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Geneva /Â AFP
The UN’s human rights chief voiced alarm on Monday at the increasing detention of migrants in Europe, including unaccompanied children, amid widespread anti-migrant rhetoric across the continent.
As Europe faces its biggest migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II, UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said he had sent staff members to assess areas along the main migration routes in the central Mediterranean and Balkans.
“They have observed a worrying increase in detention of migrants in Europe, including in the hotspots, (which are) essentially vast mandatory confinement areas which have been set up in Greece and Italy,” he told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s second annual session. “Even unaccompanied children are frequently placed in prison cells or centres ringed with barbed-wire,” he said, insisting “detention is never in the best interests of the child.”
Zeid urged the EU to collect data on migrant detentions by member states, warning that “the figures would, I fear, be very shocking.”
More than one million people made the journey to Europe in 2015, the majority fleeing war in Syria and the Middle East, and a further 208,000 have come since January, according to UN figures. More than 2,850 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean so far this year.
Faced with the influx, the UN rights chief warned that in many countries were showing “a strong trend that overturns international commitments, refuses basic humanity, and slams doors in the face of human beings in need.”
He pointed out that EU countries so far have managed to relocate fewer than one percent of the 160,000 people they have committed to taking from overwhelmed Greece and Italy.
He urged European countries to “find a way to address the current migration crisis consistently and in a manner that respects the rights of the people concerned,” and to “remove hysteria and panic from the equation.” This, he said, was particularly important in the context of a controversial deal between the European Union (EU) and Turkey in March, under which migrants not entitled to asylum are to be deported from Greece back across the Aegean.
Zeid also decried “the widespread anti-migrant rhetoric that we have heard, spanning the length and breadth of the European continent.”
“This fosters a climate of divisiveness, xenophobia and even, as in Bulgaria, vigilante violence,” he said.
Before they reach Europe, many migrants are meanwhile suffering horrible human rights abuses in chaos-wracked Libya, the UN rights warned.
He decried “disturbing reports of many migrants in Libya being subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention, attacks and unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, sexual violence and abduction for ransom.” UN staff visiting a migrant detention centre in the country found “dozens of people crammed into storage rooms without space to lie down.”
170,000 refugees need resettlement
Geneva /Â AFP
The United Nations said on Monday it will try to resettle a record 170,000 refugees urgently in need of a new home next year as it grapples with an unprecedented displacment crisis.
The projected resettlement figure from the UN refugee agency represents an increase of nearly 30,000 people compared with this year. But it is still less than 15 percent of the 1.19 million refugees worldwide who will be “in need of resettlement” in 2017, the UNHCR acknowledged in a report released Monday. That group mainly consists of refugees who the UN believes will not be able to return home or integrate in their current host country.
But resettling 1.19 million people over a 12-month period is not feasible based on recent trends, UNHCR spokesman Leo Dobbs said. The agency therefore expects to recommend that the 170,000 people most in need of resettlement should be moved to third countries.
Dobbs noted that the final decision in each case rests with prospective host countries, but in recent years the overwhelming majority of those recommended for resettlement have been given new homes.
Greek police move migrants from Macedonia border camp
Greece /Â AFP
Greek police on Monday began moving out migrants from a makeshift camp at Polykastro on the border with Macedonia, a local police official said.
Several buses were filled with migrants, who will be transferred to reception centres elsewhere in the region, said the source.
“Everything is proceeding calmly for now,” the official said, adding that 300 police officers were involved in the evacuation.
The makeshift settlement, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the border with Macedonia, gathers around 1,800 people, many of them Syrian Kurds.
Located around a filling station, it swelled after Greece closed down a large migrant camp at the border town of Idomeni last month, moving out around 12,000 people. The media were barred from covering Monday’s evacuation, except for the state TV channel ERT and the national news agency ANA.