The UK government is facing its first legal action against Home Secretary Priti Patel’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. The plans to outsource the country's asylum obligations have raised serious legal questions and human rights concerns.
For tens of thousands of asylum seekers, living in Cyprus is a daily struggle. Isiaka and Christelle are just two out of thousands of migrants and refugees battling with meeting basic needs ranging from housing to employment to having food to eat on the small Mediterranean island, as more migrants keep arriving.
The British government has announced a new deal to export its asylum claims procedure to Rwanda, which will host the refugees indefinitely. However, offshoring responsibility towards refugees to the autocratic East African country raises a number of serious legal, economic and ethical questions.
The island republic of Cyprus has asked EU member states for help in dealing with the high volumes of migrants who have been making their way there. Cyprus has the highest asylum application numbers per capita in the European Union.
Germany aims to begin processing the asylum claims of tens of thousands of people many of whom already have refugee status in Greece. The applications had been put on hold by German migration authorities.
Asylum applications in Europe rose in 2021 to pre-pandemic levels, partly due to the crisis in Afghanistan. Claims from Bangladesh nationals were higher than ever before.
UN peacekeepers in Cyprus have said that three-year-old twins lost in the buffer zone dividing the Mediterranean island are safe. Over the past few years, thousands of migrants and refugees have crossed the buffer zone into Cyprus from the Turkish-administered northern part of the island.
Last year saw another sharp rise in the number of people arriving 'irregularly' in Germany, even though they had already received refugee protection in Greece. Tens of thousands of claims for asylum in Germany remain on hold while authorities try to tackle the problem.
The Cypriot interior minister said on Tuesday that the EU and its border agency Frontex have helped to streamline procedures to return rejected asylum seekers. The number of people arriving on the island nation lately has been soaring.
Many migrants who have arrived from neighboring Belarus are currently stuck in the Pabradé camp in Lithuania that many have compared to a prison. Sekou, an asylum seeker from Guinea, has been there for seven months. He says the living conditions are deplorable and that the asylum interviews are a "charade" with an automatically negative outcome.
The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) published a report stating that the number of asylum applications filed across the EU in November 2021 was the second highest for the last five years. The security situation in Afghanistan was the main cause for the increase.
The government of Cyprus says that it has already received more than 700 applications for asylum so far this year. The island nation, which has seen a spike in irregular arrivals in recent years, says it is encountering a "migration crisis", propelled by Turkey.