Month: November 2021

In Kenya, refugees and their supporters have welcomed a new law that gives the country’s half a million refugees better access to education and work. The law comes as Kenya plans to close two of the region’s largest refugee camps, which are home to more than 400,000 people.

Willie Rwari, a refugee from Burundi, has been in Kenya for the last seven years without a regular source of income. He holds a diploma in mechanical training from Burundi and an additional one from Kenya. Yet, he has been unable to find steady employment in the country’s capital, Nairobi.

Refugees like him have to make do with what they get, he said.

Rwari said they take up whichever jobs they get, even construction site jobs, because they don’t have the required papers to get jobs they are qualified for. Rwari added that they can’t get the certificate of good conduct papers, the national hospital insurance, the Kenya revenue authority pins, the national social security fund papers. And to get any job here, you must have that.

Rwari’s hopes of getting a decent job now lie with the speedy implementation of the new Refugees Bill that Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta recently signed into law.

The law paves the way for refugees to integrate into the Kenyan economy and social life.

Victor Odero of the International Rescue Committee said the new law is a bright spot in the quest for empowering refugees.

“There was no obligation before, certainly not in law, for the state to facilitate the issuance of legal documentation through which then refugees would be able to get economic and social development — basically become self-reliant.” Odero said.

That ability for refugees to participate in Kenyan society has also been welcomed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The agency’s spokesperson in Kenya, Eujin Byun, said this will make the refugees feel valued and dignified in their new homes.

“Integration for refugees is critical,” Byun said. “One because refugees don’t want to be the other, and they want to continue their lives while seeking asylum in the host country until they can return to their country safely.”

The new law comes ahead of the planned closure next year of Kenya’s two largest refugee camps, which together house more than 400,000 people, most from Somalia or South Sudan.

Odero says the law will help make the process of clearing the camps easier.

“Refugee camps are simply unsustainable — people agree on that across the board,” Odero said. “So, the question has been, ‘Where, or can we have a legal framework that gives sufficient anchorage to durable solutions?’ And what we can see from this legislation is that it moves things forward. It is actually progressive.”

The close to half a million refugees in Kenya, just like Rwari, want the law to take effect soon so they can get the chance to earn a decent living outside of the camps.

Source: Voice of America

The migrant crisis on Poland’s border, which Western powers accuse Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of engineering, caught international attention in November. But asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border aren’t alone in being shunted back and forth across Europe’s land and sea borders, say rights organizations and other monitors.

Throughout the year, irregular migration to Europe has been increasing, with more than 160,000 migrants entering the European Union this year, mostly through the Balkans and Italy. That’s a 70% jump from 2020, when pandemic travel restrictions are thought to have impacted the mobility of would-be migrants, and a 45% increase over the previous pre-pandemic year.

And with irregular migration picking up again, rights campaigners say the EU and national governments are increasingly skirting or breaking international humanitarian laws in their determination to prevent war refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants from entering or remaining on the continent.

They say European leaders appear determined to avoid a repeat of 2015, when more than a million asylum seekers from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia arrived in Europe, roiling the continent’s politics and fueling the rise of anti-migrant political parties.

Reports have multiplied of refugees and migrants being forcibly pushed back over the EU’s external borders. So, too, have reports of refugees being prevented from filing asylum applications. Poland passed a law in August stipulating that migrants who cross the border are to be “taken back to the state border” and “ordered to leave the country immediately,” preventing them from making an asylum application.

Pushbacks breach both European human rights laws and the 1951 Geneva Convention, which outline the rights of refugees as well as the legal obligations of the 146 signatory states to protect them.

Signatory states aren’t allowed to impose penalties on refugees who enter their countries illegally in search of asylum, nor are they allowed to expel refugees (without due process). Under the convention, refugees should not be forcibly returned, technically known as “refoul,” to the home countries they fled. Asylum seekers are meant to be provided with free access to courts, and signatory states are required to offer refugees administrative assistance.

The EU, its border agency, Frontex, and the bloc’s national governments, say they do observe international humanitarian law, but according to several recent investigations by rights organizations, the rules are now being flouted routinely and systematically.

“EU member states have adopted increasingly restrictive and punitive asylum rules and are focusing on reducing migration flows, with devastating consequences,” Amnesty International warned recently.

“We are witnessing tremendous human suffering caused by the EU-Turkey deal and by the EU-Libya cooperation, both of which are leaving men, women and children trapped and exposed to suffering and abuse,” the rights organization says in reference to deals struck with Turkey and Libya to block migrants heading to Europe and readmit them when they are ejected from Europe.

In the case of Libya, migrants are often returned to detention camps run by militias where Amnesty International and others have documented harrowing violations, including sexual violence against men, women and children. In a report published earlier this year, Amnesty noted, “Decade-long violations against refugees and migrants continued unabated in Libyan detention centers during the first six months of 2021 despite repeated promises to address them.”

Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch nonprofit journalism consortium, has documented dozens of instances in which Frontex surveillance aircraft were in the vicinity of migrant boats later intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard. “There is a clear pattern discernible. Boats in distress are spotted, communications take place between European actors and the Libyan Coast Guard,” Lighthouse researchers said in a report this year.

Frontex has routinely denied the allegations but lawmakers in the European Parliament accused the agency, after a four-month investigation, of failing to “fulfill its human rights obligations.” In the Balkans, the Border Violence Monitoring Network and other NGOs say they have gathered testimony from hundreds of refugees who allege they have been beaten back into Bosnia-Herzegovina across the Croatian border by baton-wielding men whose uniforms bear no insignia.

Europe’s peripheral countries have also been erecting border fences and building walls with the prospects of more Afghan refugees appearing on their borders acting as a spur. Greece has completed a 40-kilometer wall along its land border with Turkey and installed an automated surveillance system to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe. Other countries are following suit and have been pushing the EU to help with funding.

Critics say the wall-building now contrasts with the criticism European leaders leveled four years ago against then-U.S. President Donald Trump over his plan to build a wall on America’s southern border with Mexico. “We have a history and a tradition that we celebrate when walls are brought down and bridges are built,” admonished Federica Mogherini, then the EU’s foreign policy chief.

While migrant advocates complain of rights violations, calls are mounting in Europe for changes to be made to both the Geneva Convention and the bloc’s humanitarian laws. Critics of the convention say it was primarily drawn up to cope with population displacement in Europe in the wake of the Second World War. They say it fails to recognize the nature and scale of the much more complex migration patterns of the 21st century, which could see numbers swell because of climate change.

Last week in Budapest, Balázs Orbán, a deputy minister in the Hungarian government, said the current EU migration laws should be replaced. The current legal system is “catalyzing the influx of illegal migrants, and not helping to stop them on the borders,” he said. “This framework was created during the time of the Geneva Convention in 1951, when refugees from the Soviet Union needed to be accommodated for. Now, times have changed,” he added.

Source: Voice of America

Nationals residing in Israel conducted a seminar on 27 November focusing on the objective situation in the homeland as well as regional developments. At the seminar in which hundreds of nationals took part, the Charge d’Affairs at the Embassy of Eritrea in Israel, Mr. Solomon Kinfe, gave an extensive briefing on the overall resilience program being conducted and role of nationals abroad, and on the external interventions that are hampering regional peace and cooperative developments as well as on the integrated effort being undertaken in foiling the conspiracies being encountered.

Participants on their part, indicating that they realize that the challenges being encountered in the region are caused by external interventions, condemned the unjust and unlawful unilateral sanctions the US administration has declared on Eritrea.

The nationals further expressed conviction to reinforce organizational capacity and resilience to foil the external conspiracies against Eritrea and strengthen contribution for the successful implementation of national programs.

In related news, nationals residing in Calgary and Saskatoon, Canada conducted a meeting on reinforcing their organizational capacity and thereby strengthening participation for the successful implementation of the national development drives.

The nationals have also organized memorial services on the passing away of veteran freedom fighters Mr. Alamin Mohammed Seid, PFDJ Secretary, and Brig. General Negash Tesfatsion.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

Ugandan officials are rejecting reports that China could take control of the country’s only international airport because of a failure to honor a loan agreement. China’s embassy in Uganda also dismissed the report. But analysts note the loan deal could become a problem if Uganda ever has trouble paying it back.

Local media reports had indicated that Uganda risked losing its only international airport to China over a $200 million loan to expand the facility.

According to documents shared with local media, China rejected Uganda’s request to re-negotiate some clauses in the 2015 loan deal.

This included a clause that required Uganda’s civil aviation authority to set up an escrow account to hold all of its revenues. Under the clause, the revenues in this account cannot be spent by the aviation authority without approval from Beijing.

Vianney Luggya, the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority spokesperson, told VOA that the Ugandan government has no intention of defaulting on loan repayments to China.

“It is not true that Uganda is going to lose Entebbe International Airport in any way whatsoever. This is not the first time that this allegation is coming up. Uganda is not about to default in honoring the loan obligation. We are still within a grace period of seven years and during that period we have been paying interest,” said Luggya.

The loan agreement also gives China’s Export-Import Bank oversight over monthly operating budgets for the airport.The bank is also authorized to inspect both the Aviation Authority and Ugandan government books of accounts, which some see as eroding the sovereignty of the state.

When VOA contacted the Chinese Embassy in Uganda, they said they were not in position to comment and referred VOA to a statement they issued Sunday.

In the statement, the embassy said the loan agreement between China Exim Bank and Uganda was signed voluntarily through dialogue and negotiation on equal footing without any hidden terms or political conditions attached.

They said China-Uganda economic and trade cooperation and financing in the field of large-scale infrastructure follows the principle of equality and mutual benefit and has been conducted in accordance with the laws and rules of the international market and strictly abided by the laws of the host country.

Economic analyst Fred Muhumza explains that technically, any loan received from an EXIM Bank is not treated as a loan but as an export, thus making it difficult to renegotiate.

Muhumuza said it is time for the government and its lawyers to re-examine how it handles its agreements with donors.

“These loans are reviewed by solicitor general’s office, who are the lawyers. It also indicates, in case of arbitration, we go to China. We are really at the mercy of China. They have an upper hand on this,” he said.

Uganda currently owes China $1.6 billion in loans extended to the East African country for financing of major infrastructure development projects.

In a 2018 report, Uganda’s auditor general raised concern that Uganda had agreed to several stringent conditions in the loans and these had not only increased the cost of borrowing but also exposed Uganda’s sovereignty to risk.

Source: Voice of America