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Executive Summary for February 22nd

We review the latest issues related to refugees, including scores of bodies washing ashore in Libya, poll results showing that a quarter of Canadians support a temporary ban on refugees, and a German court’s ruling that Syrians do not automatically qualify for asylum.

Published on Feb. 22, 2017 Read time Approx. 3 minutes

Death Toll Climbs as 74 More Bodies Found on Libyan Coast

The Libyan Red Crescent recovered the bodies of 74 migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach Europe from a beach in the western city of Zawiya, Reuters reported.

Discovered on Monday morning, the deaths likely occurred due to a sunken boat, as a badly damaged rubber dinghy was found close to the shore, Red Crescent spokesperson Mohamed al-Misrati told Associated Press. Most of the dead were from sub-Saharan Africa, and all but three were adult men.

The migrants are believed to have drowned over the past 48 hours. The death toll is expected to rise, as such vessels are often overfilled with passengers, sometimes carrying as many as 120 people.

More than 181,000 migrants used the central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy in 2016. The year also marked a record number of deaths, estimated at 4,579.

One-Fourth of Canadians Want ‘Trump-Style’ Temporary Ban on Refugees

Approximately 25 percent of Canadians want their government to implement a temporary ban on refugees similar to the executive order authorized by U.S. president Donald Trump, according to a new poll.

“There has been a growing number of Canadians expressing concern over both the speed and the amount of refugees being resettled in Canada,” Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, told the Huffington Post Canada.

The poll measured public opinion of the Canadian government’s repeated pledges to resettle 40,000 refugees this year, including 25,000 from Syria. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau responded to President Trump’s ban on refugees and migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. with a renewed commitment to resettling civilians fleeing conflict.

A notable majority of Canadians – 57 percent – agree with the government’s decision, according to the poll.

Syrians No Longer Get Automatic Refugee Status, Says German Court

Syrians fleeing the still war-torn country are not automatically entitled to full refugee status under the Geneva Convention, a German administrative court in North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) ruled Tuesday.

Presently, Syrians are considered “prima facie” refugees by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) because of the conflict conditions in their country.

But German judges have said that there is no concrete basis to assume that all Syrians face “political persecution” if they remain inside their own country.

The judges added that applicants would need to establish on a case-by-case basis that they face individual persecution because of religion, political association, sexual orientation or ethnicity, or prove that they were subjected to torture, in order to qualify for asylum.

As a latest example, they cited the case of a 48-year-old Syrian man who fled his country and applied for asylum in Germany. The court decided that the asylum seeker, who fled Aleppo in 2015 and was granted “subsidiary protection” in Germany, did not qualify for full refugee status or family reunification.

With over 12,300 asylum seekers filing lawsuits protesting their “subsidiary protection” status in Germany, this case sets a new precedent.

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