Border closures have led to about 5,000 refugees trapped in Piraeus amid ‘appalling conditions’, says Human Rights Watch
Aid agencies in Greece are warning that “appalling” conditions for thousands of stranded refugees are becoming increasingly explosive.
At a meeting of all 28 ambassadors to the EU late yesterday, aides to Donald Tusk, the European Council president, circulated a new three-page draft of a migration deal with Turkey that will serve as the basis of two days of summit talks aimed at securing an agreement with Ankara by Friday.
March 22, 2016 | #BrusselsAttack: It Is Time The World Holds Saudi Arabia, Turkey To Account
Osun Defender
In a 2009 memo revealed by WikiLeaks, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Saudi Arabia of being a main source of funding for militant groups including Al-Qaida, Taliban and LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan]. There was no serious effort ..
Europe knows what needs to be done. But fragmentation across the continent is making it harder to do
Just in the last two months, over 100,000 people have fled to Europe. That’s already three times more than during the same period last year. Winter temperatures in the Mediterranean have not slowed the exodus, nor have measures taken by some EU member states aimed at discouraging arrivals, such as confiscating money from refugees or raising barbed wire. The greatest push factor is the Syrian war, recently heightened with the assault on Aleppo, which stubbornly grinds on. Thousands of families continue to find it preferable to attempt deadly crossings across Aegean waters, rather than to struggle in Turkey or be exposed to relentless air raids and sieges. Whatever small hopes may rest on the “cessation of hostilities” deadline in Syria – set for this Saturday – it is unlikely to stem the migration flows in the near future. Against this backdrop, the pressing need in Europe is for unity. But in meeting the challenge, every pressure seems to be pushing the other way.
UNHCR and Médecins Sans Frontières say they will not be involved with EU-Turkey deal to send people back from Greece
A triple blow has been dealt to the EU-Turkey migration deal after five leading aid groups refused to work with Brussels on its implementation, a Turkish diplomat ruled out changing Turkish legislation to make the deal more palatable to rights campaigners, and a senior Greek official said nobody knew how the agreement was supposed to work.
Erdogan is not doing this just for the money. Turkey is legitimately concerned about its security situation and needs European and American help to resolve it.
An alliance of civilisations, Vienna global forum, 2013. Wikicommons/Bundesministerium für Europa. Some rights reserved.When politicos start using the word “game-changing” to refer to a negotiation, you can be sure that something truly heinous is going to come out of it, usually in the fine print. This is true of the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic trade pacts being negotiated, and it is equally true of the deal brokered in Ankara yesterday.
The ‘one-in, one-out’ plan being discussed in Brussels is far from a done deal and will inspire little optimism among refugees
When is a blanket not a blanket? This is a question at the heart of the three-way wrangle between EU politicians, the Turkish government and refugee rights campaigners.
If the only refugee crisis that the world faced today was in Syria, it would be challenging and heartbreaking enough. But the tragic truth is that many other refugee crises around the world never make it into the international headlines.
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