SUKRUPASA, Turkey — The small squat structure, a cross between a kiosk and a duck blind, was starkly pale against the brown, soggy hillside a few hundred yards away.

“Bulgarian border police,” said Hasan Bulgur, 73, pointing as he leaned on a crooked walking stick at the edge of this village in northern Turkey. “They are watching us now. When the refugees try to cross, they are stopping them and pushing them back, sometimes beating them, robbing them, even unleashing dogs on them.”
​
Groups of migrants, having failed to make it past the Bulgarians, frequently straggle out of the fields here, sopping wet after fording a nearby river. They arrive sometimes in groups of as many as 50, some of them with bruised skulls and bashed noses, Mr. Bulgur and other residents said.

“They hit me and took my money,” said Alan Murad, a 17-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker living at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, recounting his treatment by the Bulgarian border authorities. “I ran away from hell at home, trying to find paradise in Europe. Instead, I found another hell.”

​Pour lire la suite : http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/world/europe/bulgarian-border-police-accused-of-abusing-refugees.html

BERLIN — The number of refugees and migrants arriving in Europe this year has passed the 1 million mark, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday. Here is what you need to know about one of 2015's most defining tragedies.

Pour lire l'article : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/22/over-a-million-refugees-and-migrants-arrived-in-europe-this-year-here-is-what-you-need-to-know/

TOKYO — For Mohammed, the perils of staying in Damascus crystalized when a sniper’s bullet whizzed past his head while he and his cousins were on his rooftop, watching the Syrian air force bomb rebel forces.

The same roof where Mohammed and his lifelong friend Jamal used to sit in a tent and play video games. Now, instead of studying for a law degree, Mohammed is working as a fitness instructor in Tokyo, trying to squeeze in some language study and hoping that like Jamal, he’ll beat the odds and win official status as a refugee in Japan.

The odds aren’t good.

Out of the 7,533 people who applied for refugee status in 2014, or appealed earlier refusals, only 11 were approved. That includes Jamal, his mother and sister, whose approvals came after a year-and-a-half wait.
​
For most, the approval never comes: In the past five years, the proportion of applicants granted refugee status in Japan has dropped to below 1 percent — in 2014 it was just 0.2 percent. In contrast, Germany has accepted nearly 40,000 Syrian asylum-seekers since 2013, while the U.S. has pledged to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees and has resettled 2,234 since 2010.

Pour consulter l'article : https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-wary-of-outsiders-keeps-doors-closed-to-refugees/2015/12/28/c63c03da-ad35-11e5-b281-43c0b56f61fa_story.html

Partant d’Équateur, des milliers de migrants originaires de Cuba sont arrêtés en Amérique centrale avant d’atteindre leur objectif final. La situation tourne sur place au drame humanitaire.

Le sort de ces migrants est sans doute moins dramatique que celui des réfugiés venant de Syrie ou d’Érythrée. Il a été moins médiatisé aussi, jusqu’à ce que le pape François, dimanche, ne s’émeuve de leur sort et demande aux pays concernés de trouver une solution humanitaire. Depuis près de deux mois, des milliers de Cubains sont bloqués dans plusieurs pays d’Amérique centrale, Costa Rica et Panama essentiellement, dans l’attente d’une possibilité de gagner les États-Unis. Le temps presse pour eux : les États-Unis continuent à accorder de façon quasi automatique l’asile politique aux Cubains qui parviennent sur leur territoire. Mais le réchauffement diplomatique entre Washington et La Havane risque de mettre fin rapidement à cette politique.

Empêchés pendant plusieurs décennies de quitter leur île, les Cubains peuvent voyager librement depuis janvier 2013, à l’exception des médecins, militaires ou jeunes diplômés. Mais ils se heurtent à deux écueils. D’abord, le prix du billet d’avion n’est pas à la portée des habitants, le salaire moyen ne dépassant pas 20 euros par mois. Il faut donc compter sur l’aide de la famille ou des amis résidant à l’étranger. Surtout, très peu de pays n’exigent pas de visa des détenteurs d’un passeport cubain. Et ce ne sont pas des destinations qui intéressent les candidats au départ, car trop éloignées des États-Unis, la destination finale : Monténégro, Vanuatu, Laos, Botswana… Seule exception : l’Équateur.

Pour lire l'article dans son entièreté : http://www.ledevoir.com/international/actualites-internationales/458944/en-amerique-centrale-l-espoir-des-cubains-s-eteint

Par son ordonnance du 23 novembre 2015, Ministre de l’intérieur et Commune de Calais, le juge des référés du Conseil d’Etat a confirmé les mesures ordonnées en première instance pour faire cesser les atteintes aux libertés fondamentales des exilés sur la « jungle » calaisienne. Pour la première fois, le juge des référés a ordonné des mesures d’urgence sur le fondement de la sauvegarde de la dignité humaine, composante des pouvoirs de police administrative générale. 

Dignité de la personne humaine (Art. L. 521-2 CJA et Art. 3 CEDH)
Pour accéder à l'article et le télécharger en ligne : http://revdh.revues.org/1761

IZMIR, Turkey — The Turkish Coast Guard has stepped up nighttime patrols on the choppy, wintry waters of the Aegean Sea, seizing rafts full of refugees fleeing war for Europe and sending them back to Turkey.

Down south, at the border with Syria, Turkey is building a concrete wall, digging trenches, laying razor wire and at night illuminating vast stretches of land in an effort to cut off the flow of supplies and foreign fighters to the Islamic State.

On land and at sea, Turkey’s borders, long a revolving door of refugees, foreign fighters and the smugglers who enable them, are at the center of two separate yet interlinked global crises: the migrant tide convulsing Europe and the Syrian civil war that propels it.

Accused by Western leaders of turning a blind eye to these critical borders, Turkey at last seems to be getting serious about shoring them up. Under growing pressure from Europe and the United States, Turkey has in recent weeks taken steps to cut off the flows of refugees and of foreign fighters who have helped destabilize a vast portion of the globe, from the Middle East to Europe.

Smugglers who used to make a living helping the Islamic State bring foreign fighters into Syria say that it is increasingly difficult — though still not impossible — to do so now. Border guards who once fired warning shots, they say, now shoot to kill.

Pour lire l'article en entier : ​http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/world/europe/turkey-border-refugees.html

Avvy Go is clinic director at the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. Debbie Douglas is executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. Mohamed Boudjenane is acting president of the Canadian Arab Federation. Margaret Parsons is executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic. Shalini Konanur is executive director of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario. Neethan Shan is executive director of the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians. Chase Lo is executive director of the Chinese Canadian National Council’s Toronto chapter.

The Premier of Ontario says it’s time for her province to move beyond gender and consider all its policies through a “race lens.”

To that, we say, “Welcome to 2015.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s recent acknowledgement that Ontario needs to address its racial inequalities has been a long time coming. As Alvin Curling and Roy McMurtry lamented in their 2009 Roots Of Youth Violence report, racism is becoming a more serious and entrenched problem because Ontario is not dealing with it.

Organizations working with racialized communities have long been pushing for a racial-justice agenda in view of the ever-growing disparities facing indigenous peoples and people of colour across the province. While some limited attention has been paid by governments of all orders to the plight of first peoples, the same cannot be said about the challenges facing communities of colour.

The recent rise of hate crimes against Canadians of Muslim faith, racial profiling in the form of carding, the ongoing challenges facing indigenous peoples and African-Canadians in the criminal justice system, and the disproportionate apprehensions of children and youth of colour in the child-welfare system would seem to have provided the Ontario government with an impetus for action. Yet, the struggles for racial equality need to be fought on every front.

Pour lire la suite : ​http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/a-race-lens-for-the-labour-market-welcome-to-2015-ms-wynne/article27896569/

HONOLULU —  President Obama plans to host a United Nations summit meeting next year on the global migrant crisis and to spend his final year in office working to spur other countries and the private sector to contribute more humanitarian aid, his United Nations ambassador said Monday.

The announcement came as the flow of migrants from Syria continued at crisis levels, part of what the ambassador, Samantha Power, called “a larger global population of displaced that is larger now than 60 million.”

“The list of refugees in need unfortunately continues to grow — at the same time the international community has been utterly unable to keep up,” Ms. Power told reporters in New York on Monday. “This year has shown with painful clarity that our existing systems, approaches and funding are inadequate to the task at hand and to the amount of human suffering that is ongoing.”

Pour lire la suite : http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/world/middleeast/obama-plans-summit-on-migrant-crisis.html

Christmas dinner for Kate Moss and friends was in the diary long ago. Earlier this month he rustled up something for Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in the Hamptons. But in between, private chef Kevin Mikailian was preparing food for a rather different clientele.

Working in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Calais, he was in his chef whites standing over huge, bubbling cauldrons of dal readied for the migrants and refugees who have found themselves in the place that’s been called the biggest slum in Europe: the so-called Jungle of Calais.

Mikailian was presiding over a team of people, most of them young, most of them having “never spent a day in the kitchen”. Between them, they were aiming to produce up to 1,500 hot, nutritious meals that could be ferried the short distance to the camp. None of them had done anything like this before.

Elsewhere in the warehouse it was the same story. People were sorting black bin bags full of clothes into cardboard boxes labelled Fleece Male (medium) or Small Long-Sleeved Tops. Some of those doing the sorting had only arrived in Calais the previous day.

The woman showing me round, Philli Boyle, had no prior experience in the field of aid or emergency response. She and a few friends had simply seen the same pictures as everyone else, believed someone had to do something and put out feelers on Facebook. Now she’s been in Calais for months and has found herself at the heart of what looks like a disaster relief operation.

Pour lire l'article en entier : http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/25/calais-migrant-camp-refugees