Europe Pledges More Libya Aid After Italy Warns Over Boat Arrivals
The interior ministers of Italy, Germany and France have pledged to put more money and resources into stopping the flow of migrants through Libya after Italy called for help with refugee boat arrivals.
The ministers held a crisis meeting in Paris with the E.U. migration commissioner after Italy threatened to close its ports to foreign rescue ships last week, saying the arrival of more than 80,000 people this year had pushed the country to its limit.
“I am a europhile and I would be proud if even one vessel, instead of arriving in Italy, went to another European port,” Italian interior minister Marco Minniti told an Italian newspaper ahead of the talks.
Rescue groups said it would be logistically difficult and damaging to migrants if they were forced to dock in other European ports.
“We’d need to make a stopover in an Italian port anyway to refuel, or we’d end up needing to be rescued ourselves,” SOS Mediterranee spokeswoman Mathilde Auvillain told Agence France-Presse. After the trauma of Libyan detention and the boat journey, “imagine adding two or three more days at sea. Our priority is to protect them,” she said.
Around 60 people drowned on the deadly sea passage last week after their dinghy capsized.
Italian media said Minniti is pushing for asylum applications to be processed in Libya, the enforcing of a code of conduct for Mediterranean rescues and the expansion of the E.U. relocation program.
After the Paris talks, the French interior minister said it would develop a code of conduct for rescue ships, and officials pledged to reinforce Libya’s southern border and give more money and training to the Libyan coastguard.
UNHCR: More IDPs Return Home in Syria
The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said there has been a “notable trend of spontaneous returns” by Syrians to their homes this year, particularly of people displaced inside Syria.
UNHCR said in a statement that some 440,000 internally displaced people have returned home and more than 31,000 returned from neighboring countries so far in 2017. Most of them returned to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, many looking for family members or checking on their homes.
The U.N. agency said it was stepping up its operations inside Syria, including assisting in the rehabilitation of homes and infrastructure, as well as monitoring refugees’ intentions to return and actual returnees.
But UNHCR cautioned that conditions were not yet ready in Syria for safe return of refugees, noting uncertainty over security and difficulty of getting aid to vulnerable people inside the country. Therefore “refugee returns from host countries can neither be promoted nor facilitated by UNHCR at this stage,” the statement said.
Deadly Fire Destroys Refugee Camp in Lebanon
An informal refugee settlement in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley went up in flames on July 2, killing at least one child and leaving hundreds homeless.
The fire may have have been started by a cooking stove or a power surge, according to local officials. Emergency services battled to contain the blaze but most of the camp’s tents, numbering about 100, were destroyed.
“The settlement has turned to ashes. Even the iron melted,” emergency responder Ahmed Salloum told the Associated Press.
At least one child was confirmed dead and two other people are in a critical condition, UNHCR’s Dana Sleiman told Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star.
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