Tag Archives: Migrants

Want to save migrants in the Mediterranean? There’s an app for that

Migrants are seen on a partially submerged boat before to be rescued by Spanish fregate Reina Sofia

By Magdalena Mis

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A smartphone application that allows users to scan the Mediterranean for boats in distress is being tested by a migrant rescue service, which hopes that crowdsourced information will help it save more people.

The I SEA App, available on iTunes, divides a satellite image of the sea route migrants are taking into millions of small plots which are, in turn, assigned to registered users.

Each user then monitors their plot through the app and can send an alert to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) and the authorities if they spot potential trouble.

After receiving an alert, the authorities analyze the image and launch a rescue mission if necessary.

“The idea is that with more people getting interested you can cover bigger areas of the sea,” Ian Ruggier, MOAS head of operations, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It allows people to see that they are contributing towards saving lives. (The success) will depend on the popularity of the app,” he said by phone from Malta.

Migrants hoping to reach Italy from Libya pay hundreds of dollars to traffickers for a place in a boat. The vessels are often flimsy and ill-equipped for the journey across the Mediterranean.

The crossing is far more dangerous than that between Turkey and Greece, which was the busiest sea route until a deal to curb flows between the European Union and Turkey came into force in March.

So far this year more than 40,000 migrants have arrived in Italy after crossing the central Mediterranean, many fleeing poverty, repression and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 2,000 have died trying to make the crossing.

Launched in 2014, MOAS is the first privately funded migrant rescue service. It is already using drones in its rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

According to its website, MOAS rescued nearly 12,000 people in the first two years of becoming operational.

(Reporting by Magdalena Mis; Editing by Katie Nguyen; Please credit Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Migrant children face beatings, rape, forced labor

A girl hugs a volunteer as a group of migrants prepare to leave

GENEVA (Reuters) – Migrant children making the perilous journey to Europe to escape war and poverty face possible beatings, rape and forced labor in addition to risk of drowning in the Mediterranean, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.

Minors account for a growing percentage of migrants and refugees, particularly those trying to reach Italy by sea from Libya, it said in a report, “Danger Every Step of the Way”.

Of the roughly 206,200 people who arrived in Europe by sea this year to June 4, one in three was a child, it said, citing figures from the U.N. refugee agency.

“Every step of the journey is fraught with danger, all the more so for the nearly one in four children traveling without a parent or guardian,” UNICEF said.

That ratio was far higher on boats from Libya, where more than nine out of ten children were unaccompanied. UNICEF said there were almost 235,000 migrants and refugees in Libya and 956,000 in the Sahel, many or most hoping to go to Europe.

UNICEF said that there was “strong evidence that criminal human trafficking networks were targeting the most vulnerable, in particular women and children.

“Italian social workers claim that both boys and girls are sexually assaulted and forced into prostitution while in Libya, and that some of the girls were pregnant when they arrived in Italy, having been raped,” it said.

The U.N. refugee agency has said the flow of people from Turkey to Greece has slowed hugely but dealing with migrants now stranded along the route remains a huge challenge. [nL8N1954FE]

UNICEF said many children had fallen between the cracks of overstretched asylum systems and their cases should be a priority.

“All too often children are held behind bars – in detention facilities or in police custody – because of a lack of space in child protection centers and limited capacity for identifying alternative solutions,” it said.

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has decried a “worrying rise” in detentions of migrants in Greece and Italy and urged authorities to find alternatives to confining children while asylum requests are processed. [L8N1951GW]

Authorities in some countries take up to two years to evaluate a child’s request for asylum, and processes to reunify families can be equally slow, UNICEF said.

Once in Europe, migrants and refugees are often housed in sports halls, former military barracks or other temporary shelters, sometimes without access to schooling and psychological support, it said.

Some have faced xenophobic attacks, hate speech and stigmatization, it said, citing 45 arson attacks on refugee shelters in Germany during the first half of this year.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Dominic Evans)

IOM urges effort to identify migrants who have died

Migrants are seen on a capsizing boat before a rescue operation by Italian navy ships

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – At least 60,000 migrants have died making their way to new countries over the last 20 years, and their families rarely learned of their fate, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday.

In a report entitled “Fatal Journeys”, the agency called on authorities to ensure the missing are identified and their families traced.

The estimated toll includes a record 5,400 migrants believed to have died in 2015 trying to cross borders, and a further 3,400 who have perished already this year, the IOM said.

Of last year’s deaths, 3,770 occurred in the Mediterranean where boats capsized en route to Europe. Others died in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and along the U.S.-Mexico border, it said.

“Something in the region of 60,000 migrants across the world have died over the last 20 years,” Frank Laczko, director of IOM’s global migration data analysis centre, told a Geneva news briefing by telephone from Berlin.

The death rate is particularly high in southeastern Asia, where migrants are trying to reach Thailand and Malaysia.

“The volume of people making those crossings is perhaps lower but the death rate is similar to the Mediterranean death rate,” he said, noting it was one in 23 along the central Mediterranean route this year.

However, a separate IOM report said the Central Mediterranean route is probably much more deadly than thought, because “reports of large numbers of bodies being washed up on the shores of North Africa indicate that shipwrecks occur without leaving any traces.”

Families are left wondering if their relatives are alive or dead, the IOM said. Without legal proof of death, it may be difficult for spouses to remarry or for families to inherit property.

Fewer than half of the 387 migrants who died when their boats capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013 have been officially identified, it said. In the United States, a cemetery in Arizona contains the remains of at least 800 unidentified individuals believed to be migrants.

“Missing migrants tend to be a low priority for many authorities around the world, because they are often an irregular situation, they may be undocumented and difficult to identify,” Laczko said.

Little is known either about the deaths of migrants travelling north overland from sub-Saharan Africa.

At present there is no established common practice for collecting information on migrant deaths between states, or even sometimes between different jurisdictions in the same country, the report said.

“Above all, international and regional databases are needed, in which data that is collected nationally can be stored securely and accessed transnationally,” it said.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by John Stonestreet and Hugh Lawson)

U.N. Human Rights Chief urges alternatives for migrants

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Al Hussein arrives for the 31st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva

GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. human rights chief on Monday decried a “worrying rise” in detentions of migrants in Greece and Italy and urged authorities to find alternatives to confining children while asylum requests are processed.

More than one million migrants, many fleeing Syria’s war, have arrived in Europe through Greece since last year. More than 150,000 have come in 2016 so far – 38 percent of them children, according to United Nations refugee agency data. Italy has also set up mandatory detention centers.

“Even unaccompanied children are frequently placed in prison cells or centers ringed with barbed wire. Detention is never in the best interests of the child – which must take primacy over immigration objectives,” Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“Alternatives to the detention of children must be developed,” he told the start of a three-week council session.

Zeid said it was possible for Europe to create “well-functioning migration governance systems”, with fair assessment of individual requests for international protection while removing what he called “hysteria and panic from the equation”.

Zeid deplored anti-migrant rhetoric “spanning the length and breadth of the European continent … This fosters a climate of divisiveness, xenophobia and even – as in Bulgaria – vigilante violence”.

In April, Bulgarian police arrested a local man who had posted video on social media showing how he tied up three migrants near the Turkish border.

The migrant influx has drawn a rising public backlash, in part because of strains it has imposed on housing and social services. Concerns have also been raised in some EU countries about their ability to integrate many mostly Muslim migrants.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Miles/Mark Heinrich)

69,000 would be or actual German crimes linked to Migrants

Immigrants are escorted by German police to a registration centre, after crossing the Austrian-German border in Wegscheid near Passau, Germany,

BERLIN (Reuters) – Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migrant policy.

There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe’s largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security.

The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

Absolute numbers of crimes committed by Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis – the three biggest groups of asylum seekers in Germany – were high but given the proportion of migrants that they account for, their involvement in crimes was “clearly disproportionately low”, the report said.

It gave no breakdown of the number of actual crimes and of would-be crimes, nor did it state what percentage the 69,000 figure represented with respect to the total number of crimes and would-be crimes committed in the first three months of 2016.

The report stated that the vast majority of migrants did not commit any crimes.

It is the first time the BKA has published a report on crimes committed by migrants containing data from all of Germany’s 16 states, so there is no comparable data.

The report showed that 29.2 percent of the crimes migrants committed or tried to commit in the first quarter were thefts, 28.3 percent were property or forgery offences and 23 percent offences such as bodily harm, robbery and unlawful detention.

Drug-related offences accounted for 6.6 percent and sex crimes accounted for 1.1 percent.

In Cologne at New Year, hundreds of women said they were groped, assaulted and robbed, with police saying the suspects were mainly of North African and Arab appearance. Prosecutors said last week three Pakistani men seeking asylum in Germany were under investigation after dozens of women said they were sexually harassed at a music festival.

The number of crimes committed by migrants declined by more than 18 percent between January and March, however, according to the report.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Photograph captures week of tragedy in Mediterranean

A German rescuer from the humanitarian organisation Sea-Watch holds drowned migrant baby of the Libyan cost

By Steve Scherer

ROME (Reuters) – A photograph of a drowned migrant baby in the arms of a German rescuer was distributed on Monday by a humanitarian organization aiming to persuade European authorities to ensure safe passage to migrants, after hundreds are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean last week.

The baby, who appears to be no more than a year old, was pulled from the sea on Friday after the capsizing of a wooden boat. Forty-five bodies arrived in the southern Italian port of Reggio Calabria on Sunday aboard an Italian navy ship, which picked up 135 survivors from the same incident.

German humanitarian organization Sea-Watch, operating a rescue boat in the sea between Libya and Italy, distributed the picture taken by a media production company on board and which showed a rescuer cradling the child like a sleeping baby.

In an email, the rescuer, who gave his name as Martin but did not want his family name published, said he had spotted the baby in the water “like a doll, arms outstretched”.

“I took hold of the forearm of the baby and pulled the light body protectively into my arms at once, as if it were still alive … It held out its arms with tiny fingers into the air, the sun shone into its bright, friendly but motionless eyes.”

The rescuer, a father of three and by profession a music therapist, added: “I began to sing to comfort myself and to give some kind of expression to this incomprehensible, heart-rending moment. Just six hours ago this child was alive.”

Like the photograph of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan lying lifeless on a Turkish beach last year, the image puts a human face on the more than 8,000 people who have died in the Mediterranean since the start of 2014.

Little is known about the child, who according to Sea-Watch was immediately handed over to the Italian navy. Rescuers could not confirm whether the partially clothed infant was a boy or a girl and it is not known whether the child’s mother or father are among the survivors.

Sea-Watch collected about 25 other bodies, including another child, according to testimony from the crew seen by Reuters. The Sea-Watch team said it unanimously decided to publish the photo.

“In the wake of the disastrous events it becomes obvious to the organizations on the ground that the calls by EU politicians to avoid further death at sea sum up to nothing more than lip service,” Sea-Watch said in a statement in English distributed along with the photograph.

“If we do not want to see such pictures we have to stop producing them,” Sea-Watch said, calling for Europe to allow migrants safe and legal passage as a way of shutting down people smuggling and further tragedies.

At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday.

The boat carrying the baby left the shores of Libya near Sabratha late on Thursday, and then began to take on water, according to accounts by survivors collected by Save the Children on Sunday. Hundreds were on board when it capsized, the survivors said.

(Editing and additional reporting by Mark John in London)

700-900 migrants may have died at sea this week

Migrants from a capsized boat are rescued during a rescue operation by Italian navy ships "Bettica" and "Bergamini" off the coast of Libya

By Steve Scherer

ROME (Reuters) – At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, Medecins San Frontieres and the U.N. Refugee agency said on Sunday.

About 14,000 have been rescued since Monday amid calm seas, and there have been at least three confirmed instances of boats sinking. But the number of dead can only be estimated based on survivor testimony, which is still being collected.

“We will never know exact numbers,” Medecins San Frontieres said in a Tweet after estimating that 900 had died during the week. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said more than 700 had drowned.

Migrants interviewed on Saturday in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo told of a large fishing boat that overturned and sank on Thursday with many women and children on board.

Initial estimates were that 400 people died, but the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday there may have been about 670 passengers on board.

According to testimony collected by EU border agency Frontex, when the motorless fishing boat capsized, 25 swam to the boat that had been towing it, while 79-89 others were saved by rescuers and 15 bodies were recovered. This meant more than 550 died, the UNHCR said.

The migrants — fleeing wars, oppression and poverty — often do not know how to swim and do not have life jackets. They pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to make the crossing from Libya to Italy, by far the most dangerous border passage for migrants in the world.

This week’s arrivals included Eritreans, Sudanese, Nigerians and many other West Africans, humanitarian groups say. Despite the surge this week, as of Friday 40,660 arrivals had been counted, 2 percent fewer than the same period of last year, the Interior Ministry said.

Most of the boats this week appear to have left from Sabratha, Libya, where many said smugglers had beaten them and women said they had been raped, said MSF, which has three rescue boats in the area.

The migrants are piled onto flimsy rubber boats or old fishing vessels which can toss their occupants into the sea in a matter of seconds.

About 100 are thought to have either been trapped in the hull or to have drowned after tumbling into the sea on Wednesday.

On Friday, the Italian Navy ship Vega collected 45 bodies and rescued 135 from a “half submerged” rubber boat. It is not yet known exactly how many were on board, but the rubber boats normally carry about 300.

“Some were more shaken than others because they had lost their loved ones,” Raffaele Martino, commander of the Vega, told Reuters on Sunday in the southern port of Reggio Calabria, where the Vega docked with the survivors and corpses, including those of three infants.

“It’s time that Europe had the courage to offer safe alternatives that allow these people to come without putting their own lives or those of their children in danger,” Tommaso Fabri of MSF Italy said.

(This refiled version of the story adds byline)

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Additional reporting by Reuters TV in Reggio Calabria; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Italy says migrant boat capsized, second in two days

Migrants are seen on a partially submerged boat before to be rescued by Spanish fregate Reina Sofia off the coast of Libya

ROME (Reuters) – A migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean on Thursday, an Italian coastguard spokesman said, and 88 people have been rescued while the number of possible dead is unknown.

It was the second shipwreck in two days, after five were confirmed to have died when a large fishing boat flipped over in the sea on Wednesday.

Boat arrivals in Italy have risen sharply this week amid warm weather and calm seas, and about 20 rescue operations are currently under way, the spokesman said.

Between 20 and 30 people are feared dead, Ansa news agency reported without saying where it got the information, while the coastguard declined to estimate how many may have died.

“We don’t know how many people were on board,” the coastguard spokesman said.

An aircraft from the European Union’s Sophia mission to fight people smuggling spotted the overturned vessel and called in the coastguard to assist in the rescue.

The coastguard has coordinated the rescue of around 900 migrants in seven different operations on Thursday. That brings the total of migrants who have been rescued since Monday to more than 7,000.

Through Tuesday, total sea arrivals in Italy had fallen by 9 percent this year, to 37,743, according to the Interior Ministry, but the country’s migrant shelters are already under pressure to house 115,507 migrants, about twice as many as two years ago.

Some 650 migrants are scheduled to arrive in the Sicilian city of Porto Empedocle later on Thursday, including the five dead bodies recovered by the Italian navy on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer, editing by Isla Binnie and Ralph Boulton)

Migrants stranded in Greece take to fields to avoid state run camp

A migrant woman with a child sits in a bus after a police operation to evacuate a migrants' makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

By Phoebe Fronista

IDOMENI/EVZONI, Greece (Reuters) – They packed up their belongings and began to walk, some heading for the fields, others to a gas station, all seeking to avoid going to state-run Greek migrant camps where they fear they will end up trapped.

For months they had been living in Idomeni, a sprawling expanse of tents on Greece’s northern border with Macedonia and a symbol of human misery until police and bulldozers began clearing it on Tuesday.

More than 8,000 people, mostly Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, had been living there, hoping to reach northern Europe like the nearly a million migrants and refugees before them. But they got stranded in Greece after borders closed down across the Balkans.

The Idomeni camp was nearly empty on Thursday but only about 2,400 people have been relocated to state-run facilities, according to police.

Instead, dozens of tents have sprung up at gas station in the town of Evzoni, some six 6 km (4 miles) away, and dozens more were being pitched in a grassy field nearby.

Diar, an 18-year-old Syrian, said he woke up on Thursday to Greek police asking him to get on a bus to an official camp, so he made his own way out of there instead.

“I’m looking for a smuggler,” he said. “Everyone here is trying to get a smuggler and move from here, by plane or by walking, or anything else.”

Greek officials have not released figures on how many people may have left on their own accord.

Aid groups say the new sites, including some in disused warehouses and industrial zones, are not fully functional. They have called on Greece, which is also grappling with its worst economic crisis in generations, to improve conditions there.

The government says there are still more than 54,000 migrants on Greek soil. Asylum requests have spiked in recent months, adding to the burden of an asylum service already criticised as slow and inefficient.

Progress has also lagged on a scheme to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU states to alleviate pressure on the two frontline countries. Just over 1,100 people have been relocated so far.

“This is not just about survival. Sites must provide for refugees’ basic needs,” said Rowan Cody, northern Greece field coordinator for the International Rescue Committee aid group.

“Increasing desperation is already leading to spikes of violence and an increase in mental health issues. How much more can these people bear?” he asked.

One Syrian refugee who left Idomeni for the barren field in Evzoni with his wife and two daughters said he refused to go to an official camp as he had been told of overcrowding.

“There is no place for us and there is not enough food and aid and medicine. People are cramped on top of each other and, at the same time, there are same problems as the previous camp,” he said.

“I don’t want to go and get squeezed among people and in the end, we still don’t know what our fate will be.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Boat capsizes, Italian navy said 562 rescued and 5 migrants dead

Migrants are seen on a capsizing boat before a rescue operation by Italian navy ships "Bettica" and "Bergamini" (unseen) off the coast of Libya

By Steve Scherer

ROME (Reuters) – A large wooden fishing boat overcrowded with migrants capsized off the coast of Libya, the Italian navy said on Wednesday, with some 562 people rescued and five found dead.

Photographs show the blue fishing boat rocking violently before capsizing, sending migrants tumbling into the sea. Some then climbed onto the hull of the overturned vessel, while others swam for life boats or toward the navy ship.

Navy swimmers are also shown pulling migrants in lifebelts toward safety, according to the navy pictures. Women and children were among those rescued, but no details of the migrants’ nationalities have been given.

The Italian navy patrol boat Bettica saw that the vessel was in difficulty and approached it to hand out life jackets, but before it could begin a rescue the boat flipped over due to the sudden movement of the passengers, a statement said.

Navy frigate Bergamini deployed a helicopter, and several rubber motor boats were used in the rescue operations, which have now concluded.

The Bettica has already responded to another call for help and is in the process of rescuing 108 migrants from a large rubber boat, the navy said.

Boat arrivals rose sharply this week amid warm weather and calm seas. Italy’s coastguard said 5,600 migrants were rescued on Monday and Tuesday, and officials fear numbers will increase as conditions continue to improve.

In the past two years, more than 320,000 boat migrants have arrived on Italian shores and an estimated 7,000 died in the Mediterranean as they sought to reach Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration.

(Editing by Crispian Balmer; editing by Ralph Boulton)