Publications
Published: 13 Oct 2016
“The recruitment of children by different armed groups, including Afghan security troops, is a topic of particular concern since a high percentage of the Afghan asylum applicants in Europe are unaccompanied minors” – Country of Origin Information: Recruitment by armed groups in Afghanistan. European Asylum Support Office. September 2016.
“We are concerned that the UK’s approach to statelessness applications under the Immigration Rules does not fully comply with international human rights law and that the Government does not treat statelessness as a protection issue” – The UK’s approach to statelessness: Need for Fair and Timely Decisions. Asylum Aid. 22 September 2016.
“Over the past several years, Canada has held hundreds of children in immigration detention. These include children from Syria and other war-torn regions, as well as children with Canadian citizenship who are not formally detained but live in detention facilities with their parent(s) as de facto detainees” – “No Life for a Child:” A Roadmap to End Immigration Detention of Children and Family Separation. Hanna Gros and Yolanda Song. International Human Rights Programme, University of Toronto. 22 September 2016.
“After escaping violence in their home countries, in 2016 refugee children have again had to face physical and psychological violence in Europe’s refugee camps, detention facilities or next to closed borders” – No violence against children is acceptable, all violence is preventable. Nils Muižnieks. Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe. 20 September 2016.
“The Prime Minister wants to combat migration by helping more refugees to stay in the first country they reach; by distinguishing better between people fleeing war, and those fleeing poverty; and by giving countries more licence to protect their borders by force, or with a fence” – Theresa May isn’t interested in refugees’ welfare. She just wants fewer of them in Britain.
Patrick Kingsley. The Guardian. 19 September 2016.
“Many refugees living in Kenya’s sprawling Dadaab camp, home to at least 263,000 Somalis, say they have agreed to return home because they fear Kenya will force them out if they stay” – Kenya: Involuntary Refugee Returns to Somalia. Human Rights Watch. 14 September 2016.
“In Syria you can die one day from a bomb, but on this journey you die every single day” – On Her Own: How women forced to flee Syria are shouldering increased responsibility as they struggle to survive. CARE. 12 September 2016.
“The thesis therefore interrogates the nationality laws in Uganda and exposes their impediment on the enjoyment of the right to nationality by Rwandan refugees as provided by Article 15 of the UDHR” – International Refugee Law and the Right to Nationality: Legal Responses to the Rwandan Refugee Crisis in Uganda. Marshall Godfrey Alenyo. September 2016.
“Two immediate steps are needed to fill this protection gap, and the policy vacuum which it creates: recognition by states that missing migrants are entitled to protection similar to that enjoyed by other missing persons; and the application of international human rights law to migrant death and loss at international borders” – Dead and Missing Migrants: The Obligations of European States under International Human Rights Law. Stefanie Grant. Mediterranean Missing. September 2016.
“As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said on World Humanitarian Day last week, ‘Nobody is ever just a refugee. Nobody is ever just a single thing.’ Voters around the world should not let opportunistic politicians make them believe otherwise” – Politicians who spuriously link refugees and crime harm us all. Justice Centre Hong Kong. 3 September 2016.
“A map showing displaced and affected people in Darfur” – Sudan: 2016 New Displacements and Affected People in Darfur as of 31 August 2016. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 31 August 2016.
“Refugees in general and female refugees in particular are often exposed to multiple forms of violence: extortion, exploitation, sexual and gender-related violence” – Reception of Female Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the EU: Case Study Belgium and Germany. Yasemin Bekyol and Petra Bendel. European Parliament. 30 August 2016.
“Prolonged non-implementation of the judgments of the Court is a challenge to the Court’s authority and thus to the Convention system as a whole” – Non-implementation of the Court’s judgments: our shared responsibility. Nils Muižnieks. Council of Europe. 23 August 2016.
“Women and girls are vulnerable to alarming gaps in services and protection. They risk sexual assault, extortion, exploitation, and rights violations” – The EU–Turkey Agreement Fails Refugee Women and Girls. Women’s Refugee Commission. August 2016.
“Lost in the testimonials and acknowledgements of the risks sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) poses is how prevalent and perhaps commonplace SGBV has become among migrants and asylum seekers” – The Least Condemned Crime: Sexual and Gender Based Violence against Migrants and Asylum Seekers on the Move in the Horn of Africa. Colin Sollit. Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat. 15 August 2016.
“This fact sheet describes the asylum system in the United States, including how asylum is defined, eligibility requirements, and the application process” – Fact sheet: Asylum in the United States. American Immigration Council. 22 August 2016.
“Twenty-two women who refused meals to protest their indefinite detention at the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania say officials ‘pushed’ them to eat” – Migrant mothers at Pennsylvania center suspend hunger strike ‘due to threats’. Renée Feltz. The Guardian. 14 August 2016.
“Through an examination of the tensions at play between human rights legal standards, political and public opinion, and the pragmatics of operationalising entry and exit systems, the chapter highlights challenges in advocacy in this area, as well as strategies that have proved effective in advocating non-detention models for managing undocumented migrant and asylum seeking populations” – Engaging governments on alternatives to immigration detention. Grant Mitchell. Global Detention Project. July 2016.
“By law the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold people is purely administrative, not criminal, and not punitive. Yet the system itself was (and remains) almost entirely penal” – The impact of investigative journalism on US immigration detention reform. Nina Bernstein. Global Detention Project. July 2016.
“Resilience is not a static trait of a person but arises from experience as well as environmental factors. Daily stressors such as lack of access to services have a huge impact on refugees’ wellbeing – sometimes more than prior traumas, or exacerbating the effects of prior traumas” – Report on the annual consultations with non-governmental organizations 15-17 June 2016. Musarait Kashmiri. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. August 2016.
“There is no evidence that persons of mixed Eritrean/Ethiopian origin are at risk of being deported to Eritrea and/or are subject to treatment that amounts to persecution or serious harm” – Country Information and Guidance – Ethiopia: People of mixed Eritrean/Ethiopian nationality. UK Home Office. 31 August 2016.
“Forced recruitment should not only be seen as Taliban fighters coming from the outside to a family, grabbing their children and telling them at gunpoint to fight for them. The actors of recruitment are already there, known to these children, and persuade them to join. They sometimes put pressure on the families. The coercion or pressure can come from a family member who is part of the Taliban. Families are sometimes given money for sons to join. So there is pressure or coercion but it is not always violent.” – Afghanistan recruitment by armed groups. European Asylum Support Office. September 2016.
“Because religion, politics, and ethnicity are often closely linked, it is difficult to categorise many incidents as being solely based on religious identity. There were reports the central government engaged in killings, kidnappings, arrests, detentions, restrictions, and discrimination based on religious affiliation.” – Country Information and Guidance – Iraq: Religious minorities. UK Home Office. 12 August 2016.
“Asylum applications in the UK from main applicants increased by 41% to 36,465 in the year ending June 2016, the highest number of applications since the year ending June 2004 (39,746).” – Statistical News Release: Immigration Statistics. UK Home Office. 25 August 2016.
“According to reports, Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and associated forces involved in fighting ISIS regularly target civilians on suspicion of their affiliation with or support for ISIS. … [I]n Iraq, observers note that civilians are frequently targeted on the basis of discriminatory and broad criteria, namely the person’s perceived political opinion, religious background and/or place of origin: most arrests under the Anti-Terrorism Law of 2005 reportedly concern Sunni Arabs, predominantly men, but also women and children, on mere suspicions of supporting or sympathising with anti-government armed groups such as ISIS.” – Country Information and Guidance – Iraq: Sunni (Arab) Muslims. UK Home Office. August 2016.
“Prosecutions in cases of FGM are impeded by the fact that perpetrators of the practice are almost always the victim’s immediate family members or relatives, making it unlikely that the victim, especially if a minor, would report them. Moreover, reporting the incident could lead to reprisal against the victim in her community and home, and would offer little benefit to the victim once the procedure had already been performed.” – Country Information and Guidance – Iraq: Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). UK Home Office. August 2016.
“The accusation of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) support has often been used as a pretext to silence individuals openly exercising dissenting behaviour such as membership of an opposition political party or participation in a peaceful protest. However, in addition to targeting demonstrators, students, members of opposition political parties and people celebrating Oromo culture based on their actual or imputed political opinion, the government frequently demonstrates that it anticipates dissenting political opinion widely among the population of Oromia. People from all walks of life are regularly arrested based only on their suspected political opinion – on the accusation they support the OLF.” – Ethiopia COI Query Responses: The Master Plan; OLF members and their family members; Ill-treatment by State agents of Oromo persons who are not politically active. Asylum Research Consultancy. 7 September 2016.
“‘Being gay, for a man, it’s considered degrading yourself to the inferior rank of women. The law punishes very harshly the practices both as being against nature and prohibited by the state religion, Islam (Article 2 of the Constitution). To be arrested for homosexuality means social death […]’” – Country Information and Guidance – Algeria: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. UK Home Office. February 2016.
“The overcrowding and poor housing conditions experienced by many refugees contribute to health disparities for refugee children, who are at a disproportionately high risk of acquiring infections. According to the UN Refugee Agency, since 2010, pneumonia and malaria have been the leading causes of death among refugee children under age 5 in Asia and Africa, respectively.” – Forced to Flee: Inside the 21st Largest Country. Save the Children. 20 September 2016.