Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

Germany and Austria are working on a proposal for a common European asylum law, Germany's refugee crisis coordinator said in an interview with German magazine Focus.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere have arrived in Germany this year, with many entering from neighboring Austria.

Peter Altmaier, who Chancellor Angela Merkel tasked with overseeing the government's handling of the refugee crisis, said in an interview published on Saturday that he was working closely with Josef Ostermayer, an Austrian minister involved in policy on the migration crisis.

"We're talking about what such a system could look like," said Altmaier, who is also Merkel's chief of staff.

He said they would soon approach other countries such as France and the Netherlands, adding that there was more willingness to talk about the issue now than there had been for years.

So-called "hotspots" play a key role in the German-Austrian idea for an EU asylum law. These centers, which screen migrants arriving in Italy and Greece, aim to identify genuine asylum seekers and those eligible for the EU relocation program, created to share the refugee burden throughout the bloc.

At the moment there are only two such fully operational screening centers, out of 11 that are supposed to be set up.

Asked what a common EU asylum law would look like, Altmaier said a basic decision would be made at the hotspots about whether someone needs protection or not.

"Those who get a positive decision will then be distributed around EU countries according to a formula and the actual asylum application will then be carried out in those countries," he added.

The German government sees a European asylum law – alongside securing Europe's external borders – as key to reducing the number of refugees coming to Germany, which is expected to reach about one million this year alone.

A spokesman for Ostermayer was not immediately available for comment.

Austrian daily Kurier reported earlier this month that Austrian Justice Minister Wolfgang Brandstetter had submitted a plan to Brussels suggesting common rules for processing asylum applications made at EU missions abroad or at hotspots set up by the EU or the "international community".

That plan also calls for common criteria by which to judge applications, a common procedure for allowing people to enter the bloc, and a sharing of the financial burden among all member states, the newspaper said.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin in Berlin and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Digby Lidstone)
 

A Danish government plan to seize asylum seekers' valuables has prompted a European parliamentarian to quit in disgust. Jens Rohde says he is defecting to the centrist Social Liberal Party.

Rohde wrote Sunday that he was quitting the right-wing Venstre party over its controversial asylum policies, saying he was protesting a "deeply worrying" shift in Danish society and the sway held over the liberal party by the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party (DPP).

The minority Venstre government, which relies on DPP backing, plans changes to migration laws that would see border guards confiscating migrants' valuables or cash.

The Danish immigration ministry bill says migrant's clothing and luggage could be searched for "assets which may cover expenses" of their stay.

Seizure would include cash found on a migrant worth more the 3,000 Danish crowns (402 euros or $437) but exempt wedding rings and mobile phones.

Denmark already has some of Europe's strictest immigration policies.

Removing 'last bit of dignity'

The once liberal Venstre had "lost out big time" to the Danish People's Party, Rohde, a European Parliamentarian (MEP) since 2009, wrote on the website of the daily newspaper Politiken.

"Now it has also become acceptable to ... instruct police to arbitrarily take people's last valuables and their last bit of dignity away from them," Rohde said, asking why "there aren't more people standing up and saying this can't be right?"

Denmark, a traditionally liberal country of 5.6 million people, will close the year with 20,000 arrivals, a tenth of those received by neighboring Sweden.

Other Danish measures to deter migrants have included shortening resident permits, delaying family reunifications and placing adverts in Lebanese newspapers.

Policy tightrope

Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, whose Venstre holds just 39 of parliament's 179 seats, has in recent months walked a policy tightrope between eliciting DPP support while appealing to the opposition Social Democrats on EU-friendly policy.

Denmark has been a reluctant member of the EU since joining it in 1973 and gained opt-out clauses on home affairs, justice, the euro and defense.

'No' to pro-EU referendum

In a referendum two weeks ago, 53 percent of Danes rejected the minority government's proposal to deepen EU cooperation including adoption of the bloc's justice rules.

The anti-immigration and euro-skeptic DPP wants to keep such opt-outs, an obstacle which could see Denmark next year forced to leave a broader status Europol, the agency mandated to fight crime, trafficking and terrorism.

Rasmussen's government and four other political parties had insisted that a 'yes' vote was the best way to ensure Denmark stayed in Europol to help Danish police fight extremism and other cross-border crime.

It also wanted to adopt 22 EU laws on issues such as cybercrime and debt recovery.

The DPP tapped into fears that Denmark, if it opted for more EU cooperation, could be forced to accept EU refugee quotas as Europe struggles to house arrivals of people fleeing conflict, especially war-torn Syria.
 

BRUSSELS |

Only two of the 11 refugee reception "hotpots" Europe hoped to get up and running this year are working. Less than one percent of the 160,000 migrants it agreed to relocate have been. And a recent drop in arrivals has more to do with the weather than any crackdown by Turkey.

The harsh reality of Europe's refugee crisis, spelled out in stark numbers and cautionary rhetoric in a report given to EU leaders at their end-of-year summit, was a sobering wake-up call for German Chancellor Angela Merkel after her triumphal showing earlier in the week at a congress of her conservative party.

At that meeting in the southern German city of Karlsruhe, Merkel delivered a passionate defense of her refugee stance and, crucially, pledged to substantially reduce the number of migrants entering Germany.

Her political future probably rests on her ability to deliver on that promise, and to do so in the first few months of 2016, before three state elections take place in mid-March. Yet at the summit in Brussels, it was abundantly clear how limited her leverage really is.

Although she described a "mini-summit" with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu before the full EU met as "very good", the appetite in other European countries for her voluntary program to resettle migrants from Turkey seems limited. A majority of EU leaders stayed away.

Publicly, German officials have praised Ankara for its apparent readiness to help Europe on the migrants. Privately they express disappointment with what Turkey has done so far to stem the tide of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece.

The report by the Luxembourg presidency of the EU on how the bloc is managing the migration flows spoke of "significant gaps" in implementation and acknowledged that the planned relocation of 160,000 migrants – hailed by Merkel in her Karlsruhe speech as a "major success" – was "unsatisfactory".

Even European Council President Donald Tusk spoke of a "delivery deficit" on the implementation of a range of migrant measures agreed by leaders in recent months. The summit conclusions said: "Deficiencies, notably as regards hotspots, relocation and returns, must be rapidly addressed".

MERKEL VERSUS THE WORLD

In a positive development for Merkel, EU leaders pledged to fast-track the establishment of a border and coastguard force, a key element of her strategy to stem the influx at the bloc's external rim.

However some leaders, including Greece's Alexis Tsipras, made clear their opposition to giving Brussels powers to send in EU border guards without the consent of the country concerned.

Ultimately, officials acknowledged, the EU has little direct leverage over how member states police the bloc's external borders, beyond the implicit threat to boot them out of the Schengen free-travel zone if they don't cooperate – a breakup German officials say would be disastrous for Europe.

In contrast to Karlsruhe, where Merkel deftly headed off any open dissent, the frustration with her policies on a range of issues was glaringly apparent in Brussels.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi led the rebellion, trying to convince fellow center-left leaders to rise up and push back against Merkel and German power at a pre-summit meeting.

Renzi's ire centered around the Nord Stream-2 project, unveiled back in September, which would double the amount of gas shipped directly from Russia to Germany – raising eyebrows at a time when the EU has sanctions in place against Russia over Ukraine, and after another Russian pipeline project, South Stream, was canceled last year, to the detriment of Italy.

Siding with Renzi, European Council President Tusk, a Pole, said he believed Nord Stream-2 flouted EU rules on diversifying energy supplies. Officials said only Germany and the Netherlands appeared to be in favor of it.

One source close to the meeting tried to play down the seriousness of the clash, before adding that, in any case, "attacking Merkel is not a sin".

The German chancellor also appeared relatively isolated in opposing a European bank deposit insurance scheme that the European Commission and many other EU states see as a crucial pillar of the bloc's ambitious "banking union" project.

"It was pretty much Merkel versus the rest of the world in the room. Renzi complained about Nord Stream, others about the economic bits," said an EU diplomat.

Ultimately though, it is the migration crisis, and not these side issues, which will make or break the German leader. She bought herself some time in Karlsruhe but – as the EU summit made clear – remains uncomfortably dependent on other states, notably Turkey, to make that time count.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald, Gabriela Baczynska and Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
 

The head of the European Union's border agency has said the large number of refugees entering Europe poses a security risk, with civil war making it harder to check the authenticity of Syrian passports.

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in countries such as Syria and Iraq have arrived in Europe this year. Since last month's attacks in Paris, concern has grown that Islamist militants could enter undetected among the influx.

"The big inflows of people who are currently entering Europe unchecked are of course a security risk," Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, though he also said it would be wrong to regard all refugees as "potential terrorists."

In Paris, a Syrian passport was found near the dead body of one of the attackers and his fingerprints matched those of a person registered as arriving in October in Greece, the main entry point for refugees and migrants.

Leggeri said that in a country going through civil war like Syria no one could guarantee that "the documents that look real are really issued by an official authority or are really being carried by their rightful owner."

Diplomats said earlier this month European countries have circulated a watch list of missing Syrian and Iraqi passports they fear could be filled with false data and used by people to travel to Europe and beyond. Such documents are harder to identify than outright fakes.

One diplomat said the list contained serial numbers of thousands of genuine blank passports that were held in government offices in parts of Syria and Iraq that have since been captured by armed groups including Islamic State.

Welt am Sonntag said that according to Western intelligence services, Islamic State militants had probably procured tens of thousands of real passports after taking control of local authorities in parts of Syria, Iraq and Libya. They may also have seized machines used to produce identity documents.

The newspaper said, without specifying its sources, that Islamic State was doing a brisk trade in the passports, which sell for between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars on the black market.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Helen Popper)
 

GENEVE, 18 décembre (Reuters) – Antonio Guterres, haut commissaire des Nations unies pour les réfugiés, a réclamé vendredi une "réinstallation massive" de réfugiés syriens en Europe.

"Je parle de centaines et de centaines de milliers de personnes, et pas simplement le nombre qui a été débattu jusqu'à présent en relation avec ce mécanisme de répartition", a-t-il dit lors d'une conférence de presse, faisant référence au projet actuel de l'UE de répartir 160.000 demandeurs d'asile entre les pays membres.

"Si cela n'est pas mis en place et si la tragédie en mer Egée et la situation chaotique dans les Balkans se poursuivent, je dois dire que j'aurai de graves inquiétudes pour l'avenir du système européen d'asile", a-t-il poursuivi.

Le patron du HCR a salué l'accord annoncé dans la journée par l'agence Frontex, chargée de la surveillance des frontières extérieures de l'Union européenne, qui va accroître sa présence en Grèce.

Mais il a estimé que cela serait "insuffisant".

Frontex va envoyer 376 agents et interprètes supplémentaires en Grèce à la fin du mois pour accélérer les procédures d'enregistrement et le relevé des empreintes digitales. Ils accorderont également une attention particulière aux contrôles de sécurité, avec un accès aux bases de données nationales et européennes.

Près de 991.000 réfugiés et migrants sont entrés en Europe depuis janvier et ils pourraient être plus d'un million avant la fin de l'année, selon l'Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM).

Antonio Guterres a souhaité que l'Europe soit un jour "capable d'agir de façon concertée afin d'avoir suffisamment de centres d'accueil aux points d'entrée, d'assurer les contrôles nécessaires et de répartir ces gens entre tous les pays européens".

"Cela ne représenterait qu'un très petit pourcentage de la population européenne", a-t-il souligné. "Le nombre de gens qui arrivent en Europe par la Méditerranée, c'est moins de 2 pour 1.000 des citoyens de l'Europe."

"Je n'ai pas vu de progrès ces six derniers mois. Je crois donc que les chiffres de 2016 seront probablement pires que ceux de 2015", a ajouté Antonio Guterres (Stephanie Nebehay; Henri-Pierre André et Guy Kerivel pour le service français)
 

BRUSSELS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) – Europe has this year faced its largest wave of migration since the end of World War II. Considered a challenge for the Schengen free movement area, the crisis has forced some member states to introduce border controls.

Almost a million migrants are estimated to have arrived on European shores by sea alone in 2015, according to the International Organization for Migration, while the European statistics agency Eurostat has counted 980,000 asylum requests across EU member states so far this year.

"This crisis is extraordinary," said Etienne Reuter, a former senior advisor at the European Commission, in an interview with Xinhua. "The order of magnitude is extreme and it confronts the European Union and its member states with unprecedented challenges."

In September, the European Commission set out a refugee relocation mechanism, setting a quota for the number of migrants each state must accommodate. Germany's quota was the highest, followed by France, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.

As European leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday and Friday for an end-of-year summit to discuss the migrant crisis, big questions remain about how this extraordinary situation will unfold and what the future has in store for those who made the harrowing journey to Europe in search of a better life.

HOW GOVERNMENTS HAVE RESPONDED

While the biggest strain has been on Germany, the mass influx of people has tested all EU countries' migration policies and capacity to deal with asylum seekers.

Neighboring Belgium, for example, has been faced with its biggest backlog of asylum requests in 15 years, with more than 1,000 applications made in the first two weeks of December alone.

The extent to which the country's administration became overloaded was seen when Belgian immigration minister Theo Francken launched campaigns on social media telling Afghan and Iraqi migrants to stop trying, as they stood little chance of gaining asylum in his country.

Meanwhile, the UK government has pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, the first 1,000 of whom have just arrived in Britain in time for Christmas.

The legal framework on accepting migrants stems from the Dublin Convention, adopted in 1990 and ratified seven years later.

"Receiving refugees is a legal and moral obligation for the EU, but one must distinguish between political refugees and economic migrants. The EU must show unity, generosity and solidarity in order to ensure the application of international law," Reuter said.

BIG ISSUE OF INTEGRATION

Reuter believed that Europe had "the capacity to absorb large numbers of refugees," but he said there was, among some people, an "element of fear which intensified after the attacks in Paris" after it emerged that some of the alleged perpetrators had snuck in with the flow of refugees arriving in Europe.

"We must make a big effort to fight against this fear," he added.

But what can be done to help refugees integrate into their newly adopted European home? A crucial element is helping them find work. According to the UN refugee agencyUNHCR, nearly half of the people arriving in Greece after fleeing conflict in Syria have a university education.

In some sectors in Europe, it appears there is a clear demand for extra manpower, which could be met by the new wave of arrivals.

For example, several industries in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, have expressed an interest in offering work to Syrian refugees, such as the construction sector which has been struggling for years to fill vacancies.

"We find that among these refugees, there are well-educated and technically trained people," one building industry spokesman said. "Many of them already speak English, which makes the integration easier."

Reuter agreed: "Central to the integration of refugees in European countries should be the possibility for them to find work and earn a living instead of living off social assistance. It is also a question of dignity."

Some countries, including Belgium where this week's EU migration talks were held, have introduced a compulsory integration program for new migrants arriving in the country, including welfare advice, citizenship lessons, help with training and finding a job, and language lessons.

"It seems legitimate and appropriate to have a message for refugees arriving in our countries, encouraging them to use discretion regarding their religion and customs. But there should also be a message of tolerance for the host populations," said Reuter.

WHAT NEXT?

For some, however, the reality on arrival does not match the expectation. Several countries have in place a system of voluntary returns for asylum seekers who wish to abandon their plans to obtain refugee status and be flown back home. More than 800 Iraqi asylum seekers in Belgium alone have taken the government up on this offer this year.

What motivates someone who has travelled so far, in such hazardous conditions, to do a U-turn and return to their troubled country?

One Afghan migrant recently told Belgian newspaper Le Soir: "I'm going back for family reasons, but also because I'm disappointed with the welcome I received. I spent three nights sleeping outside before I could even get into the immigration office. The procedure is so long."

For 2016, the EU budget has set aside more than 4 billion euros (4.32 billion U.S. dollars) to address the refugee crisis both in the EU and in the countries the refugees departed from. This brings the total funding for the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016 to close to 10 billion euros.

Meanwhile, the UNHCR and the European Commission recently launched a program to provide 20,000 additional reception places for asylum seekers in Greece. The Mediterranean crossing is treacherous and the risk of drowning is real. But still refugees are arriving every day on Greek shores.

There is no end in sight for a crisis that has put Europe to the test over the past year.
 

The United Nations refugee chief called on Friday for a "massive resettlement" of Syrian and other refugees within Europe, to distribute many hundreds of thousands of people before the continent's asylum system crumbles.Antonio Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, welcomed an agreement for the European Union's border agency Frontex to boost its presence in Greece to help register, screen and interview asylum seekers, but said it was not enough.

"I mean hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, not just what has been discussed until now in relation to resettlement," Guterres said, referring to the EU's current plan to resettle 160,000 asylum seekers within the 27-member bloc.

"If this is not put in place and the tragedy in the Aegean goes on and the Balkan chaotic situation goes on, I must say I am very worried for the future of the European asylum system."

Nearly 991,000 refugees and migrants have entered Europe by land and sea so far this year and the number is expected to reach 1 million in the coming days, the International Organization for Migration said on Friday. Many others have drowned on the perilous journey.

"Obviously if Europe had been able to put its act together, in order to have proper reception capacity at entry points, do adequate screenings, distribute people normally and orderly into all European countries, this would be a very small percentage of the European population," Guterres said.

"We are talking about the number of people coming to Europe by the Mediterranean is less than 2 per 1,000 of the number of European citizens."

Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister, was speaking to his final scheduled press conference before stepping down after 10 years in the Geneva post.

The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, his U.N. agency said earlier on Friday.

"I haven't seen any improvement in the second six months. So my belief is that we will have figures for 2016 that will very probably be worse than the ones for 2015," Guterres said.

"But there is a global trend for more restrictive policies in the admission of refugees, and in the benefits to be given to refugees, and that is of course extremely worrying for us."

Guterres said diplomats had to resolve conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya, which are driving mass movement of people fleeing war and persecution.

"The result next year depends largely on what will be the progress achieved by these peace negotiations," he said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
 

The Overseas Development Institute said the division is too simplistic to describe people's motives

Despite the British Government's efforts to distinguish between "genuine" refugees and economic migrants, a report has found that the motivations for both groups to risk their lives in desperate attempts to reach Europe are often very similar.

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) , a UK-based independent think tank urged European leaders to develop a broader understanding of what causes people to migrate in order to respond to the current crisis.

Its Why People Move report said: "The evidence reveals that the asylum-seekers and economic migrants often have similar reasons for choosing to make the dangerous journey to Europe and one person may fall into both of these categories at the same time.

As winter approaches, EU needs to act fast on refugee crisis

"One common and crucial motivation is their search for a secure livelihood. Measures that aim to allow asylum seekers in, while restricting the entry of economic migrants, overlook the reasons why a particular person migrates, and are likely to increase irregular migration still further as migrants seek alternative – and often more dangerous – ways to reach European countries."

That analysis is not shared by the UK Government, which has pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees from United Nations camps bordering the country, rather than those who have already journeyed into Europe.

Of the more than 950,000 asylum seekers and migrants who have arrived on the continent so far this year, just under a half are Syrian according to figures from the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR).

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflict and persecution in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea are excluded from the UK's policy, as is anyone deemed an "economic migrant".

David Cameron emphasised the distinction when he increased the UK's quota in response to public pressure in September.

The UK has seen numerous protests both for and against resettling refugees

"For those economic migrants seeking a better life, we will continue to work to break the link between getting on a boat and getting settlement in Europe, discouraging those who don't have a genuine claim from embarking on these perilous and sometimes lethal journeys," the Prime Minister said.

"For those genuine refugees fleeing civil war, we will act with compassion and continue to provide sanctuary."

The ODI's analysis cast doubt on the idea of a "genuine claim" for taking treacherous journeys across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.

Its report said that although safety and a better life are often cited as separate motives for migrants, that they usually cross over.

A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany

"One person's motives may change in nature and in importance during their journey, suggesting that categorising individuals as 'economic migrants' or 'asylum-seekers' does not reflect the complex and fluid reality of people's experience of migration," it concluded.

Numerous right-wing politicians have claimed that many of those arriving in Europe are attracted by countries' welfare policies and economies but the ODI argued that neither had a significant impact on people's decision to leave their home countries.

"A person's need to leave their home – or flee from it in the face of extreme danger – is likely to be far more important to their decision to migrate than the lure of another country's welfare," it said.

However, the policies and rules of different destination countries, such as Germany's unlimited invitation to Syrian refugees earlier this year, was found to influence subsequent decisions.

The ODI's report said another factor contributing to the phenomenal rise in irregular migration is the growing "professionalisation" of people smugglers driving migrants through the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

A greater availability of information on the internet and the use of social media was also said to facilitate movement, with a "culture of migration" forming and being reinforced by existing networks.

Despite the onset of winter and tightening of borders in Hungary and other nations making the journey into Europe ever more difficult, the influx of people continues, with arrivals forecast to pass 1 million this year.

The crisis, as well as the unrelated threat of Isis terror attacks, have prompted tighter broder security throughout the European Union but the ODI fears this will only force asylum seekers to resort to increasingly desperate measures.

"There is strong evidence that while tightening border security may change migration routes, and often results in more people making more dangerous journeys, migration policies are unlikely to influence the actual number of people migrating," the report said.
 

MedShr, a free medical app that allows doctors to discuss medical problems, is becoming a valuable tool for doctors in migrant camps

The refugee crisis in Europe has one of the defining news events of 2015 as nearly a million people have fled the chaos of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to cross into Europe.

While numbers are beginning to fall as winter starts to bite, the conditions in the migrant camps across Europe are now of immediate concern to authorities and health care providers. While there is huge concerted effort to improve the generally appalling conditions in these camps, progress is slow because of the scale of the task and providing significant numbers of doctors there.

One free medical app MedShr is attempting to address these challenges by enabling doctors to upload, share and discuss medical images on a closed professional network. In camps where conditions are poor, it is proving to be a valuable tool for doctors in the camps.

MedShr was founded in 2013 with a UK DTI Research and Development grant by Dr Asif Qasim, a London cardiologist and clinical director of an NHS Trust. The mission was to create a platform for doctors to connect with each other and discuss clinical cases in a secure place.

"Case discussion is at the heart of how doctors learn, from medical school through to consultants and specialist surgeons. Talking about cases is critical to the way we share knowledge.

"We started online case discussion several years ago at a time when cardiologists were still posting CDs of coronary angiograms and scans to one another. We built a web platform that allowed doctors to upload, share and discuss images as part of a secure professional network. There was a fantastic response and developing MedShr was the next step," said Dr Qasim.

As the refugee crisis has deepened, medical apps such as MedShr at the camps have become more important. By connecting specialists with support, diagnoses and treatment, it has been working with organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières and The Red Cross to work out how to support doctors in the field and contact informal groups of volunteer doctors.

A recent University of Birmingham report, supported by Doctors of the World (Médicins du Monde) and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) at the Calais migrant camp underlines how appalling living conditions are there.

It says that conditions in the camp do not meet standards recommended by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) and that 'the shortcoming in shelter, food and water safety, personal hygiene, sanitation and security would have detrimental long-term health consequences for the camp's residents over their lifetime'.

Apps such as MedShr are among a number of apps that people and organisations are developing to help with the crisis. These range from language courses, latest information on residency regulations to fundraising and donations.

Recent efforts by London-based Techfugees to create hackathons and for people to work collaboratively have also helped to offer solutions to solve the refugee problem. A German-based app Refugermany also offers advice on living in Germany, housing and how to open a bank account.

As 2015 comes to an end, the prospects of opening a bank account for the hundreds of thousands of people stranded in migrant camps around Europe would appear remote. More immediately it is their health that matters and it is platforms such as MedShr that offer them hope that things may change in 2016.
 

Legal experts at Germany's lower house of parliament have serious doubts about the legality of introducing a cap on refugee numbers, according to a document obtained by German broadcaster ARD.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have been embroiled in a dispute over the idea for weeks.

Merkel has resisted calls by some members of her party for an "Obergrenze", or cap on the number of refugees entering Germany, and has said that the right to asylum for people suffering from political persecution cannot be limited.

But Horst Seehofer, leader of the CSU which governs the federal state of Bavaria where many refugees head, has called for limits to be placed on migrant inflows.

Legal experts at Germany's Bundestag lower house, who provide independent views, found that EU asylum and refugee laws did not provide for any numerical limit being placed on people seeking protection, the report said.

They said that on this issue EU legal guidelines generally override national laws.

A European-wide cap on the number of refugees would be "problematic" and would only be imaginable if the people granted refugee status under the Geneva Convention were sent to safe third countries upon being rejected, ARD said, citing the report.

But the legal experts said it was "extremely doubtful" whether deporting and rejecting refugees could be justified by saying a cap would otherwise be exceeded, ARD said.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
 

(CNN) – As Christmas approaches and the end of the year draws near, people trying desperately to reach European shores from war-torn Syria and Iraq continue to die at sea.

Overnight Friday, 18 people drowned when their wooden boat sank near Kiremit island, in the Aegean Sea just off the Turkish coast, Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu Agency reported.

The Turkish Coast Guard rescued 14 people from the boat, which was attempting to transport 32 Iraqis and Syrians to the Greek island of Kos.

Once on Greek soil – and therefore on European Union soil – asylum seekers have a better chance of staying in Europe.

Nearly 800,000 people have arrived by sea in 2015

Kos and other Greek islands lie just a few kilometers from the Turkish coast, making them attractive destinations for refugees seeking to enter the European Union.

Over the past year, thousands of families, many with young children, have made the short but perilous journey across the Aegean in a bid to reach Western Europe.

Worsening weather conditions currently make the trip more dangerous than usual.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 781,000 migrants have arrived in Greece by sea since the start of 2015, most of them coming from Turkey. But 632 people met their deaths in the Aegean up to December 14.

2015 migration

According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, more than 950,000 people have reached Europe by sea this year.

With only two weeks remaining in the year, it is virtually certain 2015's total will surpass the 1 million mark – which will be nearly five times 2014's total.

Not all European countries welcome those who flee the violence of their homelands.

A new bill presented to the Danish Parliament would allow the personal belongings of migrants to be searched and taken from them by authorities.

Those fleeing put "pressure on the Danish society"

The bill proposes "an initiative on seizing valuable assets from migrants" as well as number of different initiatives on asylum policy, according to a statement from the Danish Ministry of Integration.

It says Denmark is tightening refugee policies because "too high number of refugees puts pressure on the Danish society and makes it more difficult to ensure a successful integration of those who come to Denmark."

The bill, presented on December 10, gives Danish authorities the power to search clothes and luggage of asylum seekers and other migrants without a permit to stay in Denmark, with a view to finding assets which may cover their basic maintenance, health care and accommodation.

Lawmakers will debate the bill in Parliament in January and "the bill is expected to be effective from February 2016."

If passed, the law will apply to refugees already in Denmark.
 

Turkish media reports that 18 died and 14 were rescued after boat capsized in the Aegean Sea, between Turkey and Greece.

At least 18 people have drowned after a refugee boat capsized off the Turkish coast near Bodrum, the Turkish Anadolu news agency reported.

The wooden boat carrying refugees, including Syrians and Iraqis, sank on Friday night as it travelled from Turkey's coastal resort of Bodrum to Greece's Kos Island.

According to the Bodrum Sea Rescue Society, coast guards retrieved the bodies, including those of children, who drowned.

The incident was the third attempted sea crossing to end in the deaths of refugees in the Aegean this week.

Less than 24 hours earlier, on Friday morning, eight Iraqi refugees, including five children, drowned after a boat sank off near Bodrum, Anadolu reported.

And on Wednesday, at least Syrian four refugees, including three babies, drowned as their boat sank off Bodrum.

The bodies of the dead refugees were taken to the Greek island of Leros and then to Rhodes for medical examination, according to the Anadolu report.

Kos and other Greek Islands are a few kilometres from the Turkish coast.

European border action

The European Commission said in a statement on Tuesday that it will adopt a set of measures to protect the EU's external borders and manage migration more effectively.

The Commission proposed to establish a European border and coast guard to "ensure a strong and shared management of external borders to further increase security for European citizens", the statement said.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says at least 45,255 refugees and migrants have arrived in the Greek islands from Turkey since the beginning of December.

Since January, at least 907,712 refugees and migrants made the journey to Europe, including 878,495 who have arrived by sea, the IOM said in a report earlier this month.

At least 3,563 people have gone missing or drowned trying to reach Europe, the IOM said in a report released in early December.

The UNHCR put the number of arrivals by sea at 956,683 and 3,625 reported missing or dead.
 

BUDAPEST — Like most members of Hungary's liberal intellectual elite, George Konrad, a distinguished novelist, loathes his country's stridently illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban.

"He is not a good democrat and I don't believe he is a good person," said Mr. Konrad, a veteran of communist-era struggles against dictatorship.

All the same, he thinks Mr. Orban, the self-declared scourge of mainstream elites across Europe, was right and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was wrong about how to respond to the chaotic flood of migrants seeking refuge from war and poverty — perhaps Europe's most serious crisis since World War II.

"It hurts to admit it, but on this point Orban was right," Mr. Konrad, 82, said, lamenting that in the absence of a joint European effort to control the flow, Hungary was wise to seal its borders and sound the alarm over the perils of allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly Muslims, to enter Europe willy-nilly.

Quietly, and often with similar misgivings, a growing number of people in Hungary and beyond are wondering whether, despite his shrill and often bigoted message, Mr. Orban had a clearer view of the scale of the migration crisis and its potential hazards than technocrats in Brussels and leaders in Berlin and other European capitals.

In fact, Mr. Orban's prescriptions — notably the need to secure Greece's porous coastline and seal Europe's outer borders — have slowly been embraced by other European Union leaders, who vowed on Thursday, at their final summit meeting of 2015, to "regain control" of the Continent's frontiers.

Speaking in Brussels at the end of the summit meeting on Friday, Mr. Orban said that "it has taken us a long time" but that there was now "an absolute consensus among the prime ministers on the issue of protection and control of the external borders." With a big grin, he added, "Actually it was Hungary's point of view since the beginning that we should start here."

While repelled by much of the hate-mongering that has accompanied Mr. Orban's positions, European leaders have nonetheless begun to echo him on many points, albeit without his nasty snarls. The shift reveals just how far the debate around migrants and asylum seekers has turned, particularly since revelations that a few of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13 had entered Europe in the tide of refugees.

In a recent interview with European newspapers, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, the body that presides over European Union summit meetings, described Ms. Merkel's welcoming approach to migrants as "dangerous" and endorsed the view long promoted by Mr. Orban — that most of the asylum seekers entering Europe were not Syrians fleeing war but economic migrants seeking jobs.

Emphasizing the need to secure Europe's external borders, another longstanding Hungarian demand, he suggested that asylum seekers be detained for up to 18 months to give the authorities time to identify and send back economic migrants.

"This shows how far the European mainstream is now moving in another direction," said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, an independent research organization. "It is moving closer to what Orban represents."

As proof, he pointed to the recent election victory in Poland of the ultraconservative and conspiracy-minded Law and Justice Party, the strong showing of France's far-right National Front in the first round of regional elections and the crumbling across Scandinavia of a pro-migrant consensus.

Peter Szijjarto, Hungary's foreign minister, said that in his meetings with fellow European ministers the tone had changed drastically since the summer, when Hungary was repeatedly denounced for building a fence to seal off its southern border to migrants hoping to get to Germany.

Fences and other obstacles have since become the norm across much of Europe, with even Sweden, traditionally Europe's most welcoming country for refugees, announcing tough border controls.

"It is more and more obvious that what we kept on saying for the last six months turned out to be right," Mr. Szijjarto said in an interview. "This is acknowledged more and more: Some say it openly, some say it behind closed doors and some don't say it but act accordingly."

Open support for Mr. Orban and his approach, which has mixed effective practical measures to slow the flow of migrants with bizarre conspiracy theories tinged with racism and anti-Semitism, remains mostly limited to Europe's political fringe.

On a visit this month to Estonia, for example, Mr. Szijjarto heard lavish praise for his boss, Mr. Orban, from the Conservative People's Party, a nationalist opposition outfit with a simple message for nonwhite migrants: "If you are black, go back."

The most that mainstream politicians will say is that "Orban wasn't completely wrong," as Reinhold Mitterlehner, Austria's Conservative vice chancellor, remarked recently.

Officials in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, acknowledge in private that Mr. Orban got many things right, but they say that he and his supporters undermined their case with belligerent tirades that variously cast the influx of asylum seekers as a Muslim invasion, a conspiracy by European socialists to import future left-leaning voters and a plot by the Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros to undermine European nation states.

At a congress over the weekend of the governing Fidesz party, Laszlo Kover, an Orban loyalist and the speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, thundered against multiculturalism as "some kind of experiment" to turn Europe into a "territory for rootless barbarian hordes."

Tamas Lanczi, the director of the Center for Political Analysis at Szazadveg, a Budapest research group tied to Hungary's governing party, said: "The European elite is very angry with Orban because he spoiled their game. He called out the name of the emperor who is naked."

Mr. Orban, he added, has been demonized "as the Devil himself," but his views are "now becoming the mainstream" because he "refuses to walk down the one-way street of political correctness."

Istvan Gyarmati, a retired Hungarian ambassador who dislikes his country's illiberal direction under Mr. Orban, said the shift in mood stemmed in large part from the manifest failures of the European Union to get a grip on the migrant crisis and its tendency to put wishful thinking ahead of realistic policy.

"There is a shift to the extreme right because the left, or what is left of the left, and the moderate center right were offering answers that were wrong," said Mr. Gyarmati, who heads the International Center for Democratic Transition, a group that promotes democracy. "Now we are in a situation where the answers are unpleasant to say the least."

The centerpiece of Europe's common response to the migrant crisis has been a well-intentioned but so far utterly unworkable plan to spread 160,000 migrants who land in front-line states like Greece around the Continent under a quota system.

Introduced seven months ago with strong backing from Berlin by the European Commission, the union's executive arm in Brussels, the plan has relocated only 208 people, stirred months of divisive recrimination and left the 28-nation union in disarray.

Even as it has moved closer toward his policies, the European Commission, fed up with Mr. Orban's mocking of its impotence, announced in early December that it would take Hungary to court over legislation it adopted in September that made it difficult for asylum seekers to appeal speedy rejections of their applications and other alleged violations of European rules.

Mr. Szijjarto, the Hungarian foreign minister, dismissed the move as "revenge" for Hungary's own decision to challenge the quota-based relocation plan at the European Court of Justice.

The recent disclosure by the Belgian authorities that Salah Abdeslam, a suspected participant in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, traveled to Hungary to collect two accomplices who entered Europe on the migrant trail has unleashed another burst of "told-you-so" comments in Budapest.

The Hungarian government distorted what happened, claiming against all evidence that the accomplices picked up by Mr. Abdeslam were themselves refugees. But the fact that terrorists appear to have entered Europe concealed among asylum seekers still vindicated repeated warnings by Mr. Orban that the uncontrolled flow of so many people posed serious security risks.

"Whenever Hungary made an argument the response was always: 'They are stupid Hungarians. They are xenophobes and Nazis,' " Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman, said. "Suddenly, it turns out that what we said was true. The naïveté of Europe is really quite stunning."

Helene Bienvenu contributed reporting.
 

NOUR is six and she has a cleft palette. Her three younger siblings and their parents were living in Aleppo up until recently. They travelled to Turkey so Nour could be operated on. The operation was not a success so the family decided to head to Germany for treatment. When I spoke to them near the train station in Izmir they had just arrived in town and were beginning to have discussions with the many smugglers that can be found in the back streets of Turkey's third-biggest city.

As we chatted, the children suddenly looked up at the sound of a jet passing overhead. In Aleppo, planes spell danger.

Sick Are they refugees? Not really.

Surprisingly, they intend to return to Aleppo once the treatment is complete. Perhaps you could say they are medical migrants. Looking at it from their point of view, they would not seek asylum in Germany if there was a temporary protection they could avail of to obtain medical care for a sick child.

We spoke to Ahmed, whose family had fled from an area near Tartous in Syria and had made a number of attempts to cross to Greece. One attempt had resulted in them capsizing on exposed rock and spending the night there before being returned to Izmir by the Turkish coast guard.

Again they were heading for Germany and it is their intention to go back to Syria as soon as possible.

Abu Mohammed, also from Aleppo, has settled his family in Germany and is in Izmir working with refugees for the Turkish Red Crescent. He was arrested and tortured by the Assad regime, having been part of the early peaceful protests. Abu Mohammed has no intention of moving back to Aleppo now. He and his family have obtained refugee status in Germany, though he has a job and safety in Turkey. His wife arrived in Germany with false papers through a smuggling route.

Finally, I went to a place an hour's drive outside Izmir used by smugglers to launch their dinghies.

The road ran out so we parked up and made our way across some scrubland towards, where we thought the beach might be. In the distance, people started to emerge from the bushes. Maybe 500 people were coming from the beach to be fed by a local Turkish voluntary group. These were all Iranians and Afghanis. Too poor to stay in hostels in town, they were sleeping out in the open, waiting for their turn to embark on the short journey to Greece which could be seen just 7 km away. Some had been there for weeks. We continued on to the beach.

People ask me if the things I see working for GOAL are sometimes harrowing. Sometimes it's the things you don't see that stay with you.

The beach was empty but was strewn with the personal effects of the families that had begun their journey to Europe from here. Kids' shoes and clothes, backpacks and torn life-jackets were thrown everywhere. The smugglers order the passengers to ditch all unnecessary items to lighten the load.

It was here that six Afghan children had drowned the previous weekend.

Afghanis have a much better chance of obtaining refugee status than Iranians. Yet they all mixed together here – all leaving behind grinding poverty and risking everything for a brighter future.

Not being refugees, these Iranians must, according to standard definitions, be migrants. There is no internationally accepted definition of a migrant but the term is quaintly understood to cover cases where the decision to leave is taken for reasons of "personal convenience" and "without intervention of an external compelling factor".

The grinding poverty they had left behind apparently doesn't count.

It is these grey areas between refugee status and migration that the international system is not geared towards. There are two key agencies in this area. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) deals with those fleeing conflict while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) deals with migrants. It is clear that the majority of populations on the move do not fit neatly into these two categories.

The UN system needs to be more flexible to account for this complexity.

A gobal summit is required to address these institutional issues and the issues of categorisation. A summit is required to contextualise the issue of solidarity. Only a global, multilateral approach based on the principle of solidarity has any hope of succeeding.

Safe zone GOAL has argued for two years for a protected humanitarian safe zone in Syria. The failure to provide such relief has been a major contributor to the current crisis. This is an example of the kind of approach a global summit could address.

However, lumping migrants and refugees together is not recommended – instead, we need to recognise that each journey has many and complex motivations.

There are climate migrants, medical migrants, conflict migrants and many others on the move. There are the residents of Za'atari camp in Lebanon, who are not likely to go anywhere for a very long time. They and so many others like them are neither one thing nor the other.

Ireland, of course, can play a role. Our history must inform a robust ethical approach as far as large movements of population are concerned, without having to ignore considerations of security, the integrity of sovereign borders and integration. Ireland's multi-lateralism has been under intense scrutiny lately both at the COP21 climate change conference and in the context of our corporate tax regime. The Government sought a permission slip at COP21 to resile from the principle of global solidarity in favour of narrow self-interest.

A strong position on migration might conceivably serve as a counter-balance.

Barry Andrews, GOAL'S chief executive, has just returned from Izmir. GOAL is working extensively in Syria
 

Voluntary classes help refugees from conservative societies adapt to Norwegian women wearing fewer clothes, flirting and walking home alone



Norway is teaching male refugees from conservative societies about Norwegian sexual norms and laws, to help them adapt to a country where women have greater freedoms, wear fewer clothes and walk alone in public.

A voluntary five-hour programme offered nationwide involves group discussions of sex and rape, and teaches that types of violence considered 'honourable' in some cultures are illegal and shameful in Norway.

Its manual says, "to force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person."

Danish lawmakers are pushing for the same classes to be offered, and in the German town of Passau, a key entry point for refugees, male teenagers are already participating in similar groups.

Most European countries have avoided such integration initiatives, fearing they may stigmatise refugees as potential rapists and fuel anti-immigration rhetoric.

When the former head of the Oslo police's violent crime department, Hanne Kristin Rohde, said in 2011 that there was a "clear statistical connection" between rapes and non-Western male migrants, she was met with hostility, she told The New York Times.

"This is a cultural problem", she said. "There are lots of men who haven't learned that women have value".

But "the biggest danger for everyone is silence", said Per Isdal, a clinical psychologist at Alternative to Violence, the Norwegian non-profit organisation running the programme.

Many refugees "come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men", said Ms Isdal. "We have to help them adapt to their new culture."

Abdu Osman Kelifa, an Eritrean asylum seeker to Norway, volunteered for the classes in Sandnes.

In Eritrea, "if someone wants a lady, he can just take her and he will not be punished," Mr Kelifa told The New York Times.

He said he had learned how not to misread signals such as women wearing short skirts, smiling at him or walking without a male escort at night. But it was still difficult for him to accept that a woman could accuse her husband of sexual assault, he said.

A former police chief in Stavanger, the first town to introduce the classes to its large migrant population, supports the classes.

"People from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa", he told the New York Times. "When they get to Norway, something happens in their heads."

The teaching material avoids casting immigrants as sexual predators. It uses a native Norwegian character, Arne, as its example of violent sexual behaviour, while an immigrant character, Hassan, is "honest and well liked".
 

Far above Sweden's Arctic Circle, two dozen refugees stepped off a night train onto a desolate, snow-covered platform, their Middle Eastern odyssey abruptly ending at a hotel touted as the world's most northerly ski resort.

It was Sweden's latest attempt to house a record influx of asylum seekers.

No one was here to greet them. Only a few, swaying lights flickered on the otherwise empty platform as women fruitlessly wrapped hijabs around their faces to protect themselves from the mountain blizzard.

"Where are we? Is this the final destination?" said Alakozai Naimatullah, an Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator. He wore tennis shoes, buried in the snow.

His words went unanswered in the disorder of arrival. Their bare hands frozen, husbands, wives and children bent over to drag plastic bags filled with worldly possessions over a steep, snowy path to hotel lights a hundred meters below.

They joined around 600 refugees, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, holed up for two months in Riksgransen. It is some 124 miles (200 km) north of the Arctic Circle and a two-hour bus ride to the nearest town – if the road is not closed by snow.

It is an example of the extremes Sweden is going to in order to house some 160,000 refugees this year in a country of 10 million people. Shelters range from heated tents to adventure theme parks, straining resources.

The sun never rises in Riksgransen at this time of year and temperatures can plummet to minus 30 degrees Celsius. But the hotel offers food, shelter and security after a dangerous month-long trip from the Middle East by boat, train and bus.

The jovial hotel manager Sven Kuldkepp has helped arrange temporary classes and free sledges for children. There is a gym and boxing classes for adults. A room once used for meditation has been turned into a mosque. Yoga mats now face Mecca.

But the hotel mostly has the feel of an airport lounge with a delayed flight – with a two-month wait. Riksgransen will be home until the ski season starts in February, but many face more than a year's wait until they get news of asylum requests.

SMARTPHONES

Some refugees, only a hundred meters from ski slopes, still dream of Syrian beaches.

Wael al-Shater was a chef at a 60-table restaurant called Sky View in Homs, specializing in chicken. He had aspirations and applied to study as a chef in Cyprus, but never got a visa. He had friends in Dubai but didn't want to live outside Syria.

"Life was so easy. I made $1,200 a month," al-Shater said. "It was so safe that my friends and I used to drive 60 kilometers to the beach just to have a coffee late at night at two in the morning and return home."

But war came. His work day was cut in half as fighting erupted in the streets, and his father died of a suspected heart attack during fighting in Homs.

"I could not take him to hospital. He died on the street," Al-Shater said. He paid $1,200 to be smuggled by boat to Greece some 25 days ago and ended up in Riksgransen with his wife, an English teacher.

"In the end I had no option but to leave or join the killing. Or become a protester and get killed. I had to leave."

Sitting along dark corridors, refugees' faces are illuminated by flickering smartphone screens. Some play video games, others Skype friends. Most, like al-Shater, are eager to share memories, using their phones to swipe through photos.

One elderly man showed pictures of his wife and daughter at the beach in the Syrian town of Latakia, a seaside resort and near a Russian military airbase.

Smoking outside in the freezing dark, he raised his face to the sky, as if bathing in Latakia's imaginary sun.

"Please turn on the sun again," he laughed.

Another pale, old man had charmed hotel staff with tales of his perfume shop in Syria before he was moved to a Swedish hospital due to a heart ailment.

MEMORIES

Trauma and illness abound. Flu and chicken pox already spread through the hotel. But the most common ailment is insomnia, a sure sign, say nurses, of war trauma.

To make matters worse, few refugees venture outside, spending days in rooms. Many fear taking children out in such freezing temperatures, despite tourists spending thousands of dollars to visit a place famed for views of the northern lights.

"This place is like a desert island," said nurse Asa Henriksson in a makeshift clinic by the spa's swimming pool. "It is surrounded by a wall of mountains."

"When the aurora comes, we tell people to go outside, lay down in the snow, and look up," she added. "The refugees don't. Many people here think their children could die in this cold."

There have been cases of bus loads of refugees arriving in the north overnight, having a glance at the surroundings and refusing to get off, insisting on returning to warmer regions.

Some return to southern Sweden while others, like most in Riksgransen, accept their lot. In Riksgransen, many still want to visit the nearest town of Kiruna. They receive around 2 euros a day, some saving for days to buy small toys for children.

Al-Shater still yearns for his homeland.

"There is no human being who does not dream about returning to his country," he said. "But when it comes to Syria, this is simply impossible. We are planning our future in Sweden."

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy in Cairo; Editing by Janet McBride)
 

The Ikea Foundation on Saturday insisted that its refugee shelters are safe, a day after the Swiss city of Zurich said it no longer would use the units after discovering they posed a fire hazard.

Zurich announced Friday that a fire safety test had revealed the Ikea ready-to-assemble refugee shelters were "easily combustible."

The city made its announcement just hours after unveiling the 62 units it had purchased, lamenting that it now needs to find an alternative for housing 250 asylum seekers by early January.

The northern Swiss canton of Aargau followed suit, saying it no longer planned to house 300 asylum seekers in the shelters over the next few months.

Maerta Terne, a spokeswoman for the Better Shelter project, born out of a collaboration between the Ikea Foundation and the UN refugee agency, told AFP she could not comment on the Swiss safety test before seeing a "translation of the report on the results and the method used."

However, she stressed the tests against European safety standards "on the walls and covering panels showed that the material held a security level superior to that required for temporary shelter."

Zurich said it had relied on safety information from the Swedish study and from UNHCR before purchasing the shelters.

But regional authorities had requested a new test after learning that a German report this week raised concerns about the accuracy of the Swedish study.

"Safety is of course a priority and we'll be looking carefully at the fire study reports," UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told AFP.

According to Better Shelter, the UN agency has ordered for its operations this year 10,000 of the 17.5-square-metre (188-square-foot) easy-to-assemble shelters, which come in Swedish furniture giant Ikea's famous flatpacks.

The units have already been deployed by the hundreds in refugee camps in Chad, Ethiopia and Iraq, and some 1,200 were recently assembled in Greece, as the country struggles to deal with a heavy influx of migrants and refugees, Better Shelter said on its website.
 

The Swiss city of Zurich announced Friday it would not use the 62 Ikea refugee shelters it has purchased to house asylum-seekers after a test showed they constituted a fire hazard.

Amid swelling numbers of refugees and other migrants arriving in Switzerland, Zurich city councillor Raphael Golta on Friday morning proudly unveiled a large hall filled with dozens of Ikea ready-to-assemble refugee shelters aimed to house 250 people by early January.

But just a few hours later, the city was forced to announce that a fire safety test had revealed the shelters do not live up to Swiss fire protection requirements.

The test showed the temporary shelters "are easily combustible," the city of Zurich said in a statement.

Golta voiced surprise at the verdict, but insisted the city had done its best under the circumstances.

"We have to host 40 percent more asylum seekers in the space of two months, so we had to move quickly to choose the best solution available," he told the RTS public broadcaster.

The shelters, developed in cooperation between Swedish furniture giant Ikea and the UN refugee agency, have already reportedly been deployed by the thousand in refugee camps and in places like Greece that are facing a heavy influx of migrants.

The city of Zurich said it had relied on safety information from the UNHCR and a Swedish study.

But regional authorities had requested a new test after learning that a German report this week raised concerns about the accuracy of the Swedish study.

UNHCR spokeswoman Anja Klug told Swiss news agency ATS Friday that the organisation was preparing to compare the Swiss and Swedish safety test results.

"If we discover problems, we will seek a solution," she said, stressing though that the shelters are "emergency housing, temporary solutions, which we consider better than tents."

The Swiss canton of Argau, which had been planning to house 300 asylum seekers in the Ikea shelters within a few months, also said Friday it was seeking alternatives following the Zurich test results.

Switzerland is expecting to receive some 39,000 asylum applicants this year, up from 23,800 in 2014.
 

La Fondation défend ses cabanes pour migrants

La Fondation Ikea a défendu samedi la sécurité de ses cabanes pour migrants après la décision de la ville de Zurich d'y renoncer en affirmant qu'elles sont inflammables. Zurich a dévoilé vendredi des tests montrant que ces cabanes conçues par le géant suédois de l'ameublement prêt-à-monter étaient «facilement inflammables».

Les autorités ont donc décidé d'annuler l'accueil de migrants dans 62 de ces petites maisons à partir de janvier. Le canton d'Argovie, qui envisageait lui aussi d'acquérir ces maisonnettes pour accueillir 300 demandeurs d'asile, a annoncé qu'il recherchait d'autres solutions. «Nous ne pouvons faire aucun commentaire avant d'avoir reçu la traduction du rapport sur les résultats et la méthode utilisée pour conduire ces tests d'incendie», a indiqué à l'AFP la responsable de la communication du projet «Better Shelter», fruit d'une collaboration entre la Fondation Ikea et le Haut Commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés (HCR).

Les cabanes Ikea, dont la réaction au feu a été testée selon les normes européennes, présentent un niveau de sécurité supérieur à ce qui se fait ailleurs en matière d'hébergement d'urgence, a souligné la responsable, Märta Terne. «Les tests réalisés sur les murs et les panneaux de couverture ont montré que le matériau dépasse les niveaux requis de sécurité pour ces logements provisoires».

De son côté, le HCR «va regarder de près le rapport anti-incendie» évoqué par les autorités zurichoises, a écrit un porte-parole, Adrian Edwards, dans un courrier électronique. Ces petites maisons, facilement montables et peu onéreuses, ont déjà été déployées par centaines dans des camps de réfugiés au Tchad, en Ethiopie et en Irak, selon le site internet de «Better Shelter». Depuis cet été, quelque 1200 maisonnettes ont aussi été montées en Grèce pour accueillir le flux croissant de migrants. Les autorités cantonales suisses avaient demandé une vérification du respect des normes anti-incendie après qu'une étude allemande a mis en doute cette semaine la fiabilité des informations données par le HCR et des experts suédois.

Fin octobre, les cabanes Ikea avaient été présentées en première suisse en Argovie pour servir de centre d'urgence pour requérants d'asile. Le canton prévoyait d'en acquérir 200 pour héberger des réfugiés dans des halles industrielles. – (ats)
 

Canada will begin the third leg of its effort to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February against a swirling backdrop

There's a plan to start flying Syrian refugees from the south of Turkey to Canada some time soon. All that's missing is a Health Canada-certified hospital and an airport – and a safe way to get the refugees there.

There's the war to the south, in Syria, which has driven a staggering 2.2 million refugees onto Turkish soil, and caused friction with the European Union over Turkey's unwillingness to stop those intent on travelling illegally to Greece and onwards. Moscow and Ankara are snarling at each other over last month's downing of a Russian jet. Turkish troops recently bolstered their presence in northern Iraq – near the Islamic State-controlled city of Mosul – prompting threats of attack from Iranian-backed Shia militias in the country.

Parts of Turkey increasingly resemble war zones themselves.

The army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a separatist militia better known as the PKK, resumed their three-decades-old conflict earlier this year. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says fighting the PKK is as much part of the "war on terrorism" as combatting the Islamic State.

Some cities in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast have been so badly damaged in the fighting – with almost every building bearing scars of heavyarms fire – that Turks have taken to posting photographs of them online with the bitter tagline, "Turkey, not Aleppo." Newspaper headlines refer to the "Syria-ization" of Turkey's south.

The Islamic State has made its presence felt in the country too, claiming responsibility for a trio of bombings this year, including a double suicide bombing in October outside Ankara's main train station that killed more than 100 people. The United States reduced services at its embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul for part of this week over an unspecified threat. An alleged IS militant was arrested Tuesday in connection with the Istanbul plot.

It's against this swirling backdrop that Canada will begin the third – and most complicated – leg of its effort to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February.

While the first planeloads from Lebanon and Jordan have already begun arriving in Toronto and Montreal, the first refugee flights from southern Turkey are still some way off, with security concerns pushing back political deadlines, such as a promise to bring 10,000 of the refugees to Canada by the end of December.

The deteriorating situation has complicated every phase of Canada's plan. Many of the names provided to Canada by the Turkish government for potential resettlement reside in either the predominantly Kurdish southeast, where clashes between the army and the PKK are a daily occurrence, or flush against the Syrian border, where IS, sometimes called ISIS or ISIL, is believed to have a strong presence.

Bringing the refugees in for screening interviews at a centre run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the southern city of Gaziantep – the part of the operation that's now under way – means busing them for long hours across a de facto war zone. They're later bused back across the same battlefields to wait for news of a next appointment.

"These provinces are right next to a country in civil war, so the security situation is not worse than one would expect of such provinces elsewhere around Syria," said Akin Unver, assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. "Currently, it is difficult to assess the level of threat of ISIS in those regions, and the added security problems originating from renewed violence in the predominantly Kurdish areas exacerbate this fog of war."

Unlike Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey handles refugee affairs itself, rather than delegating to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The Turkish government has given Canada two lists of about 5,000 names each that it considers suitable for resettlement. The IOM is helping Canada verify the accuracy of those lists – for instance, a family member who travelled illegally to Europe would disqualify the whole family – and arrange transportation.

On Dec. 11, Turkey declared a "special security situation" in the southern province of Gaziantep, nixing plans to possibly use the city and its airport as the hub of the Canadian refugee operation in southern Turkey.

Instead, Canada is left looking for another Turkish airport it can use, one a safe enough distance away from the chaotic SyrianTurkish border to erase worries that either Canadian officials or the refugees could become targets.

Officials from the Canadian Border Services Agency are on the ground in Turkey, conducting the security screening that is step two in the process after the IOM interviews, but safety worries are such that the Canadian embassy won't even identify which city they're in, other than to say that it isn't Gaziantep. Health tests for the refugees have not begun because officials have yet to identify a hospital in the south that meets Health Canada standards.

"Our operations have begun and we're going as fast as we can.

But security of our personnel – and the refugees and IOM personnel – is our No. 1 concern," John Holmes, Canada's ambassador to Ankara, said in an interview. "It's a challenging region and a challenging area and that affects our operations."

The spreading chaos is the result of a series of strategic reversals for Turkey over the past four years.

Initially, Mr. Erdogan's Turkey looked set to emerge as one of the big winners from the Arab Spring popular revolutions that shook the region starting in 2011.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) has informal ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party, and the two Sunni Islamist movements looked to Ankara for support after winning post-revolution elections in their countries. Suddenly, Mr. Erdogan had Ottomanesque clout across much of the Middle East.

Then it all started to unravel; first abroad, then at home.

Turkey waded into the Syrian war at its beginning in the spring of 2011, keen to topple the Alawite-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad, and to see another friendly (and Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood government rise on Turkey's southern border. At the outset of the conflict, Turkey trained and funded the Syrian army defectors who became the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Fatefully, Ankara also adopted a policy of allowing anyone opposed to the Assad regime – including the radical jihadists – to use Turkish soil as something of a rear base.

Four years on, events have spun out of Turkey's control. The Muslim Brotherhood was ousted in Egypt, replaced by a military government that severed ties with Turkey. Ennahda lost power in Tunisia. The FSA stalled and splintered in Syria. Those jihadis Turkey turned a blind eye to became the so-called Islamic State and declared a caliphate that comes right up to the Turkish border.

"In Turkish, we have a saying that if you spit into the wind, it comes back in your face," said Suat Kiniklioglu, a former AKP parliamentarian who is now a critic of Mr. Erdogan's rule. "Turkey engaged in nothing but regime-change policies, and that puts Turkey on the spot now in Syria. The rise of ISIS makes Turkey's border policy vis-à-vis ISIS much more publicly exposed."

Mr. Kiniklioglu sees the tiff with Russia in the same way. Mr. Erdogan, he believes, thought he could send a sharp message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the lengths Turkey would go to in defending its airspace – and the ethnic Turkmen militias it supports in Syria – and escape with only mild retribution.

Instead the Kremlin has continuously escalated pressure on Ankara since the incident, severing many diplomatic and economic ties. On Monday, a Russian frigate fired a warning shot toward a Turkish fishing boat it accused of sailing too close.

At home, a June election saw the AKP lose its majority after 13 years, threatening Mr. Erdogan's treasured plan to alter the constitution and give more powers to the presidency. As Turkey tottered along with a caretaker government, hostilities with the PKK exploded again, ending a decade of work Mr. Erdogan had put into mending Turkish-Kurdish relations, but creating a surge of nationalist sentiment that restored the AKP's majority in a November rerun of the election.

The price for that, however, has been at least 150 deaths in fighting between the army and the PKK since June, military curfews across much of the southeast and a crumbling sense of national identity.

"I'm very worried about my country," Mr. Kiniklioglu said.

"The government fails to see how deep the psychological break with our Kurdish citizens has become. With what's going on in Iraq and Syria next door, I'm worried about the unity of my country."

With so many moving pieces, the Canadian embassy won't even hazard a guess as to when the refugee airlift from Turkey might start.

Mr. Holmes suggested that some of those eventually flown from Turkey won't be counted among the 25,000 the government has promised to bring to Canada by the end of February, but rather as some of the additional 35,000 refugees Canada is planning to bring by the end of 2016.

For aid workers in the region, Canada's timelines matter less than the overall goal. They're anxious to see the refugee airlift succeed, hoping it will inspire other countries to adopt similar programs.

"Canada is showing how it can be," said Selin Unal, externalrelations officer for the Ankara office of UNHCR. "Money and donations [to refugees] are not enough. Solidarity, like the Canadians have shown, is something else."

Provided, of course, that everything goes well.
 

ISTANBUL

Turkey has acknowledged a "miscommunication" with Iraq over its deployment of troops to the Bashiqa military base in northern Iraq, Turkey's foreign ministry said on Saturday.

The ministry said Turkey would continue to move some of its troops out of Nineveh province, where the camp is based. It did not say how many troops would be moved or where to.

Turkey deployed hundreds of troops in the Bashiqa area this month, with the stated aim of protecting its military personnel training Iraqi militia to fight against Islamic State. Baghdad has criticized the deployment and demanded Turkey pull them out.

Turkey's statement comes a day after U.S. President Barack Obama urged Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in a phone call to "de-escalate tensions" with Iraq by continuing to withdraw Turkish forces.

Some troops were withdrawn earlier this week to another base inside Iraq's Kurdistan region, but Baghdad said they should withdraw completely.

"Turkey ... acknowledges the miscommunication with the government of Iraq over the deployments of Turkish protection forces ...," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in the statement.

"Turkey, in recognition of the Iraqi concerns and in accordance with the requirements of the fight against Daesh, is continuing to move military forces from Nineveh province that were the source of miscommunication," it said, using an Arabic term for Islamic State.

Ankara has said the deployment of the force protection unit was due to heightened security risks near the camp, which is close to the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Mosul.

The base came under fire from Islamic State on Wednesday, when militants fired rockets as they launched a wave of attacks against Kurdish forces. Turkish armed forces said its soldiers returned fire and four had been lightly wounded in the incident.

Iraq has taken its criticism of the deployment to the U.N. Security Council, which met on the issue on Friday. Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari asked the body to adopt a resolution demanding Turkey withdraw its troops immediately.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Alison Williams)
 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not abandon Russians living in southeast Ukraine to Ukrainian nationalists, the state-run RIA news agency quoted him as saying in a documentary due to be broadcast later on Sunday.

Moscow says Ukrainian nationalists pose a threat to ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the region. More than 9,000 people have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops since April 2014.

"We proceed from only one thing, which is we cannot just abandon the people who live in the southeast of the country to nationalists to eat them up," Putin said.

"There is nothing excessive in that position."

He did not elaborate.

Putin has denied allegations by independent observers and media that Russian regular troops are taking part in the conflict. However, on Friday he admitted that Russia did have personnel in eastern Ukraine who were carrying out certain military tasks.

According to RIA, Putin also said Russia would continue to improve its nuclear arsenal, but added that it would not wield the "nuclear big stick".

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Andrew Bolton)