A heavily pregnant Afghan asylum seeker was released from hospital after setting fire to herself at a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sunday. She was reported to have mental health issues, while the suicide attempt was blamed on a "misunderstanding."
Asylum applications in the European Union dropped by 31% last year and fell to a record low. The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) attributed the decline mainly to coronavirus-related travel restrictions.
A fire on the border between Afghanistan and Iran on Saturday damaged a reception center run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), resulting in a halt to services for repatriated Afghans.
The deportees landed in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday, February 9. They departed the German city Munich earlier that day.
There are renewed calls in Germany for a freeze on deportations of rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan. Several groups are warning that as Afghanistan’s security situation worsens, the risks from COVID have become acute.
Italian authorities have reported more cases of Afghan minors entering the country hidden inside cargo trucks coming from the Balkans. Police said they apprehended youths in two separate cases in Ravenna and in Caserta this week.
42 additional refugees arrived in the German city of Hanover from Greece on Wednesday, February 3. The group is part of a contingent of 1,553 vulnerable persons that Germany agreed to take from Greece after the fire in the Lesbos migrant camp Moria last September.
Six young Afghans, including four minors, were rescued by Carabinieri police on January 28. According to police, they had been on the road for the last eight months.
Amid heated debate about the long-term effects of the lockdown on children, business and the arts, Germany's refugees seem to have been forgotten.
A 27-year-old man has died in a fire in an asylum seeker center in the northern German city of Hamburg. Police said the man was of Afghan origin.
Six Afghan migrants were discovered inside a Bulgarian lorry by German police in a motorway lorry park in southern Germany on Saturday, January 23.
Save The Children has warned that almost 10 million children need life-saving assistance in Afghanistan, where conflict is causing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes every year.