Iraq has begun to fly back some of its citizens who had flown in to Belarus on tourist visas, in the hope of making it over the border to Lithuania and the EU. Eighty reportedly returned to Baghdad on Monday, and 200 are expected to make the journey on Tuesday.
InfoMigrants By Marion MacGregor Published on : 2021/06/09
New concrete walls are being built around migrant camps in mainland Greece. The project is part of a government plan to modernize facilities, but there is strong opposition to the changes.
16-year-old Parwana Amiri fled Afghanistan and arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos in September 2019. Today she lives in the Ritsona migrant camp near Athens. Until a few weeks ago, she had no idea that she was soon to be cut off from the world by a three-meter-high concrete perimeter wall. I woke up as usual and got ready to go to my class, says a May 4 entry on Amiri s blog post, Letters from Ritsona . As I walked along, I noticed some bulldozers and many workers working by the back gate, constructing something… They told me that they were going to build a wall all around the camp.
InfoMigrants By DW Published on : 2021/03/31
The Greek island of Lesbos has become a symbol of Europe s failed refugee policies. European ideals are falling by the wayside in the refugee camps, but there are few alternatives elsewhere. Florian Schmitz reports.
Ylva Johansson and Notis Mitarachi have fundamentally different ideas about how Europe should handle migration.
While the Greek migration minister has a reputation of being tough, Johansson, the EU commissioner for migration and home affairs, prefers to invoke European ideals. But human rights, transparency, adequate accommodation and freedom have been in short supply on Lesbos and other Greek islands for years and still are today.
InfoMigrants By InfoMigrants Published on : 2021/03/05
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has announced that the destroyed Moria migrant camp on Lesbos will not be rebuilt. A new structure elsewhere on the island will reportedly replace the temporary Kara Tepe camp.
In a meeting with the mayors of the Greek islands hosting refugees, Mitsotakis said that a park is to be built on the site of the former Moria migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, German news agency
dpa reported Thursday.
The notorious Moria camp, which hosted around 12,500 refugees and migrants at the time, burned down last September after residents of the camp allegedly set fire there.
InfoMigrants By ANSA Published on : 2021/02/23
In the midst of the ongoing pandemic and harsh winter weather that has hit Greece over the past few days, residents of the island of Lesbos where over 7,500 asylum seekers are hosted have made an impassioned plea to help as many people as they can.
In the wake of the Medea cold front that hit Greece recently, photos and videos circulated by asylum seekers staying at the controversial Kara Tepe tent city camp on Lesbos showed large areas of the camp buried in snow.
The tents at Kara Tepe, many of them set up by the sea, do not have a floor, with people sleeping on the ground. What is more, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, 40% of the population at Kara Tepe are children.