Word: asylums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crackdown on illegal immigrants has intensified, questions remain as to whether it will do anything to deter refugees from making the arduous trip to the continent in the first place. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said on Oct. 21 that Europe now receives 75% of the world's asylum seekers. And increasingly, these migrants are from Iraq and Afghanistan. About 13,200 Iraqis applied for asylum worldwide between January and August - the largest number for a single country for the fourth year running. Afghans followed a close second...
...entry or put in detention camps awaiting deportation to their home country. Depending on which country they're in, the differences in treatment can be huge. "You can have two people with exactly the same story, and in one country there is less than a 1% chance of getting asylum, and in another country there's a 95% chance," says Gilles van Moortel, a spokesman in Brussels for the U.N. refugee agency. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' new offensive in Afghanistan...
...past week, France and Britain have tried to take a more aggressive approach by forcibly deporting asylum seekers. At midnight on Oct. 20, a flight chartered by French and British immigration officials left Paris for Kabul, carrying 27 Afghans - 24 of whom had been deported from Britain and three from France. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who visited Kabul last week, told reporters on Wednesday that "the situation of each Afghan migrant is examined individually." He added that the deportations had been conducted in accordance with international refugee conventions, and that the Afghan government had approved the flight plan...
...Refugee organizations have decried the deportation of asylum seekers to the two war-torn countries, saying it is unlikely to stop the influx of people into Europe and is possibly unethical. "There is a paradox," says Dan Hodges, director of the London-based charity Refugee Action. "We are consistently being told of the extreme nature of the military struggle against extremists and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when it comes to people seeking sanctuary, the governments' policies are more nuanced." (Read "How the Afghan Election Was Rigged...
...European officials also face a deeper question over what constitutes a refugee these days. The international refugee rules were drafted during the Cold War in order to offer asylum to those who risked individual persecution for their political or religious beliefs. That now seems dated, with migrants fleeing everything from wars to famine and ecological disasters like droughts. Still, many immigration officials have stuck to the original definition. "They say, 'You weren't really fleeing persecution, just fleeing bullets,' " says Bill Frelick, director of the Human Rights Watch refugee-policy program in Washington. "But those distinctions are rapidly fading...