Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

Hungarians are poised to reject the EU's troubled refugee quota plan in a referendum on Sunday, as fiercely anti-migrant Prime Minister Viktor Orban rides a populist wave across the bloc.

Following are the main European populist parties that have stoked concerns about the continent's worst migrant crisis since World War II to boost their support and even enter government in some countries.

- GERMANY: Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered a stinging setback in state elections in Berlin on September 18 in a backlash against her "open-door" refugee policy.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) won seats in the regional parliament with 14 percent of the vote – not far behind the CDU's 18 percent.

A recently elected Berlin deputy for the AfD reportedly called Syrian refugees "disgusting worms" and said asylum seekers were "parasites which are feeding off the German people".

Two weeks earlier, the AfD came ahead of the CDU in a northeastern regional poll. It now has seats in 10 out of Germany's 16 regional parliaments.

- AUSTRIA: The Freedom Party (FPOe) narrowly missed winning a May 22 presidential election. This would have made Norbert Hofer Europe's first far-right elected head of state since 1945.

However, Hofer will have another stab at winning the election on December 4 after the country's highest court annulled the May result due to procedural irregularities. He has said Islam "has no place in Austria".

Austria was located on the so-called Balkan migrant route, which saw hundreds of thousands of people, many fleeing the Syrian war, trek up from Greece towards northern Europe last year.

- SLOVAKIA: In March, the People's Party Our Slovakia won 14 seats in the country's 150-seat parliament, four years after it was founded on a platform hostile to the Roma minority, the EU and NATO. Party leader Marian Kotleba has been branded a neo-Nazi by opponents.

Populism has spread into mainstream parties too, with Prime Minister Robert Fico taking one of the EU's tougher stances on immigration. He has branded the migrant crisis an "onslaught" and called EU migrant policy "ritual suicide".

- HUNGARY: Orban, head of the right-wing Fidesz party, has organised the October 2 referendum on migrant relocation under an EU quota plan.

In late 2015, Hungary built fences along its borders with Serbia and Croatia to stem the massive tide of migrants. Other countries in the Balkans then followed suit.

Those migrants who do sneak through into Hungary suffer illegal border pushbacks and unlawful detention, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

Orban has called immigration "poison" and has said that "every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk".

- POLAND: The Law and Justice (PiS) party swept back into power in late 2015 after nearly a decade, playing on fears sparked by the refugee influx.

Its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has said refugees bring "cholera to the Greek islands, dysentery to Vienna, various types of parasites".

- NORWAY: The Progress Party joined a government coalition in 2013 after winning 16 percent of the vote. The party's Sylvi Listhaug, immigration and integration minister, has said "the tyranny of kindness is blowing over Norwegian society like a nightmare".

- DENMARK: The Danish People's Party won 21 percent of the vote in a 2015 legislative poll. The minority government needs the party's support to pass legislation.

Denmark introduced a host of measures to deter migrants earlier this year, including allowing police to confiscate some of their valuables to help pay for their accommodation.

- FINLAND: The nationalist Finns Party won 18 percent of the vote in 2015 legislative elections and is now a part of the government coalition, although its popularity has fallen. Party leader Timo Soini is foreign minister.

- BRITAIN: A historic vote on June 23 to leave the EU was the biggest success to date of populist movements since the bloc was founded.

The "Leave" victory was driven in large part by worries about immigration, economic uncertainty and a perception that an out-of-touch Brussels elite was making the rules.

With the Labour Party in crisis, the new head of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP), Diane James, has said she wants the group to become Britain's main opposition force.

- FRANCE: The National Front (FN) has notched up several local electoral successes since 2012. The FN's Marine Le Pen has likened the migrant influx to the "barbarian invasions" of the fourth century.

Boosted by the succession of Islamist "terror" attacks in France, polls consistently tip Le Pen to reach the second round of France's presidential election in 2017.

- NETHERLANDS: The far-right Freedom Party is currently leading polls for a March 2017 legislative vote. The party's platform calls for a closure of "all mosques and Islamic schools" and "a ban on the Koran."
 

SALZBURG, Austria – The 5:08 p.m. to Munich pulled into Salzburg Central Station, and four German police officers boarded the train. This was a migrant sweep, and the cops moved quickly past the fair-skinned passengers, questioning a group of Saudi tourists and a Chicano from Chicago.

In the last seat of the last car, the patrol found Shakira Sarwari. Eight months on the road from war-torn Kandahar, the young Afghan mother clung tightly to her 17-month-old son. Her 7-year-old daughter huddled close, nervously eying the officers. They were now one station away from their final destination: Germany, the promised land of refugees.

But they were not there yet – and after more than a million arrivals in 2015, the German welcome is no longer so warm. In fact, a crackdown at the border is giving those migrants who make it this far the worst odds of crossing since the height of the crisis last year. It is more evidence, some say, that as Europe's migrant crisis stokes a mounting voter backlash, even generous Germany is quietly closing its door.

"Your passport," asked one of the officers, who now have permission from the Austrians to stop migrants on trains bound for Germany.

Sarwari replied with a pleading look, holding up an empty palm.

"Where are you going?" the officer asked slowly. Sarwari tugged nervously at her pink headscarf. In her arms, her son squirmed and whined. Her daughter, terrified, was on the verge of tears.

"To Germany," Sarwari said. "To Germany."

The officer shook his head.

"You'll have to come with us," he said.

In September 2015, as thousands of migrants a day were converging on Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an astounding pledge. In the face of raging wars in the Middle East, she said there was "no limit" to the number of refugees Germany could accept. That promise – along with some of the most generous refugee benefits in the world – made the same country that sparked World War II an asylum seeker's paradise.

But that has already begun to change. Since March, tougher controls in the Balkans, Greece and Turkey have sharply reduced the number of new arrivals. But hundreds of migrants each week – mostly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa – are still attempting to enter Germany.

Yet the nation that took in more migrants last year than the rest of Europe combined is making it harder to get in. In August, Germany refused entry to 1,070 of the 2,300 migrants – or 46 percent – it stopped on its side of the Austrian border. In January, when arrival numbers were far higher, only 7 percent of migrants were turned back.

The smaller number of arrivals now, German officials say, has allowed them to more rigorously question migrants and apply rules meant to weed out economic migrants and opportunists. But critics say the policy is too sweeping and that there's a good chance that people who qualify for German asylum are not being given a chance to apply. A large portion of those coming now also already have family in Germany and are trying to skirt years-long waiting periods for family reunions.

Yet the German message to migrants is clear: It's not so easy anymore.

"The reality of today's Germany is a different one than the refugee fairy tale of last summer," said Karl Kopp, spokesman for the migrant aid group Pro Asyl.

It happens as Germany is drowning in a backlog of hundreds of thousands of asylum requests. Last year, it paid $5.91 billion in aid and shelter, more than double the cost in 2014. A violent standoff last week between migrants and right-wing Germans became the latest sign of rising tensions. Germans are investigating 60 cases of migrants allegedly conspiring with Islamist militants.

Perhaps the most important factor: The chancellor's Christian Democratic Union is suffering steep political losses because of her refugee stance, losing ground in a string of local elections and surrendering voters to the anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party only a year before Merkel's possible reelection bid. After another bitter defeat in liberal Berlin, Merkel this week offered a mea culpa.

"If I could, I would turn back time many, many years in order to be able to better prepare myself, the whole government and all those responsible, for the situation that hit us rather unexpectedly in late summer of 2015," she said.

Germany is now rejecting more than a third of all asylum applications for those already there, and it is trying to negotiate mass returns to countries such as Afghanistan. The tough-talking interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, has even suggested that Germany wants to send many refugees back to bankrupt Greece, where most of them first entered Europe.

In the graceful city of Salzburg – the birthplace of Mozart that last year turned into the main gateway into Germany for migrants – German police are going further. Since June, they have been boarding trains here to pull off irregular migrants with Austria's blessing. Some migrants are briefly detained in Austrian jails. Most get 14 days to leave the country or apply for asylum in Austria. Still others could get pushed back by the Austrians to Italy or Slovenia.

It is all part, observers say, of Europe's closing door.

As the German police led Shakira Sarwari off the train in Salzburg, her daughter, Setayesh, dressed inpink sneakers and an Elsa shirt from Disney's "Frozen," broke down in tears. In the busy terminal, and flanked by officers, they walked past gawking passengers as Sarwari tried to comfort her crying son.

"Shh, shh," she said softly, cradling Mohammed in her arms.

The German police showed the three of them into an industrial-looking room fitted with a computer terminal, a few wooden desks and a bench behind a partial fence. She went behind the fence with a male officer, who did a cursory check. She placidly complied when he asked her to remove her headscarf. Mohammed cried as the police took his mother's digital fingerprints.

As requested, she emptied her possessions onto a table – the most important being a plastic bag with a few hundred euros, all that she had left. She flushed as she was presented with, and asked to sign, a document in her native Pashtun language stating that she was being denied entry to Germany. She would later tell an interpreter that she could not read or write.

Via a telephone interpreter, she was able to communicate with the police, telling them that her husband was already in Germany and she was trying to join him there.

"I want to go to Germany," she said.

"You cannot go," an officer explained. "Because of European law." She was told she would need to stay in Austria.

"I do not want to stay here," she said, shaking her head. "My husband is in Germany."

Her girl could not stop crying now. One of the German officers, Horst Auerbach, gave her daughter a gentle look and a glass of water.

"It gets to you," he said, a lump in his throat.

Within two hours, the family was handed over to the Austrian police. A sturdy female cop with plastic gloves took Sarwari away for a more thorough search. Afterward, the family spent the night at the main Salzburg police station.

The next morning, like most migrants taken off the trains here, she was issued an order to leave the country or apply for asylum in Austria. Some Austrian politicians are bitterly complaining that the German policy is leaving more migrants on Austria's doorstep – although Austria, too, is trying to send some migrants back to Italy and Slovenia. Officials in Vienna say both they and the Germans are simply following European rules.

It remains unclear how efficient the German measures are at thwarting migrants. All the migrants in Salzburg are indeed being stopped. But farther north, at other border crossings, more asylum seekers are managing to get across the German border, where German officers decide whether to push them back. Almost half are refused. Decisions, officials say, are made on a case-by-case basis.

As Sarwari prepared to leave the police station, she said she had no real plan. She did not speak German or English. She did not know which way to go.

"I made it this far by myself, with the kids, and I am going to go to Germany," she said, determined. "I will manage to find a way."

anthony.faiola@washpost.com

Stephanie Kirchner contributed to this report.
 

TIHANY, Hungary—At a tavern in this lakeside resort town, the waiter scurrying from table to table could use some help.

Most of his colleagues have gone abroad to seek better pay, leaving Ferenc Punk's family-run business heavily understaffed.

Mr. Punk could have tapped a vast pool of potential workers: Scores of migrants, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have traveled through the Central European country over the past two years, and thousands more are waiting at its southern border in the hope of entering the European Union.

Instead, the 67-year-old restaurant owner plans to make his dining room smaller. He won't recruit migrants, especially if they are Muslims.

"I wouldn't know what to do with them," Mr. Punk said. "I'm not against them but they are coming from a totally different culture."

Mr. Punk's tavern is a microcosm of the wider forces shaping Hungary's society and economy ahead of Sunday's referendum on immigration. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who opposes Muslim immigration, wants voters to say no to an EU policy to impose "the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens."

Although Hungary's working population is expected to shrink by more than 10% over the next four years, according to a central-bank estimate, Mr. Orban objects to allowing large numbers of refugees to settle in the country, saying they would threaten its ethnic cohesion.

The prime minister argues migrants also represent a security threat because some Islamist radicals have made their way into the EU by posing as refugees.

In tandem with Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the country's ruling Law and Justice party, Mr. Orban is campaigning in Brussels against the EU plan to impose refugee quotas on bloc members.

That has put him on a collision course with other EU​ leaders, notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has made the acceptance of refugees a cornerstone of her policy.

But Ms. Merkel's approach has suffered setbacks at home, where an upstart anti-immigration movement outpolled her ruling conservative party in a recent state election and now has seats in 10 state parliaments.

"Courageous politicians in Germany and Austria do say that what the Hungarians are doing is good for Germany and for Austria as well," Mr. Orban said on state television Tuesday.

Since joining the EU in 2004, the country of nearly 10 million has seen an estimated 350,000 of its skilled and educated workers leave. At least 90,000 alone have relocated to the U.K. The "brain drain"—along with a low birthrate and aging population—has resulted in chronic labor shortages in service industries and at factories and farms.

Students, who were mandated to provide cheap labor at apple-picking camps during the communist era, are no longer coming to the fields. Romanians and ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries traditionally filled many jobs in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors here, but now leapfrog Hungary to move farther west.

That has left members of DelKerTESZ, a cooperative of some 500 vegetable producers in Szentes, in southern Hungary, mustering friends and relatives to avoid losing harvests.

"We get family members to work on the fields or transport the produce on Saturdays and Sundays," said Ferenc Ledo, the cooperative chief. "It's impossible to find crop pickers."

Hungary's main association of entrepreneurs and employers, Mgyosz, has warned that the dearth of applicants in many sectors was endangering economic growth, which is expected to reach 2% this year. The association sides with government policy, though, saying thatonly migrant workers who "are skilled and could culturally fit in" are needed.

More than 150,000 non-European refugee seekers applied for asylum in Hungary last year. But nearly all of them continued their journeys to Germany or Scandinavia.

Those countries would like Budapest to repatriate any migrants who were first registered in Hungary upon their entry into the EU—as the bloc's rules require—but Mr. Orban has refused their entreaties.

The government now lets about 30 migrants a day cross into Hungary through its heavily guarded border with Serbia. Almost none of them stay in the country, even if granted asylum protection,according to the Helsinki Committee, a human-rights group.

The government's anti-immigration policy has been pilloried by the Two-Tailed Dog Party, a group founded by prankster artists that launched a mock billboard campaign.

"Did you know? Hungarians see more UFOs in their lifetime than migrants," one of the recent billboards reads.

Yet a survey conducted in mid-September by polling agency Publicus suggests 61% of Hungarians will support Mr. Orban's immigration stance on Sunday. The referendum, which is valid only if turnout surpasses a threshold of 50%, is largely symbolic, as it carries no legal bearing and Brussels has largely backed off trying to impose refugee quotas on bloc members.

At the Tihany tavern, Mr. Punk casts his support with the government, saying it has made Hungary a safer and more attractive place. "Some Germans have already moved here," he said. "They can have a cozy life here."

Write to Margit Feher at margit.feher@wsj.com
 

Maja is no immigrant, she's a Muslim convert. But in the febrile atmosphere in Hungary ahead of Sunday's referendum on refugees, she says her religion has made her a target for abuse.

"We Hungarians are normally kind, friendly people. I don't know what is happening to us, but something is really not right now," the 33-year-old financial services employee told AFP.

"People say things all the time," the mother-of-one said in a phone interview. "Once I was knocked off a bicycle by a driver who said 'Why don't you back to the desert!'"

Only this week she was assaulted in broad daylight at a petrol station. She leaves her headscarf in the car when she goes to work or parent-teacher meetings for the sake of her son.

Fellow convert Maria Nagy, standing at the counter of the Asian goods shop she runs with her Pakistani husband in the multi-cultural eighth district of Budapest, has had similar experiences.

"We feel the hate. On the tram, ticket controllers hassle me all the time because I wear the scarf, if I go to a restaurant people stare at me," the 30-year-old said.

Their experiences are not shared by all Muslims in Hungary, but groups representing the 40,000-strong minority community say discrimination and race hate are on the rise.

The referendum is about whether Hungary will accept one of the European Union's main responses to the continent's migrant crisis, that of sharing refugees around the bloc via mandatory quotas.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban is backing a "No" vote and is almost certain to win, inflaming tensions with his western European partners which have heavily criticised his hardline anti-migrant nationalism.

Ignoring this, his government has plastered lampposts and billboards nationwide with posters linking immigration – which Orban calls "poison" – with terrorism and crime.

Zoltan Bolek, another convert and head of Hungary's oldest Muslim group, the Hungarian Islamic Community set up in 1990, said this has further soured the ugly atmosphere.

"The coded message is that migrants are Muslims are terrorists or criminals. Also state media keeps putting out stories about anything a Muslim has done or is alleged to have done somewhere," Bolek told AFP.

A letter he sent last week to Orban appealing for physical protection for mosques has gone unanswered so far.

"This is the situation where we have reached, people's souls have been poisoned," Bolek said.

Zoltan Sulok, the softly-spoken president of Organisation of Muslims in Hungary, the larger of the two main religious groups, said that many in the community are children and grandchildren of 1980s immigrants, not new arrivals.

"They speak Hungarian, supported Hungary in the European football championships, what should they think if someone now tells them 'Go Home'?" he said.

The prayer room in the Budapest Mosque – a large but nondescript building devoid of nameplate or minaret so as not to attract attention – has space for 2,000 worshippers, by far the largest of the city's handful of mosques.

It gets 200-300 for Friday prayers but is full on festivals like Eid.

"Until now we lived quite peacefully, because we were not a political issue. But now we started to be," he said. He even likens the situation to the 1930s, with migrants "dehumanised" by politicians and the media.

"It's a very dangerous game that politicians are playing," he said.

Portraying himself as the defender of Christian Europe against Islamisation, Orban says the EU has no right to "redraw Europe's cultural and religious identity".

He and other leaders in eastern Europe reject what they see as a failed experiment with multiculturalism in the West, pointing to social tensions and home-grown terrorism as the results.

But support in the referendum campaign sometimes comes from unlikely quarters.

Maher Zaki is a 43-year-old trader who arrived from Syria 25 years ago "with nothing, no money, no knowledge of the language". He helped organise medical aid for Syrian migrants last year during the peak of the crisis.

"Orban's policies protect my son and my family as well as Hungary," Zaki, now fluent in Hungarian, told AFP in a Budapest cafe, referring to cases of Islamic State extremists arriving in Europe as asylum seekers.

"I don't want to walk in town centres among people who might be about to kill and bomb innocent people."

He added: "Of course there is huge propaganda against us, but if people come to live in my house, I accept them but I want to check who they are before they come through the door."
 

A refugee referendum is mostly about showing Brussels who is boss

HUNGARY will hold a referendum on October 2nd. (Such things have become a fad in Europe.) The question is: "Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament?" (Note the neutral wording.) At issue is the EU's Emergency Response Mechanism, adopted in September 2015, under which 160,000 of the migrants who began surging into Europe last year are to be shared out between member states according to quotas. The decision passed the European Council by majority vote, but four countries voted against it: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. Hungary and Slovakia have challenged the system in the European Court of Justice. It is "unlawful, unworkable and dangerous", says Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman.

The referendum is largely a popularity ploy by Viktor Orban (pictured, right), Hungary's populist prime minister, and will have no legal effect. It is also a challenge to the authority of Brussels and the leadership of Germany's Angela Merkel, who champions the relocation scheme. Mrs Merkel sees accepting refugees as a European commitment whose burdens must be shared. Mr Orban, who has clashed with the EU over his government's illiberal media and economic policies, wants to stop the EU from issuing shared rules on asylum and much else. He wants the union to be a trading bloc of sovereign countries that keeps out of matters like migration and human rights. With sympathetic governments in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, Mr Orban thinks his vision for the future of Europe will prevail.

The government is leaving nothing to chance. It has plastered posters calling for a "no" vote across the country. "Did you know that Brussels is planning to relocate a town's worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary?" asks one. (In fact, asylum applicants are not illegal immigrants, and Hungary's quota is a mere 1,294.) A leaflet sent to millions of homes claims that immigration has created "hundreds" of "no-go zones" in London, Brussels and Berlin. Britain, Belgium and Germany issued protests. Tension is rising. On September 24th a bomb exploded in downtown Budapest, injuring two police officers.

Polls predict a comfortable majority of voters will choose "no". Outside Budapest and the major cities, Hungary is a conservative and insular country, where many people speak no foreign languages and have little experience of those with different skin colours or faiths. But more than 50% of Hungary's roughly 8m eligible voters must turn out for the result to be valid, and they may not. An invalid result would be seen as a failure for Mr Orban and his ruling Fidesz party, says Peter Kreko of Political Capital, a Budapest think-tank.

One reason for the government to worry is that people have grown more sanguine about migration. At the height of the crisis in August 2015, thousands of migrants poured across the Hungarian border every day. Since then the government has built razor-wire fences along the frontiers with Serbia and Croatia. Of the handful of migrants who still enter, most are caught and expelled. The government, say critics, is diverting attention from issues such as corruption, health care and education.

The reduction in migration has been purchased with cruelty, say human-rights groups. A report this week from Amnesty International claims that asylum-seekers in Hungary, including unaccompanied children, suffer abuse, violence and unlawful detention. "Orban has replaced the rule of law with the rule of fear," says John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's Director for Europe. It is almost impossible for asylum-seekers to assert their legal rights, says Gabor Gyulai of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a watchdog. The government has "intentionally destroyed" the asylum system for political reasons.

Officials dismiss these claims as "sheer lies". Hungary is simply protecting its border as required under Europe's Schengen agreement, says Mr Kovacs. Legitimate claims for asylum, he insists, will be processed. Yet since the start of 2015 Hungary has received 203,898 asylum applications, and granted only 880 people any form of protection, according to the government.

It is not clear how anti-migrant the public is. A poll in September by Publicus Research found that just 37% thought Hungary should accept as many refugees as it could, but 64% felt that "it is our duty to help refugees." In any case, the referendum campaign faces little organised opposition. The Socialists and some smaller parties have called for voters to abstain. And it seems to be helping Fidesz, whose support climbed in a recent poll to 37%, while the ultranationalist Jobbik party fell to 12%.

The most spirited resistance has come from a fringe group called the Two-Tailed Dog Party. Together with a number of NGOs, including the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the party is calling for voters to spoil their ballots. It has crowd-funded advertising posters satirising the government's "Did you know?" campaign. "Did you know a tree may fall on your head?" asks one. Falling trees or no, if the opposition's biggest achievement is to keep voters away from the polls, it is not clear whether anyone will hear it.
 

CATANIA, Italy, Sept 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Nigerian teenager Beauty arrived in Sicily after crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa last year, she had only hours to phone the man who trafficked her – or risk lethal repercussions for family members back home.

Before her journey through Niger to Libya, a spiritual priest practicing a form of black magic known in Nigeria as "juju" had forced her to swear an oath of obedience to her trafficker.

The threat of a "curse" if she broke her oath and the possibility of violence by her traffickers at home in Benin City, a southern Nigerian hub for human trafficking, were enough to trap her into sex slavery.

"If I had reported him to the police, my family would have been in great danger," said Beauty, 19, fiddling with black-and-blond braids as she recalled the events of last summer.

"At the (migrant) camp a man came to pick me up in a car. I got into the car and I was taken away."

Beauty, who uses a pseudonym and declined to reveal her full name, is one of around 12,000 Nigerian women who reached Italy by sea over the past two years, official data shows.

That's a six-fold increase over the previous two-year period, with the majority – almost 80 percent – of the young women victims of trafficking, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Young, exhausted and vulnerable, many victims report being told that prostitution is the only way to repay hefty debts ranging from 25,000 to 100,000 euros ($28,000-$112,000) to their traffickers, Italian charities say.

Fear plays a large part in the juju rituals, with pubic hair, fingernails and blood collected from the victim as she is made to swear never to report her situation to the authorities, rights groups say.

In some cases, fearing the juju "spell" may be turned on them and they may die, Nigerian parents insist their daughters obey their traffickers, testimony from Italian court documents shows.

Beauty only learned later that she had been trafficked – and that the man who had brought her to Europe, a friend of her father's, now demanded she pay back 25,000 euros ($28,000) by working as a prostitute.

"My pimp was a nice man. I think he was a good man," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in the security of the safe house where she now lives.

But as she provided sex services for dozens of Italian clients in a town in southern Italy, a tyranny of abuse unfolded, she said.

"The man pimped me. His girlfriend beat me."

"OUT OF CONTROL"

With numbers of Nigerians rising in Sicily, prostitution is a thriving business, campaigners say – though nobody knows exactly how many women end up plying their trade on the streets.

Close to the vibrant cultural centre in the island's southeastern port city of Catania, six or seven African women posed outside shuttered-up shops at night as teams from a local charity, the Penelope Association, offered support and advice.

"The women need help to reintegrate in society," said Oriana Cannavo, head of the charity's Catania branch, nodding towards a woman in a short turquoise dress sauntering up and down the pavement.

The offer of support is a delicate one, Cannavo said, because the girls are already in the psychological clutches of their traffickers.

The number of Nigerian women arriving in Italy is accelerating – complicating the task of law enforcement agencies determined to keep tabs on the location of pimps or their female brokers known as "madams".

Dozens of Nigerian men and women have been arrested in Italy in recent months on trafficking related charges, prosecutors say.

More than 13,500 unaccompanied minors – some from Nigeria – were "reached" by social workers in 2013 and 2014, with around 9,200 taken into Italian state care, according to a report commissioned by the interior ministry.

The Italian government did not respond to repeated requests for the number of adult victims of trafficking supported or granted asylum.

"Female victims of violence are granted special protection similar to that accorded to refugees," the Italian interior ministry said on its website.

The new arrivals of trafficking victims are stretching the workload of the IOM, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) and local charities, aid workers say.

"It is reaching a stage where it is out of control," said Margherita Limoni, a legal advisor with the IOM in Catania.

The number of Nigerian women arriving in Italy has almost doubled in the past year, surpassing 6,300 in the first eight months of 2016, up from 3,400 for the same period last year, according to the IOM.

Unaccompanied children from Nigeria – some as young as 10 or 11 – have also flocked to Italy. Around 1,700 arrived in the first eight months of this year, while 1,000 came during the whole of 2015, the IOM data shows.

PIMPS AS "BENEFACTORS"

Although minors are offered state protection, Beauty was not eligible for this as she was already 18, she said.

After running away from her pimp late last year, she fled to the local office of the Penelope Association, which found her a place in sheltered accommodation late last year.

Beauty is one of 45 people the charity aims to support this year by finding them a place to live and employment in restaurants, well away from the preying eyes of traffickers, Cannavo said.

But the assistance is not always accepted.

Seven of Beauty's friends slipped back into prostitution out of fear of their pimps, or loyalty, the teenager said.

"Many times the girls see their pimp as a benefactor who is trying to improve their lives," said IOM's Limoni, who briefs newly arrived migrants about the dangers of trafficking. "They trust them 100 percent."

Victims are also put off from fleeing pimps by actual stories of families being targeted or killed back in Nigeria – a reminder of the need to fulfil their obligations or stick to their juju oaths, another Sicily-based campaigner said.

If a girl breaks her juju oath then she loses the spiritual protection, or so they believe, said Vivian Wiwoloku, president of the charity Pelligrino della Terra.

"There was one Nigerian girl some years ago who abandoned prostitution. Then someone was really sent to her home in Nigeria to kill her brother," said Wiwoloku in his small office in the island's main city of Palermo.

Wiwoloku, also from Nigeria, said his charity work – helping more than 400 women abandon prostitution since 1996 – was not without its dangers. His car has twice been set on fire.

"When you try to help somebody not everyone will be happy," he said.

The IOM's Margherita Limoni agreed that the strong spiritual and psychological grip of Nigerian pimps, madams and traffickers makes it harder to support the victims.

"The traffickers are getting smarter and smarter by the day," she said. ($1 = 0.8901 euros)

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Timothy Large; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women's rights, human trafficking and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
 

Le secrétaire général de l'ONU sera de dimanche à mardi en Suisse pour saluer Genève avant de terminer son mandat en fin d'année. Ban Ki-moon doit aussi rencontrer le Conseil fédéral mardi à Berne.

Dimanche soir, un concert en son honneur sera donné par l'Orchestre des Nations Unies à Genève. Lundi, il doit rencontrer des membres du Conseil d'Etat, de la Ville de Genève, du Forum économique mondial (WEF) et du Comité international de la Croix-Rouge (CICR), a expliqué jeudi l'ONU à Genève.

Il doit planter un arbre de deuxième génération d'Hiroshima. Il discutera aussi avec le personnel des Nations Unies et donnera une conférence de presse. Il doit également s'exprimer devant le comité exécutif du Haut Commissariat de l'ONU aux réfugiés (HCR) et à l'Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID).

Mardi, il doit allumer le Jet d'eau de Genève, avant de se rendre à Berne pour rencontrer le Conseil fédéral.
 

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The number of lone refugee children in English foster homes rose by 50 percent in the past year, data showed on Thursday, prompting the U.N. children's agency to urge the UK to do more to help "unprecedented" numbers of children fleeing conflict.

In the 12 months to March this year, unaccompanied refugee children in foster care in England jumped by 54 percent to 4,210 from 2,740 in the previous year.

As of March 31, lone refugee children made up 6 percent of the entire population of children in foster care.

"Given the unprecedented number of children facing crisis around the world, and the rise in the number of unaccompanied children being taken into care, the UK could and should be doing more," said Sol Oyuela, director of Public Affairs at UNICEF UK.

She said the government must reunite lone refugee children who have become stranded in Europe with their families in Britain, and ensure local authorities are equipped to care for unaccompanied child asylum-seekers.

"Both central and local government must work together to ensure these children are given the stability, certainty and the help they need to rebuild their lives," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In 2015, nearly 96,000 lone children sought asylum in the European Union, almost four times as many as the previous year, according to the European Asylum Support Office.

Rape, forced labor, beatings and death are just some of the dangers faced by children traveling without their parents, UNICEF says.

In Britain alone, 3,472 children applied for asylum in the 12 months to June this year, an increase of 54 percent compared with the previous year. The highest number of claims came from children arriving from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran.

Under the Children Act 1989, British councils have a legal responsibility to care for children who arrive from abroad, seeking asylum.

As the closest British county to Calais in France, where hundreds of child migrants have ended up living in squalid camps, Kent council in southeast England is on the frontlines of refugee arrivals in the UK.

According to official data released on Thursday, Kent had 865 unaccompanied minors in its care as of March 31 this year, hosting a fifth of all lone refugee children in England.

Kent council says it is struggling to support the children they have in their system, and has urged other local authorities to take in some minors through a voluntary dispersal scheme launched in July.

UK charity The Fostering Network said it was confident the British care system would cope with the rise in lone refugee children.

"We know that for some areas, the increase in the number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children has created significant pressure on resources, including finding the right foster family," a spokesman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"We believe the care system will cope with these increased numbers, and will help these children to settle into life in the UK and to thrive," he added.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Katie Nguyen; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land and property rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women's rights, and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories)