A total of 118 migrants have left Greece Thursday on a plane bound for Germany. The transfer was part of a European effort to get hundreds of vulnerable children and their close family members out of camps on the Greek islands amid the coronavirus pandemic.
COVID-19 presents a serious risk to refugee education worldwide, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR. It warns that the virus threatens to cause a ‘pandemic of poverty’, which could reverse hard-won progress made in refugee school enrolment.
When in 2015 ever more refugees came to Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel promised them "We can do this!" Eight-year-old Lama Suleiman was among them and has made the country a home from home.
100 vulnerable migrants will be relocated from Greece to Germany this Friday. Among the roughly 24 families are sick children in need of medical treatment, the German interior ministry said.
Bavaria, North-Rhine Westphalia and other states in Germany have announced they will take in several families with sick children currently living in squalid conditions in Greek refugee hotspots.
Koumba, from Guinea, arrived in France at the end of 2017 along with her two daughters, then aged two and four. She hoped to spare them the traumatic experience of female circumcision and wanted to offer them a good education. Two and a half years later, she says she has lost all hope for her future in France.
A number of EU member states want to take in refugee children stuck in Greece. However, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn now says the coronavirus pandemic has made that impossible.
Sixty-five humanitarian organizations have signed a document calling on the European Union to transfer unaccompanied minors off of the Greek islands and into safety in their territory.
Lots of you have been asking us questions related to family status and migration. So we decided to gather up the most frequently asked questions and put them to a legal expert in the field of migration. Lawyers at the firm Schlun and Elseven which has offices in Aachen, Düsseldorf and Cologne responded to us. Here is what they said:
Aid agencies in Greece are warning that unaccompanied migrant children are at grave risk at overcrowded migrant camps. Many of them are seeking voluntary detention at police cells to escape the camps. Aid agencies want the Greek government to beef up efforts to reunite unaccompanied minors with their families. But most European nations are not willing to help. Anthee Carassava has more.
Among the migrants that disembarked from the Ocean Viking in Italy on Wednesday were 149 minors. Many of them experienced terrible things on their migration journeys, in particular in Libya, they told aid workers.
A series of five memorial "stumbling stones" have been placed at five schools in Rome in memory of a 14-year-old Malian student who died on a boat in the Mediterranean with his report card sewn into his pocket.