Tag: Migrants ⁄ Page 4 ⁄ Open Migration

The Tunisian fishermen who bury nameless migrants

June 22, 2017 - Giulia Bertoluzzi

In Zarzis, southern Tunisia, the victims of the Libyan route are washed ashore by the currents or retrieved while floating in the sea. They are the men, women, and children who have drowned in their attempt to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe. Hardly a day passes by without fishermen or volunteers recovering a dead body. It is often impossible to identify them, but the fishermen struggle to give a proper burial to the nameless ones too, even if only under the sand dunes. Giulia Bertoluzzi spent some time with the fishermen and wrote a report for Open Migration, which anticipates the making of a documentary.

The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 24/2017

June 20, 2017 - Open Migration

Essential reads for World Refugee Day, events to celebrate solidarity, record numbers of people displaced worldwide. Also: reflections on rescue operations at sea, the importance of reforming citizenship laws in Italy, an atlas of foreign unaccompanied minors and the consequences of the failed EU relocation plan.

The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 23/2017

June 13, 2017 - Open Migration

A new report dismantles the accusations against NGOs out at sea using science, even as rescue ships are under attack from the Libyan Navy. What is behind the record numbers of Bangladeshis arriving in Italy? What do the digital footprints of people on the move tell us? Also: migrants in Italy are lost in translation; the forgotten children of Calais (and the rest of Europe); the crucial issue of new environmental refugees.

Training the Libyans is not enough to stop migrants

June 7, 2017 - Francesco Floris

On the night of May 23, 2017, the captain of the Iuventa, a ship from the German NGO Jugend Rettet, reported a new attack at sea by a Libyan motorboat: the crew had shot at some boats overloaded with refugees, then brought two of them back towards Libya. Was it the Libyan Coast Guard? How is Italy training them, and to what end? And how many Coast Guards actually exist in Libya? Francesco Floris takes us into the details of training in Libya and its historical precedents.

The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 22/2017

June 6, 2017 - Open Migration

Death rates in the Mediterranean have almost doubled even as migrant crossings fall, since EU countries will do anything to push them back, disregarding international law and human rights while pointing the finger against humanitarian NGOs (who have gone from “angels of the sea” to “taxi cabs for migrants”).

One year at City Plaza in Athens

May 31, 2017 - Eleonora Camilli

The heart of Athens is reacting to Greece’s harsh financial crisis with different experiments of solidarity and self-organisation. These experiments aim at relieving the isolation of the jobless or homeless, compensating for the lack of healthcare and medicines, and regenerating unused spaces and social life. In one of the toughest moments in Greek history, the occupied City Plaza hotel has become a positive accommodation model for migrants and refugees. Eleonora Camilli went there to see how life in the former five-star hotel is after exactly one year of occupation.

The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 21/2017

May 30, 2017 - Open Migration

As politicians and the media keep discussing the baseless accusations against the NGOs in the Mediterranean, no one seems willing to talk about what is happening in Libya, between prisons for migrants and a Coast Guard that turns rescue missions into deportations (by shooting out at sea).

Accusations against Ngos at sea: what is false or misleading in that smear campaign

May 19, 2017 - Francesco Floris and Lorenzo Bagnoli

“Too smart for their own good” (Matteo Renzi). “Taxi cabs for migrants” (Luigi Di Maio). Northern League secretary Matteo Salvini said there was a “secret service dossier” on them. Their chief accuser is Catania’s prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro, according to whom their intervention “renders investigations into facilitators of criminal organisations useless.” After weeks of hearings, though, the defense commission in the Italian Parliament has cleared them of all suspicions. But who are they? Humanitarian Ngos, carrying out search and rescue operations in the waters between Sicily and Libya, are the target of a relentless smear campaign. The European border control agency Frontex has designated them the main “pull factor” for the rising number of migrant boats (and deaths) in the Mediterranean. How much truth, and how much untruth, is there in such accusations?

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