Stories about Syrians who were forcibly displaced by the ongoing civil/regional war in Syria under the Assad regime since the spring of 2011.
The European refugee crisis is officially over. That was the message of the European Commission when it presented its annual progress report on migration in Brussels earlier this month. “For 3 consecutive years, arrivals figures have been steadily falling, and current levels are a mere 10% of what they were at their peak in 2015,” the Commission wrote.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Next week world leaders descend on Marrakesh, Morocco to put the finishing touches on a long-awaited, and by now controversial, new framework for managing international migration. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, as it is officially called, will be discussed at the intergovernmental conference on December 10-11, after which the UN General Assembly is expected to formally adopt it before the end of the year.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
On June 18, the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) made a surprise announcement granting nationals of countries suffering from war and disasters a one-year residence visa. Although an important gesture to relieve suffering and provide temporary shelter, Abu Dhabi is not following through on a much more important and sustainable solution to these problems: the permanent resettlement of Syrian refugees from Lebanon, Jordan or other hosting countries to the UAE.
Read full blog in Muftah Magazine.
In early March 2016, after months of negotiations, the EU’s 28 heads of states reached an agreement with the Turkish government to slow the refugee influx into Europe. The so-called 1:1 plan — for each undocumented migrant Turkey takes back from Greece, the EU would take one refugee from Turkey — went into effect on March 20, 2016. Under the terms of the deal, the EU would give Turkey six billion euros ($6.7 billion) to support hosting refugees and revisit its stalled attempt to join the EU.
Read full blog at Muftah.
RIGA / TARTU — Under the EU relocation scheme Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have now accepted 455 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy since the beginning of last year. Although France (2,702), the Netherlands (1,216) and Germany (1,099) have received the most asylum-seekers to date under the program, by accepting the 455 — mostly Syrian — asylum-seekers the three Baltic states have actually carried a greater burden given their size (only France accepted more as a percentage of its population).
The EU relocation scheme is supposed to relocate asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. It just hit the 10,000 mark last week, with 150,000 more to go by 27 September 2017. If successful, and that is still a very big if, the EU program would relief the 60,000-odd refugees that are currently stuck in Greece and suffering under terrible winter conditions, as well as another 70,000 from Italy. But implementation is slow and there is a lot resistance from governments and voters, aside from logistical challenges.
That the Baltics are now leading the way in the EU relocation program is quite astonishing, to say the least. Resistance to the arrival of refugees from Syria has been strong and the Baltic governments only reluctantly agreed — unlike other post-communist states like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — to be part of the relocation mechanism. And as recent as last August the European Commission was critical of the strict admission requirements that the Baltic governments set for war refugees from Syria and Iraq seeking relocation.
BEIRUT — The number of migrants in the Middle East has more than doubled since 2005, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center.
Migrant workers, asylum seekers, refugees and internally displaced persons increased from around 25 million in 2005 to 54 million in 2015. This 120% increase is much higher than in North America and Europe (both around 20%) over the same period despite the arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers in Europe last year, of whom many were from the Middle East. Forced and voluntary migration in the Middle East also grew at a faster pace than in Africa (90% increase), the Asia-Pacific (26%), and Latin America and the Caribbean (77%).
The share of migrants of the region’s population grew from 7% in 2005 to approximately 13% in 2015. In other words, one-in-ten people currently living the Middle East is either an international migrant or displaced. The Pew Research Center based its analysis on data from United Nations agencies.
This growth of migration in the Middle East is mainly caused by two factors: conflict and economic opportunity.
Armed conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen has displaced millions. This forced displacement accounts for the majority (60%) of the growth of the migrant population. The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil war, the war in Syria since 2011, the rise of Daesh and the various conflicts in Yemen since the Arab Uprising had (internally) displaced 23 people by the end of 2015, about half of them living in Syria or Iraq, followed by Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Lebanon.
Economic opportunity has attracted millions of migrant workers — mostly from countries outside the region — particularly to the oil-rich Gulf States: Saudi Arabia (10.2 million), United Arab Emirates (8 million), Kuwait (2.9 million) and Oman (1.8 million). But also Israel and Lebanon continue to attract migrants.
The figures from the Pew Research Center show how war and armed conflict have wreaked havoc on the region: the portion of migrants living in the Middle East that were not displaced fell from 78% to 57% in the past decade.
RIGA – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have drawn the ire of the European Commission over their reluctance to host refugees under the EU relocation programme, the LNT commercial TV channel reported Friday.
“There are only two criteria based on which someone can be refused asylum or relocation within Europe,” Kristīne Liepiņa, spokesperson for the European Commission Delegation in Latvia, told LNT. “One reason is that this person poses a threat to other people’s security, namely, to local society. And another reason, of course, is if this person poses a threat to international security.”
Yet to date Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have only accepted refugee families with children and educated refugees with foreign language skills and work experience.
The Baltic states between them are expected to accept 1,481 asylum seekers by the end of 2017 as part of the EU’s relocation scheme. All EU member states together agreed to take 160,000 refugees that are stranded in Greece and Italy by that date.
In its fifth report on the progress of the EU relocation and resettlement programme, the Commission wrote last month: “During the reporting period, a number of Member States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have rejected relocation requests without providing substantiated reasons or on grounds other than those specified in the Council Decisions on relocation.” The previous, fourth report (June) also singled out the Baltic countries, among others, for “[…] lack of motivation of rejections of relocation requests [which] goes against the letter of the Council Decisions on relocation and the spirit of loyal cooperation.”
This is the first time, however, that a representative of the European Commission openly criticises the Baltic governments. So far the EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has only encouraged member states to do more. During the presentation of the last progress report he spoke of a “positive trend, but more efforts are needed.”
Latvia’s governing Unity party believes that the EU report is a testament to the fact that Latvia takes the application verification process very serious. “Our system of domestic affairs staff are doing their job well. […] The criteria should not be changed,” Lolita Čigāne (Unity), member of the Saeima and chairperson of the European Affairs Committee, told LNT in response to the criticism.
Ironically, the criticism comes at a time when all three Baltic countries have started accepting substantially more refugees. On Friday, Lithuania welcomed 11 Syrian refugees from Greece under the EU deal, bringing the total to 73 so far. Earlier last week, a court in Latvia granted five Iraqis refugee status and 12 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Syria subsidiary (temporary) protection. And two Syrian refugee families arrived in Estonia from Greece at the end of July.
The next progress report of the European Commission is expected in September.
Last week the membership of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) approved a motion to join the United Nations. “We expect to soon have a seat and a voice at the UN table and the UN will soon have a dedicated migration agency,” said IOM Director General William Lacy Swing.
But what will this mean for migrants around the world? One in every seven persons on the planet is now a migrant and 65.3 million of these are forced migrants and refugees.
Discussions about the IOM joining the UN go back a long time but were accelerated with the prominence of migration governance in the newly minted Sustainable Development Goals. Back in 2005, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), appointed by then-Secretary General Kofi Annan, recommended the IOM become a part of the UN system as a “global agency for economic migration,” leaving UNHCR as the key institution dealing with forced migration. This put the IOM at odds with the International Labour Organization (ILO), already a UN specialised agency, which claimed to have the monopoly on mobility. At the UN High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development in September 2013 it appeared the IOM had beaten the ILO in the battle over who would become the central agency for migration.
Unlike its long-time rival the ILO, the IOM currently has no formal mandate for the protection of migrants. Established in 1951 it acts primarily as a service provider to its member states and donors. The IOM’s mandate is to help ensure the orderly and humane management of migration, promote international cooperation on migration issues, assist in the search for practical solutions to migration problems, and to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced persons (the latter being the mandate of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency).
Although the IOM itself argues that protection of migrant rights is central to its mission, many non-governmental organisations, including Human Rights Watch and the International Catholic Migration Committee, have criticised the IOM in the past as being too state-centric in its operations, yielding to the agenda of governments with too little regard for migrants themselves. Assisted voluntary return programmes of the IOM have been criticised for not being genuinely voluntary, particularly when it involves migrants kept in detention centres.
However, the IOM does have a wealth of field experience in running programmes that have a strong emphasis on human rights and protection. It has worked for example on migrants’ health, the prevention of human trafficking, and has led migrants’ rights training programmes.
Upon acceptance into the UN family, the IOM would need to be given a formal legal protection mandate, guided by the core international human rights treaties, including the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. And IOM’s staff, both at headquarters and in field offices, would need to be trained in human rights; it already has experience and expertise conducting such trainings.
The IOM certainly seems up to the task of being the “global agency for economic migration” from an operational point of view. The new UN agency currently has over 9,500 employees in 450 offices world-wide, which assisted an estimated 20 million migrants in 2015.
Whether this will result in better global management of migration flows, the protection of migrant workers against exploitation by employers and recruitment agencies or a more effective fight against smugglers and traffickers worldwide, only the future can tell.
It sounded too good to be true: an app that let’s you save refugees in the Mediterranean from the comfort of your living room.
“Every person who has watched this tragedy unfold over the past two years will now have a chance to contribute to saving lives, even if it is giving a couple of minutes of their time on an app,” Christopher Catrambone, founder of Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), told Mashable.
Here is how it was supposed to work: The ISea app “crowd-sources the search of the sea for migrants by giving access to the satellite image of the sea to smart phone users.” It then lets you scour those satellite images to spot refugee boats in trouble and alert rescue teams to their location. Teams such as MOAS, which provides professional search-and-rescue assistance to refugees and migrants in distress at sea. MOAS collaborated with the Singapore-based Grey for Good to develop the app.
Yet one week after the launch of ISea, the first stories broke that the app did not live up to its promise. Users pointed out that the app displays the same image for every user. ISea was subsequently pulled from the AppStore. And Grey for Good turned out to be the pro bono arm of a global advertising agency.
Meanwhile, MOAS, which even without the app rescued more than 2,000 people in its first two weeks of its operations in the Mediterranean, has denounced Grey for Good and the ISea app. “We were dismayed to discover that real time images were not being used,” MOAS wrote in a statement following the revelations. “We have since discontinued our relationship with Grey for Good and spoken candidly about our disappointment to the media.”
So far 2016 has been the deadliest year on record on the Mediterranean: 2,888 migrants and refugees lost their lives, compared with 1,838 through the first six months of 2015.
RIGA – Yesterday the Estonian Conservative People’s Party EKRE submitted to parliament a petition against mass immigration. The petition demands a referendum on the government’s immigration and refugee policy, the Estonian Public Broadcaster ERR reported.
EKRE is in the opposition and with seven (of the 101) seats the smallest of the six parties represented in the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament. Mart Helme, EKRE’s chairman, told ERR that his party had begun to collect signatures last summer, after the European Commission introduced its controversial refugee relocation programme.
Under the EU relocation scheme, Estonia, with 1.3 million inhabitants, is set to receive 302 asylum seekers by the end of 2017 – a fraction of the 160,000 refugees EU member states agreed to take from Greece and Italy over the next two years. To date Estonia has taken in 19 Iraqi and Syrian refugees from Greece.
Only last year, immigration exceeded emigration for the first time since Estonia regained its independence in 1991. According to Statistics Estonia, 15,413 persons immigrated to and 13,003 persons emigrated from Estonia in 2015. The majority of the migrants – 52% of the immigrants and 69% of the emigrants – were citizens of Estonia. Ukrainians, Russian and Finns are among the largest non-Estonian migrants.
Together with Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Denmark, the Baltic states have opposed the EU policy to distribute refugees – not immigrants – based on quotas. Given this opposition, the European Commission is now expected to present a final proposal for the reformed Common European Asylum System, next month, which will no longer feature quotas.
Along with the petition, EKRE’s parliamentary group submitted a draft bill that calls for a referendum on 23 April 2017. It would like to ask voters: “Do you agree that the Republic of Estonia participates in the redistribution of immigrants arriving in the European Union?”
The question is: which “redistribution” and which “immigrants”?
