Get short URL Refugees seeking reunification in Germany announce hunger strike during a protest opposite the parliament building in Athens © Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters Europe may face a second wave of migration as the situation in refugee camps in Africa and the Middle East is only getting worse, the head of the UN World…
A statement from the UN has described the EU policy of intercepting people crossing the Mediterranean and returning them to prisons as “inhuman”. According to UN human rights high commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein “The suffering of migrants detained in Libya is an outrage to the conscience of humanity. The European Union’s policy of assisting the…
‘Aid in the 21st century is about helping people to thrive as well as survive’: David Miliband at the International Rescue Committee’s New York HQ. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer David Miliband is president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the US-based global relief organisation he joined in 2013, following his resignation as the…
Water storage devices on show at the 2016 AidEx event in Brussels. (Photo: Flickr) The EU spends vast amounts on development aid, but new research shows that much of this money is being spent within Europe, calling into question the definition of aid and the transparency of EU spending channels. In a world overwhelmed by humanitarian…
German police watch as Yamen Alahmad appears in courtULI DECK/AFP On the surface, at least, Yamen Alahmad was a model refugee, a Syrian teenager apparently motivated only by the hope of starting a new life far from the hell of his homeland. Last week, however, Germany’s anti-terrorism police kicked in the door to the flat…
With populism endemic in its periphery, the European Union is clearly in a period of deep uncertainty. If EU leaders are ever going to right the ship, they will need to identify the root cause of today’s instability, which is not so much about economics or immigration as it is about de facto Franco-German leadership….
Fewer people are crossing the Mediterranean, but a nightmarish bottleneck has been created instead A man looks out of a barred door at a detention centre for migrants in Gharyan, Libya. Photograph: Hani Amara/Reuters Something happened to the deadly migrant trail into Europe in 2017. It dried up. Not completely, but palpably. In the high summer, peak…
After the victory of Sebastian Kurz of Austrian People’s Party in legislative elections on October 15, German Chancellor Angela Merkel of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has to prepare for a changed dynamic in neighborly relations. Although the two parties belong to the same European Union party, Kurz, the 31-year-old minister for foreign affairs, Chancellor-designate of…
FILE PHOTO: Migrants wait to be rescued by the Aquarius rescue ship run by non-governmental organisations in the Mediterranean Sea © Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP Two years after the peak of the refugee crisis, Germany, which has been the most popular European destination for asylum seekers, has decided to dissuade potential new arrivals by launching…
The far-right Freedom Party—an ally of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and one of the emboldened cluster of populist right-wing parties making big gains across the Continent—took as much as 26 percent of the vote in Austria’s elections this weekend. The result could see the Freedom Party enter into a coalition with the…