‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive | Environment | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/25/climate-apartheid-united-nations-expert-says-human-rights-may-not-survi
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Donald Trump annule au dernier moment des frappes militaires sur l’Iran
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/21/trump-annule-au-dernier-moment-des-frappes-sur-l-iran_5479488_3210.htmlAu lendemain de l’attaque d’un drone américain, le président américain a approuvé une opération militaire avant de se raviser, selon le « New York Times ».
Le président américain Donald Trump qui poursuit sa politique de « pression maximum » sur l’Iran. Il a approuvé une opération militaire devant cibler des installations iraniennes, vendredi, avant de se raviser et d’annuler les frappes au dernier moment, écrit le New York Times, vendredi 21 juin. Le quotidien cite des représentants de l’administration américaine ayant pris part ou étant informés des discussions.
D’après le journal, le président américain a validé une offensive contre un éventail de cibles iraniennes, telles que des radars ou des batteries de missiles, puis s’est ravisé alors que les avions de chasse avaient décollé et les navires de guerre s’étaient mis en position.
Aucun missile n’a été tiré, avant que l’opération ne soit annulée, à 19 h 30, heure de Washington (1 h 30 du matin, à Paris), a déclaré un membre de l’administration, cité par le journal. La Maison Blanche et le Pentagone ont refusé de commenter l’information.
Le New York Times ajoute ne pas savoir à l’heure actuelle si une offensive américaine contre l’Iran est toujours programmée, indiquant ne pas avoir établi si Donald Trump avait changé d’avis ou si le revirement était dû à des interrogations stratégiques ou logistiques.Les craintes de confrontation directe entre Washington et Téhéran ont été ravivées jeudi après que l’Iran a abattu un drone RQ-4 Global Hawk américain se trouvant selon lui dans son espace aérien, près du détroit d’Ormuz, ce que contestent les Etats-Unis.
L’Iran affirme disposer de preuves « irréfutables » montrant que le drone américain a abattu jeudi était entré dans son espace aérien. « Des débris du drone ont même été retrouvés dans les eaux territoriales de l’Iran », a maintenu le ministre des affaires étrangères adjoint Abbas Araghchi lors d’une discussion avec l’ambassadeur de Suisse à Téhéran, qui représente les intérêts américains.-
Washington a dans la foulée interdit les vols commerciaux américains dans la zone concernée par l’attaque.
[…]
Dans une note d’urgence diffusée jeudi soir, l’aviation civile américaine (FAA) a interdit aux compagnies aériennes américaines de survoler le détroit d’Ormuz et le golfe d’Oman. La compagnie United Airlines a pour sa part suspendu les vols prévus depuis l’aéroport de Newark, dans le New Jersey, à destination de Bombay, en Inde, car ils empruntent l’espace aérien iranien.Drone abattu dans le Golfe : Trump a ordonné des frappes contre l’Iran avant de se raviser
▻https://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/drone-abattu-dans-le-golfe-trump-a-ordonne-des-frappes-contre-l-iran-avant
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What it means to be a ‘refugee’ in South Sudan and Uganda
After decades of armed conflict in South Sudan and Uganda, labels of ‘refugee’ and ‘internally displaced person’ fail to reflect the complex realities of the people they refer to. Leben Moro examines the history of movement across the region’s borders, and argues refugees are not the passive recipients of aid as often presented by humanitarian initiatives.
Since independence from British colonial rule, large numbers of South Sudanese and Ugandans have repeatedly crossed the shared border to escape civil wars. These forced movements of large populations have created shifting labels of ‘refugees’ and ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), with tremendous social, economic and political repercussions for the persons to which these labels are applied.
In August 1955, months before Sudan’s independence, the largely Christian Southern Sudanese took up arms against Muslim rulers in the North to achieve a vision of greater regional autonomy, which sparked a mass flight of people from their homes. By the end of the First Sudanese Civil War in 1972, the Sudanese government estimated that 500,000 people had hidden in the bush, and another 180,000 had crossed into neighbouring countries, with 74,000 settling in four official camps (Onigo, Agago, Acholpii and Nakapiripirit) in northern Uganda. Many of the displaced persons, including my own family members, self-settled in other parts of Uganda, mainly near cotton ginning mills and other businesses operated by Ugandans of Indian origin, who employed them as casual labourers.
My own family members settled near Gulu, the largest town in northern Uganda, among the Acholi ethnic group. Some South Sudanese journeyed southwards to Bwelye in the centre of Uganda, where there was plentiful fertile land and jobs in Indian enterprises. Others travelled further south into the heartland of the Baganda, the largest tribe in the country, to work in sugar plantations and different enterprises, including fields where locals grew coffee, bananas and other crops.
Over time, many newcomers acquired land with their earnings and became poll taxpayers. Their receipt documentation allowed them to move across land in relative safety. In general, however, life was hard as they lacked citizenship and were vulnerable to exploitation and harassment.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) coordinated a programme of official repatriation, supported by public authorities in Sudan and Uganda, including a mandate that supported Sudan’s IDPs. Many people, however, chose not to leave.
In 1979, Uganda became embroiled in a bitter civil war following the overthrow of President Idi Amin Dada, forcing Southern Sudanese, including my own family members, and many Ugandans from the north of the country, to flee into the relatively peaceful Southern Sudan. The UNHCR and other humanitarian organisations as well as public authorities in Sudan helped settle many refugees in camps, but some Ugandans settled among local people, initially without external support.
The relative peace in Southern Sudan was disrupted in 1983 when the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) was founded to lead another armed struggle against Sudan’s newly declared Islamic state under President Gaafar Nimeiry – which came to be known as the Second Sudanese Civil War. The violence forced Ugandan peoples living in Southern Sudan back into Uganda and many Southern Sudanese also made the crossing. Some of the refugees returned to locations they had lived in during the first civil war or joined relatives or friends who had remained in Uganda. People used their established networks.
The new wave of refugees received generous assistance from the UNHCR and the Ugandan government, whose policy was the settlement of refugees in camps and dedicated areas. Effectively, the policy redefined a refugee as ‘someone receiving assistance and living in a camp’. Many displaced Southern Sudanese avoided encampment, with its associated restrictions of movement, by self-settling among locals or dividing their family members or time between camps and outside locations.
As in the first civil war, many displaced persons in Southern Sudan did not cross international borders, but remained behind in dire circumstances. Their plight forced the United Nations to launch another initiative, Operation Lifeline Sudan, in the 1980s to assist those trapped in the war zone. This suffering formally ceased in 2005 with the conclusion of the much-lauded Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLM/A, enabling the return of the IDPs to their original homes and refugees back to the country.
In 2011, Southern Sudan seceded from Sudan. About two years later, the world’s newest country relapsed into a vicious civil war. Sparked by divisions among the country’s key leaders, ethnic identities were subsequently exploited to mobilise fighters with devastating consequences for national unity and the wellbeing of civilians.
During the conflict, many Nuer people, an ethnic group primarily inhabiting South Sudan’s Nile Valley, fled into areas created on UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) bases, called Protection of Civilians Sites (PoCs), to escape killing by members of the Dinka, the largest ethnic group, who had effectively taken over the country with the support of Ugandan soldiers. Nuer fighters retaliated against Dinka civilians, forcing many to flee to the Uganda border and other locations.
Many South Sudanese headed north into the new Republic of Sudan, where public authorities labelled them ’arrivals’, a new term with no precedent in refugee policy or literature, and confined them to ‘waiting stations’. Uganda also received a large number of displaced persons, among them refugees placed in settlements with international assistance. Many displaced persons settled among locals without external assistance, thus avoiding the label of ‘refugee’.
What it means to be ‘refugees’ in Uganda
The 1951 Refugee Convention states a person becomes a refugee after crossing an internationally recognised border in search of protection, recognition and status by public authorities in the asylum country or the UNHCR. When the circumstances that forced the person to seek refuge cease to exist, the refugee re-avails themselves of the country’s protection they had fled. Thus defined concrete international borders are characterised as integral to becoming a refugee or ending refuge.
For South Sudanese displaced persons, the border between their country and Uganda is not a clearly defined line separating two jurisdictions. Many parts of the border are contested by ordinary people and public authorities on both sides. Consequently, people inhabiting locations along these contested areas are not always on peaceful terms despite often belonging to the same ethnic groups, such as the Acholi of South Sudan and Uganda.
Different ethnic groups that have seen clashes over contested territories have also been forced into settling in areas of close proximity following unrest in their respective homelands. My own research reveals the Kuku of Kajokeji in South Sudan were so suspicious of the Madi in the Ugandan Moyo district that, when they settled in the latter’s region, they avoided treatment in the Moyo hospital for fear of maltreatment by Madi medical personnel. The history of conflict over certain borders has a direct bearing on the welfare of refugees in the present.
Armed groups and criminals also operate along the border, posing serious security problems, with some people losing their lives at the hands of unknown gunmen. Despite this danger, refugees and other South Sudanese cross in and out of South Sudan for matters of family and livelihoods, such as to harvest crops in their old fields due to food shortages in their new home. Others return their deceased kin to bury them decently on their old compounds and, further, trips are made to the national capital, Juba, to visit relatives or deal with administrative issues.
These movements defy the legal meaning of ‘refugee’, who is supposed to return home when the threat of persecution that caused the flight is over. They demonstrate that refugees are not the passive and docile recipients of aid, as often presented, but active individuals who exercise agency. Studies remind us that were refugees only to eat the ‘food which is distributed to them, they would die’.
What it means to stay behind as an IDP
Because IDPs are citizens living in their native county they are entitled to the same rights and legal protections as fellow citizens as stipulated by the constitution. In reality, IDPs do not always enjoy citizenship rights because those in power consider them enemies or supporters of enemies.
During the second civil war, the Sudanese government branded IDPs as rebel supporters and subjected them to all kinds of punitive measures, including starvation and denial of basic services. Many IDPs consequently starved to death or died due to deadly diseases, such as kala azar, as the already rudimentary healthcare system in pre-war Southern Sudan was destroyed by repeated military bombardments as well as frequent obstructions of international humanitarian access.
When South Sudan gained independence and descended into civil war, IDPs did not fare any better. Following shocking atrocities and the continued risk of further violence, many Nuer civilians remain in PoCs on UNMISS bases under the protection of peacekeepers in refugee-like situations. Deprived of state protection, their situation has become worse than most refugees in South Sudan, deprioritised over the dominant Dinka.
The labels of ‘refugee’ and ‘internally displaced person’ do not reflect the experiences of most South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, and IDPs within South Sudan. These terms present refugees and IDPs as powerless recipients of aid when, in reality, refugees and IDPs are active agents in efforts to improve their situation. In some cases, they creatively manipulate borders and the systems in place to satisfy their basic needs.
It has been expressed that South Sudanese refugees have shown an extraordinary creativity and resourcefulness that can form a blueprint for future refugee assistance programmes. When ‘official legal categories rarely match realities on the ground’, aid workers should now appreciate and encourage the active involvement of refugees and IDPs to address the challenges that confront them.
▻https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/05/28/what-it-means-to-be-a-refugee-in-south-sudan-and-uganda
#réfugiés #IDPs #déplacés_internes #Soudan_du_Sud #Ouganda #histoire #histoire -
U.S. is using unreliable dental exams to hold teen migrants in adult detention
The young Bangladeshi sitting in the dentist’s chair last October thought he was getting checked for diseases.
Dental staff examined his teeth, gave him a cleaning and sent him back to the juvenile facility where he had been held for months since illegally crossing the border in July.
But a checkup wasn’t the real purpose of the dental work. The government wanted to figure out if “I.J.,” as the young migrant has been identified, really was 16, as he said, or an adult.
The use of dental exams to help determine the age of migrants increased sharply in the last year, one aspect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and illegal border crossings.
The accuracy of forensic testing to help determine the age of migrants is very much a subject of the debate. And with the stakes so high, the exams are becoming another legal battleground for the government.
Federal law prohibits the government from relying exclusively on forensic testing of bones and teeth to determine age. But a review of court records shows that in at least three cases – including I.J.’s – the government did just that, causing federal judges to later order the minors released from adult detention.
In a case last year, a Guatemalan migrant was held in adult detention for nearly a year after a dental exam showed he was likely 18, until his attorneys fought to get his birth certificate, which proved he was 17.
For I.J., the results had serious ramifications. Based on the development of his teeth, the analysis showed an 87.70% probability that he had turned 18.
An immigration official reported that it was apparent to the case manager that I.J. “appeared physically older than 17 years of age,” and that he and his mother had not been able to provide a second type of identification that might prove his age.
The next month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him away in shackles and placed him in a medium-security prison that houses immigrant detainees.
He spent about five months in adult detention and 24 of those days in segregated custody. Whenever he spoke with an officer, he would say he was a minor — unaware for more than a month that his teeth had landed him there.
“I came to the United States with a big dream,” I.J. said. “My dream was finished.”
But when the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project took I.J.’s case to federal court, a district judge found that the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s age re-determination violated federal law and the agency’s own guidelines.
In April, the judge ordered I.J. released back into Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, a program responsible for unaccompanied migrant children. He has since reunited with his family in New York. The Florence Project also filed another case in federal court that resulted in the government voluntarily returning a Bangladeshi minor to ORR custody and rescinding his age re-determination.
As the government grappled with an influx of the number of families and children arriving at the border in fiscal year 2018, approvals of ORR age determination exams more than doubled.
These handful of cases where a minor was released from adult detention is almost certainly an undercount, as most migrants held in adult detention do not have legal representation and are unlikely to fight their cases.
It is unclear how often migrants pretend to be minors and turn out to be adults. In a call with reporters earlier this year, a Customs and Border Protection official said that from April 2018 to March 25 of this year, his agents had identified more than 3,100 individuals in family units making fraudulent claims, including those who misrepresented themselves as minors.
Unaccompanied minors are given greater protections than adults after being apprehended. The government’s standard refers migrants to adult custody if a dental exam analysis shows at least a 75% probability that they are 18 or older. But other evidence is supposed to be considered.
Dr. David Senn, the director of the Center for Education and Research in Forensics at UT Health San Antonio, has handled more than 2,000 age cases since 1998.
A program that Senn helped develop estimates the mean age of a person and the probability that he or she is at least 18. In addition to looking at dental X-rays, he has also looked at skeletal X-rays and analyzed bone development in the hand and wrist area.
He handled a larger number of cases in the early 2000s, but last year he saw his caseload triple — rising to 168. There appears to be a slowdown this calendar year for Senn, one of a few dentists the government uses for these analyses.
He said making an exact age determination is not possible.
“We can only tell you what the statistics say,” Senn said. “I think the really important thing to note is that most people who do this work are not trying to be policemen or to be Border Patrol agents or immigration …. what we’re trying to do is help. What we’re trying to do is protect children.”
In 2007 and again in 2008, the House Appropriations Committee called on the Department of Homeland Security to stop relying on forensic testing of bones and teeth. But it was the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 that declared age determinations should take into account “multiple forms of evidence, including the non-exclusive use of radiographs.”
In a Washington state case, an X-ray analysis by Senn showed a 92.55% probability that Bilal, a Somali migrant, already had reached 18 years of age. ICE removed him from his foster home and held him in an adult detention center.
“Not only were they trying to save themselves money, which they paid to the foster family, but they were wrecking this kid’s life,” said Matt Adams, legal director for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which represented Bilal. “They were just rolling the dice.”
In 2016, a federal judge found that the Office of Refugee Resettlement relied exclusively on the dental exam and overturned the age determination for the young Somali.
Last year, in the case of an Eritrean migrant who said he was 17, Senn’s analysis of dental X-rays showed a 92.55% probability that he had turned 18, and provided a range of possible ages between 17.10 and 23.70.
It was enough to prompt his removal from a juvenile facility and placement into an adult one.
Again, a district judge found that the government had relied exclusively on the dental exam to determine his age and ordered the migrant released back into ORR custody.
Danielle Bennett, an ICE spokeswoman, said the agency “does not track” information on such reversals.
“We should never be used as the only method to determine age,” Senn said. “If those agencies are not following their own rules, they should have their feet held to the fire.”
Similar concerns over medical age assessments have sprung up in other countries, including the United Kingdom and Sweden.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ guidance about how adolescent migrants’ ages should be analyzed says that if countries use scientific procedures to determine age, that they should allow for margins of error. Michael Bochenek, an attorney specializing in children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said that for adolescents, the margin of error in scientific tests is “so big that it doesn’t tell you anything.”
An influx of Bangladeshi migrants claiming to be minors has contributed to the government’s recent use of dental exams. From October through March 8, more than 150 Bangladeshis who claimed to be minors and were determined to be adults were transferred from the Office of Refugee Resettlement to ICE custody, according to the agency.
In fiscal year 2018, Border Patrol apprehensions of Bangladeshi migrants went up 109% over the year before, rising to 1,203. Similarly, the number of Bangladeshi minors in ORR custody increased about 221% between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018, reaching 392.
Ali Riaz, a professor at Illinois State University, said Bangladeshis are leaving the country for reasons including high population density, high unemployment among the young, a deteriorating political environment and the “quest for a better life.”
In October, Myriam Hillin, an ORR federal field specialist, was told that ICE had information showing that a number of Bangladeshi migrants in their custody claiming to be underage had passports with different birth dates than on their birth certificates.
Bochenek said it’s common for migrant children to travel with fake passports that make them appear older, because in some countries minors are more likely to be intercepted or questioned by immigration agents.
While I.J. was able to regain status as a minor, three Bangladeshi migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in the San Diego area in October 2018 are still trying to convince the government they are underage.
Their passports didn’t match their birth certificates. Dental exams ordered by immigration officials found that each of them had about an 89% likelihood of being adults.
“Both subjects were adamant that the passports were given to them by the ‘agent’ (smuggler), however, there is little reason to lie to any of the countries they flew into,” wrote one Border Patrol agent, describing the arrest of two of the migrants. “Also, it is extremely difficult to fake a passport, especially for no reason. I have seen [unaccompanied children] fly into each of the countries (except for Panama and Costa Rica) and pass through with no problem. This is a recent trend with Bangladeshis. They do it in order to be released from DHS custody faster.”
During interviews, the young migrants, Shahadat, Shahriar and Tareq, told asylum officers that smugglers had given them the passports, according to records from the interviews.
When asked why they had been given those birth dates, they said it had something to do with smugglers’ plans for their travel.
“I don’t have that much idea,” Shahadat told an asylum officer, according to the officer’s notes in a summary-style transcript. “When I asked why, they told me that if I don’t give this [date of birth] there will be problems with travel.”
Shahriar told the officer that the smuggler became aggressive when questioned.
The migrants have submitted copies of birth certificates, school documents and signed statements from their parents attesting to their claimed birth dates. An online database of birth records maintained by the government of Bangladesh appears to confirm their date of birth claims.
Shahriar also provided his parents’ birth certificates. If he were as old as immigration officials believe him to be, his mother would have been 12 years old when she had him.
In each case, immigration officials stood by the passport dates.
Shahadat and Shahriar are being held in Otay Mesa Detention Center. Tareq was held at the facility for months before being released on a $7,500 bond. All three are moving through the immigration system as adults, with asylum proceedings their only option to stay in the U.S..
At least one of the migrants, Shahadat, was placed in administrative segregation, a version of solitary confinement in immigration detention, when his age came into question, according to documents provided by their attorney.
A judge ordered him deported.
▻https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-immigrant-age-migrants-ice-dental-teeth-bangladesh-20190602-story.
#tests_osseux #os #âge #USA #Etats-Unis #mineurs #enfants #enfance #rétention #détention_administrative #dents #migrations #asile #réfugiés #USA #Etats-Unis -
Selon l’#ONU, Julian #Assange présente des symptômes de « #torture #psychologique » - Le Point
▻https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/selon-l-onu-julian-assange-presente-des-symptomes-de-torture-psychologique-3Le rapporteur de l’ONU sur la torture, qui a rencontré le #lanceur_d'alerte, estime qu’il a été « exposé à des formes graves de peines ou de traitements inhumains ».
[...]
En plus de maux physiques [...]
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Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert | Media | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/31/julian-assange-shows-psychological-torture-symptoms-says-un-expertThe former legal adviser to the Red Cross will say on Friday: “In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”
“#démocraties”
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Jeremy Hunt sur Twitter : “This is wrong. Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice. The UN Special Rapporteur should allow British courts to make their judgements without his interference or inflammatory accusations.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1134373848290353152Nils Melzer sur Twitter : “Jeremy_Hunt With all due respect, Sir: Mr Assange was about as „free to leave“ as a someone sitting on a rubberboat in a sharkpool. As detailed in my formal letter to you, so far, UK courts have not shown the impartiality and objectivity required by the rule of law.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1134400849097220102
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Congo Ebola response must be elevated to maximum level, UN told | Global development | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/may/29/congo-ebola-response-must-be-elevated-to-maximum-level-un-toldThe UN has been urged by charities to ramp up Ebola prevention work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the highest level of emergency response.
Only three crises – Yemen, Syria and Mozambique – are treated as the equivalent of a level-three response, activated when agencies are unable to meet needs on the ground.
Charities including Mercy Corps and Oxfam said the same declaration should also be made in DRC, following a recent acceleration in the spread of Ebola.
Almost 2,000 cases of Ebola have been recorded since the outbreak began in August. As of Monday, 1,287 people have died from the disease.
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First-ever private border wall built in #New_Mexico
A private group announced Monday that it has constructed a half-mile wall along a section of the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico, in what it said was a first in the border debate.
The 18-foot steel bollard wall is similar to the designs used by the Border Patrol, sealing off a part of the border that had been a striking gap in existing fencing, according to We Build the Wall, the group behind the new section.
The section was also built faster and, organizers say, likely more cheaply than the government has been able to manage in recent years.
Kris Kobach, a former secretary of state in Kansas and an informal immigration adviser to President Trump, says the New Mexico project has the president’s blessing, and says local Border Patrol agents are eager to have the assistance.
“We’re closing a gap that’s been a big headache for them,” said Mr. Kobach, who is general counsel for We Build the Wall.
▻https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/27/first-ever-private-border-wall-built-new-mexico
#privatisation #murs #barrières_frontalières #USA #Mexique #frontières #business #complexe_militaro-industriel
ping @albertocampiphoto @daphne-
The #GoFundMe Border Wall Is the Quintessential Trump-Era Grift
In 2012, historian Rick Perlstein wrote a piece of essential reading for understanding modern conservatism, titled “The Long Con” and published by the Baffler. It ties the right’s penchant for absurd and obvious grifts to the conservative mind’s particular vulnerability to fear and lies:
The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.
Lying, Perlstein said, is “what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound.” The lies—about abortion factories, ACORN, immigrants, etc.—fund the grifts, and the grifts prey on the psychology that makes the lies so successful.
Perlstein’s piece is all I could think of when I saw last night’s CNN story about the border wall GoFundMe, which seemingly has actually produced Wall. According to CNN, the group We Build the Wall says it has produced a half-mile of border wall in New Mexico. CNN was invited to watch the construction, where Kris Kobach, who is general counsel for the group, spoke “over the clanking and beeping of construction equipment.”
#Steve_Bannon, who is naturally involved with the group, told CNN that the wall connects existing fencing and had “tough terrain” that means it was left “off the government list.” The half-mile stretch of wall cost an “estimated $6 million to $8 million to build,” CNN reported.
CNN also quoted #Jeff_Allen, who owns the property on which the fence was built, as saying: “I have fought illegals on this property for six years. I love my country and this is a step in protecting my country.” According to MSN, Allen partnered with United Constitutional Patriots to build the wall with We Build the Wall’s funding. UCP is the same militia that was seen on video detaining immigrants and misrepresenting themselves as Border Patrol; the Phoenix New Times reported on the “apparent ties” between the UCP and We Build the Wall earlier this month.
This story is bursting at the seams with an all-star lineup of right-wing scammers. The GoFundMe itself, of course, has been rocked by scandal: After the effort raised $20 million, just $980 million short of the billion-dollar goal, GoFundMe said in January that the funds would be returned, since creator Brian Kolfage had originally pledged that “If for ANY reason we don’t reach our goal we will refund your donation.” But Kolfage quickly figured out how to keep the gravy train going, urging those who had donated to allow their donations to be redirected to a non-profit. Ultimately, $14 million of that $20 million figure was indeed rerouted by the idiots who donated it.
That non-profit became #We_Build_The_Wall, and like all good conservative con jobs, it has the celebs of the fever swamp attached to it. Not only #Kris_Kobach, a tenacious liar who failed at proving voter fraud is a widespread problem—but also slightly washed-up figures like Bannon, Sheriff David Clarke, Curt Schilling, and Tom Tancredo. All the stars are here!
How much sleazier could it get? Try this: the main contractor working at the site of New Wall, according to CNN, is Tommy Fisher. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump had “personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers” to give the contract for the border wall to the company owned by Fisher, a “GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News,” despite the fact that the Corps of Engineers previously said Fisher’s proposals didn’t meet their requirements.
Of course, like all good schemes, the need for more money never ceases: On the Facebook page for the group, the announcement that Wall had been completed was accompanied with a plea for fans to “DONATE NOW to fund more walls! We have many more projects lined up!”
So, what we have is: A tax-exempt non-profit raised $20 million by claiming it would be able to make the federal government build Wall by just giving it the money for it and then, when that didn’t happen, getting most of its donors to reroute that money; then it built a half-mile of wall on private land for as much as $8 million, which went to a firm of a Fox News star whom President Trump adores.
Perlstein wrote in the aforementioned piece that it’s hard to “specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins,” since “the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself.” The con job was sold through fear: “Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.”
The Trump era is the inartful, gaudy, brazen peak of this phenomenon. This time, instead of selling fake stem cell cures using the language of Invading Liberals, the grifters are just straight-up selling—for real American dollars—the promise of building a big wall to keep the monsters out.
▻https://splinternews.com/the-gofundme-border-wall-is-the-quintessential-trump-er-1835062340
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Company touted by Trump to build the wall has history of fines, violations
President Donald Trump appears to have set his sights on a North Dakota construction firm with a checkered legal record to build portions of his signature border wall.
The family-owned company, #Fisher_Sand_&_Gravel, claims it can build the wall cheaper and faster than competitors. It was among a handful of construction firms chosen to build prototypes of the President’s border wall in 2017 and is currently constructing portions of barrier on private land along the border in New Mexico using private donations.
It also, however, has a history of red flags including more than $1 million in fines for environmental and tax violations. A decade ago, a former co-owner of the company pleaded guilty to tax fraud, and was sentenced to prison. The company also admitted to defrauding the federal government by impeding the IRS. The former executive, who’s a brother of the current company owner, is no longer associated with it.
More than two years into his presidency, Trump is still fighting to build and pay for his border wall, a key campaign issue. After failing to get his requests for wall funding passed by a Republican-held Congress during his first two years in office, Trump has met resistance this year from a Democratic-controlled House. His attempt to circumvent Congress through a national emergency declaration has been challenged in the courts.
On May 24, a federal district judge blocked the administration from using Defense Department funds to construct parts of the wall. The Trump administration has since appealed the block to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and in the interim, asked the district court to allow building to continue pending appeal. The district court denied the administration’s request.
Despite the uncertainty, construction firms have been competing to win multimillion-dollar contracts to build portions of wall, including Fisher Sand & Gravel.Asked by CNN to comment on the company’s history of environmental violations and legal issues, the company said in a statement: “The questions you are asking have nothing to do with the excellent product and work that Fisher is proposing with regard to protecting America’s southern border. The issues and situations in your email were resolved years ago. None of those matters are outstanding today.”
Catching the President’s attention
The company was founded in North Dakota in 1952 and operates in several states across the US. It’s enjoyed public support from North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, who as a congressman invited the company’s CEO, Tommy Fisher, to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2018. Cramer has received campaign contributions from Fisher and his wife. A photo of the event shared by Fisher in a company newsletter shows Tommy Fisher shaking Trump’s hand.
The Washington Post first reported the President’s interest in Fisher. According to the Post, the President has “aggressively” pushed for the Army Corps of Engineers to award a wall contract to Fisher.
The President “immediately brought up Fisher” during a May 23 meeting in the Oval Office to discuss details of the border wall with various government officials, including that he wants it to be painted black and include French-style doors, according to the Post and confirmed by CNN.
“The Army Corps of Engineers says about 450 miles of wall will be completed by the end of next year, and the only thing President Trump is pushing, is for the wall to be finished quickly so the American people have the safety and security they deserve,” said Hogan Gidley, White House deputy press secretary.
A US government official familiar with the meeting tells CNN that the President has repeatedly mentioned the company in discussions he’s had about the wall with the head of the Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite.
Fisher has recently made efforts to raise its public profile, both by upping its lobbying efforts and through repeated appearances on conservative media by its CEO, Tommy Fisher.In the past two years, for example, the company’s congressional lobbying expenditures jumped significantly — from $5,000 in 2017 to $75,000 in 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit that tracks lobbying expenditures.
When asked about Fisher Sand & Gravel’s lobbying, Don Larson, one of Fisher’s registered lobbyists, said: “I am working to help decision makers in Washington become familiar with the company and its outstanding capabilities.”
Media Blitz
As part of a media blitz on outlets including Fox News, SiriusXM Patriot and Breitbart News, Tommy Fisher has discussed his support for the border wall and pitched his company as the one to build it. In a March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, Fisher said that his company could build 234 miles of border wall for $4.3 billion, compared to the $5.7 billion that the Trump administration has requested from Congress.
Fisher claimed that his firm can work five-to-10 times faster than competitors as a result of its construction process.
The President has also touted Fisher on Fox News. In an April interview in which he was asked about Fisher by Sean Hannity, Trump said the company was “recommended strongly by a great new senator, as you know, Kevin Cramer. And they’re real. But they have been bidding and so far they haven’t been meeting the bids. I thought they would.”
Despite the President’s interest, the company has thus far been unsuccessful in obtaining a contract to build the border wall, beyond that of a prototype.Earlier this year, Fisher put its name in the running for border wall contracts worth nearly $1 billion. When it lost the bid to Barnard Construction Co. and SLSCO Ltd., Fisher protested the awards over claims that the process was biased. In response, the Army Corps canceled the award. But after a review of the process, the Army Corps combined the projects and granted it to a subsidiary of Barnard Construction, according to an agency spokesperson.
It’s unclear whether the project will proceed, given the recent decision by a federal judge to block the use of Defense Department funds to build parts of the border wall and the administration’s appeal.
Fisher, which has a pending lawsuit in the US Court of Federal Claims over the solicitation process, is listed by the Defense Department as being among firms eligible to compete for future border contracts.It has moved forward with a private group, We Build the Wall, that is building sections of barrier on private land in New Mexico using private money raised as part of a GoFundMe campaign. Kris Kobach, the former Kansas Secretary of State who is now general counsel for the group, said a half-mile stretch is nearly complete, at an estimated cost of $6 million to $8 million.
In a statement, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said Fisher Industries has told them that the company has begun construction on private property along the border “in the approximate area of a USBP border barrier requirement that was not prioritized under current funding.”
The spokesperson added: “It is not uncommon for vendors” to demonstrate their capabilities using “their own resources,” but the agency goes on to “encourage all interested vendors” to compete for border contracts “through established mechanisms to ensure any construction is carried out under relevant federal authorities and meets USBP operational requirements for border barrier.”
In responses provided to CNN through Scott Sleight, an attorney working on behalf of the company, Fisher maintained that it’s “committed to working with all appropriate federal government officials and agencies to provide its expertise and experience to help secure America’s southern border.”
The company says it has “developed a patent-pending bollard fence hanging system that [it] believes allows border fencing to be constructed faster than any contractor using common construction methods.” It also added: “Fisher has been concerned about the procurement procedures and evaluations done by the USACE to date, and hopes these issues can be remedied.”
Relationship with Sen. Cramer
A month after attending the 2018 State of the Union address with Cramer, Fisher and his wife, Candice each contributed the $5,400 maximum donation to Cramer’s campaign for the US Senate, Federal Election Commission records show.
Fisher also donated to several Arizona Republicans in the 2018 election cycle, including giving the $5,400-maximum donation to Martha McSally’s campaign, records show.
A recent video produced by Fisher Sand & Gravel demonstrating its ability to construct the wall includes a clip of Cramer at the controls of a track-hoe lifting sections of barrier wall into place, saying “this is just like XBOX, baby.” Cramer was joined at the demonstration by a handful of other Republican lawmakers from across the country.Cramer has been publicly critical of how the Army Corps has handled its border wall construction work, arguing that it has moved too slowly and expressing frustration over how it has dealt with Fisher. In an interview with a North Dakota TV station, Cramer said that he believes the corps “made a miscalculation in who they chose over Fisher” and that the company had been “skunked so to speak.” Cramer added that Fisher “remains a pre-qualified, high level, competitor.”
In an interview with CNN, Cramer said that the company has come up in conversations he has had with administration officials, including the President and the head of the Army Corps, but while the senator said that he would “love if they got every inch of the project,” he added that he has “never advocated specifically for them.”
"Every time someone comes to meet with me, whether it’s (Acting Defense Secretary) Shanahan, General Semonite, even with Donald Trump, they bring up Fisher Industries because they assume that’s my thing," Cramer said.
“One of the things I’ve never done is said it should be Fisher,” Cramer said. “Now, I love Fisher. I’d love if they got every inch of the project. They’re my constituents, I don’t apologize for that. But my interest really is more in the bureaucratic process.”
According to an administration official familiar with the situation, Cramer sent information about Fisher to the President’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, who then passed it along to the Army Corps of Engineers for their consideration. The source tells CNN that Kushner was not familiar with the company prior to getting information about them from Cramer.
Cramer said he does recall passing along information about the company to Kushner, but that he did not know what Kushner did with the information.
On May 24, Cramer told a North Dakota radio station that the President has asked him to examine the process of how federal border wall projects are awarded.
“We’re going to do an entire audit,” Cramer said. “I’ve asked for the entire bid process, and all of the bid numbers.” Cramer told CNN the President said he wanted the wall built for the “lowest, best price, and it’s also quality, and that’s what any builder should want.”
Asked about aspects of the company’s checkered legal record, Cramer said “that level of scrutiny is important, but I would hope the same scrutiny would be put on the Corps of Engineers.”
Environmental violations
Though its corporate headquarters are in North Dakota, Fisher has a sizable footprint in Arizona, where it operates an asphalt company as well as a drilling and blasting company. It’s there that the company has compiled an extensive track record of environmental violations.
From 2007 to 2017, Fisher Sand & Gravel compiled more than 1,300 air-quality violations in Maricopa County, culminating in the third highest settlement ever received by the Maricopa County Air Quality Department, according to Bob Huhn, a department spokesperson. That’s a record number of violations for any air-quality settlement in the county, Huhn said. The settlement totaled more than $1 million, though the department received slightly less than that following negotiations, Huhn said.
Most of the violations came from an asphalt plant that the company was running in south Phoenix that has since closed. While the plant was still running, the City of Phoenix filed 469 criminal charges against the company from August to October of 2009, according to a city spokesperson.
According to a 2010 article in the Arizona Republic, Fisher reached an agreement with Phoenix officials to close the plant in 2010. As part of the deal, fines were reduced from $1.1 million to an estimated $243,000 and all criminal charges were reduced to civil charges.
Mary Rose Wilcox was a member of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors at the time the city and county were fighting Fisher over the asphalt plant, which was located in her district. “They tried to persuade us they were good guys since they were a family-owned company. But they were spreading noxious fumes into a residential area,” Wilcox said. “We tried to work with them, but their violations were just so blatant.”
Michael Pops, a community activist who lived in the area around the plant, remembers fighting with Fisher for six years before the plant finally shut down. “The impact they had on this community was devastating,” Pops said, adding many low-income residents living near the asphalt plant were sickened from the fumes the plant emitted.
The company has also racked up more than 120 violations with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality from 2004 until as recently as last summer, according to the department.
In 2011, Fisher agreed to a Consent Judgement with ADEQ over numerous air quality violations the company had committed. As part of that settlement, Fisher agreed to pay $125,000 in civil penalties, and that it would remain in compliance with state air quality standards. Within two years Fisher was found to be in violation of that agreement and was forced to pay an additional $500,000 in fines, according to the state’s attorney general’s office.
Legal trouble
Internally, the company has also confronted issues.
In 2011, Fisher Sand & Gravel agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a sexual discrimination and retaliation suit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lawsuit charged that the company violated federal anti-discrimination laws when it “subjected two women workers to egregious verbal sexual harassment by a supervisor and then fired one of them after she repeatedly asked the supervisor to stop harassing her and complained to a job superintendent.”
The settlement required Fisher to provide anti-discrimination training to its employees in New Mexico and review its policies on sexual harassment.
Micheal Fisher, a former co-owner of Fisher and Tommy’s brother, was sentenced to prison in 2009 for tax fraud, according to the Justice Department. Fisher pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud the United States by impeding the [Internal Revenue Service], four counts of aiding in the filing of false federal tax returns for FSG and four counts of filing false individual tax returns,” according to a Justice Department release.
The company also admitted responsibility for defrauding the US by impeding the IRS, according to the DOJ. Citing a long standing policy of not commenting on the contracting process, the Army Corps declined to comment on whether Fisher’s history factored into its decision not to award Fisher a contract.▻https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/31/politics/fisher-sand-and-gravel-legal-history-border-wall/index.html
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Private US-Mexico border wall ordered open by gov’t, fights back and is now closed again
The privately funded portion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall is now fully secure and closed again after one of its gates had been ordered to remain open until disputes about waterway access could be resolved.
“Our border wall & gate are secure again and we still have not had a single breach. I want to thank the IBWC for acting swiftly and we look forward to working with you on our future projects,” triple amputee Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage posted to Twitter on Tuesday night.
Kolfage created We Build The Wall Inc., a nonprofit that is now backed by former Trump Administration Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The group crowd-funded more than $22 million in order to privately build a border wall and then sell it to the U.S. government for $1.
A portion of that wall has been constructed in Texas for between $6 and $8 million. The 1-mile-long wall is located on private property near El Paso, Texas, and Sunland Park, New Mexico.
However, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) had ordered a 33-foot gate within the private border wall to remain open – not locked and closed – over a waterway access issue, according to BuzzFeed News. The IBCW addresses waterway issues between the U.S. and Mexico.
“This is normally done well in advance of a construction project,” IBWC spokesperson Lori Kuczmanski said. “They think they can build now and ask questions later, and that’s not how it works.”
BuzzFeed reported that the IBWC said the gate “had blocked officials from accessing a levee and dam, and cut off public access to a historic monument known as Monument One, the first in a series of obelisks that mark the U.S.–Mexico border from El Paso to Tijuana.”
By Tuesday night, the IBWC said the gate would remain locked at night and issued a statement.
“The U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) will lock the privately-owned gate on federal property at night effective immediately due to security concerns,” it said.
The statement continues:
The USIBWC is continuing to work with We Build the Wall regarding its permit request. Until this decision, the private gate was in a locked open position. We Build the Wall, a private organization, built a gate on federal land in Sunland Park, N.M., near El Paso, Texas, without authority, and then locked the gate closed on June 6, 2019. The private gate blocks a levee road owned by the U.S. Government. After repeated requests to unlock and open the private gate, the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC), accompanied by two uniformed law enforcement officers from the Dona Ana County Sheriff’s Office, removed the private lock, opened the gate, and locked the gate open pending further discussions with We Build the Wall. The gate was also opened so that USIBWC employees can conduct maintenance and operations at American Dam.
The USIBWC did not authorize the construction of the private gate on federal property as announced on We Build the Wall’s Twitter page. The USIBWC is not charged with securing other fences or gates as reported by We Build the Wall. The international border fences are not on USIBWC property. The USIBWC did not open any other gates in the El Paso area as erroneously reported. Other gates and the border fence are controlled by other federal agencies.
When the proper documentation is received for the permit, USIBWC will continue to process the permit application.
Before the statement had been released, Kolfage posted to Twitter.
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/06/private-us-mexico-border-wall-ordered-open-by-intl-group-later-closed-locked-after-security-concerns/
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Nanni Balestrini ist tot – Das ZKM trauert um einen der bedeutendsten Vertreter der italienischen Nachkriegsavantgarde | ZKM
▻https://zkm.de/de/magazin/2019/05/nanni-balestrini-ist-tot-das-zkm-trauert-um-einen-der-bedeutendsten-vertreter-de21.05.2019 - Als Dichter, Künstler, Schriftsteller und Verlagslektor, als Zeitschriftengründer und Organisator literarischer Festivals nahm Nanni Balestrini in der Entstehung und Durchsetzung der literarischen Neoavantgarde eine Schlüsselrolle ein. Seit den 1950er-Jahren zählte er zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der italienischen Kultur. Am 20. Mai 2019 ist der 1935 in Mailand geborene Künstler im Alter von 83 Jahren gestorben.
Im deutschen Sprachraum war er vor allem für seine politischen Romane bekannt. »Wir wollen alles« (1971), »Die Unsichtbaren« (1987) und »Der Verleger« (1989) verarbeiten die politische Geschichte Italiens und der sozialen Bewegungen der 1960er- und 1970er-Jahre. In Folge seines linken politischen Engagements ging Balestrini 1979 ins Exil nach Frankreich. Seit 1985 lebte und arbeitete er in Rom, Mailand und Paris.
»Es ist die Poesie, die mich gewählt hat. Ich bin es nicht gewesen, der sie ausgesucht hat. Es ist so passiert und ich bin glücklich darüber.«
Nanni BalestriniNanni Balestrinis vielfältiges dichterisches und künstlerisches Werk basiert auf der Poetik der Collage, einem Verfahren, das sich der Brüche, Fragmente und Kombinatorik bedient. Dieses verbindende Prinzip zeigt sich in Balestrinis visuellen Collagen ebenso wie auch in seinen wegweisenden Experimenten mit computergenerierter Poesie.
Wer das hir liest, braucht sich vor nichts zu fürchtenMit der Ausstellung »Wer das hir liest, braucht sich vor nichts zu fürchten« widmete das ZKM Balestrini im Frühjahr 2017 eine Ausstellung, die erstmals einen umfassenden Überblick über sein visuell-poetisches Oeuvre gab. Collagen und Cut-Ups aus Bildern, Texten und Filmsequenzen zeigen ein Lebenswerk, das sich gegen die »Trägheit der Sprache« wandte und damit gegen die Erstarrung des Denkens und Handelns. Sie zeigen jene möglichen Welten, die wir nicht wagen sowie jene, die wir übersehen haben.
#Art
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Nous voulons tout, 1971, Nanni Balestrini est disponible en ligne :
▻https://entremonde.net/IMG/pdf/nous_voulons_tout-livre.pdfLa postface de Blackout, extrait
▻https://entremonde.net/blackoutRendre en vers la parabole des mouvements contestataires des années soixante-dix – leur force, leur rage, leur déclin – c’est l’exploit réussi par Nanni Balestrini dans les textes ici réunis (...)
Blackout
▻https://entremonde.net/telechargement119La violence illustrée, encore via @entremonde
▻https://entremonde.net/telechargement121
La horde d’or - Italie 1968-1977- Entretien Nanni Balestrini et Sergio Bianchi
►http://www.cip-idf.org/article.php3?id_article=8487▻https://seenthis.net/messages/655521
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/638810
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/137358
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/106828
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/65918
#autonomie #révolution
►http://ordadoro.info
#Livre_en_ligne : ►http://ordadoro.info
#autonomie #La_Horde_d'Or
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« Philippe de Villiers n’a pas le droit de falsifier l’histoire de l’UE au nom d’une idéologie »
▻https://www.les-crises.fr/philippe-de-villiers-na-pas-le-droit-de-falsifier-lhistoire-de-lue-au-nom -
Big tech firms are racing to track climate refugees - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613531/big-tech-firms-are-racing-to-track-climate-refugeesTo be an undocumented refugee, these days, is to exist in many places and to not exist at all. It is to have your movements, words, and actions tracked, archived, and multiplied. It is to live between fences, tents, and databases—one new entry per doctor’s visit, per bag of rice, per canister of water. It can mean having your biometric and biographical data scanned, stored, and cross-checked by people you do not know, and who speak a language you may not understand. It is to have your identity multiplied, classified, and reduced to lines of code. It is to live in spreadsheets.
Today, around 1.1 billion people live without a recognized form of identification. In many cases, their papers—if they ever had papers at all—have been burned, lost, or otherwise destroyed. And the number is growing every day. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN’s refugee agency, estimates that in 2017, one person became displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict, economics, or climate change. “In short, the world had almost as many forcibly displaced people in 2017 as the population of Thailand,” the agency reports. “Across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced.”
The next frontier, though, is not figuring out where people have been or where they will settle: it is figuring out who they will be when they get there. What will their “digital identity” look like? Who will hold the keys? A number of new and established tech companies are rushing to answer these critical questions. Technology accelerated the global identity crisis, and now technology claims to have the solution.
But now that so much of our economic and political life takes place online, creating new forms of identity has taken on a severe urgency. Both the private and public sectors are racing to come up with a sustainable way of counting, identifying, and connecting not only the growing population of the global displaced, but also the wealthy population of the voluntarily mobile. Mastercard, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir, and Facebook have all entered the field, through private ventures as well as controversial partnerships with some of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies.
In 2015, all the UN’s member states committed to providing “legal identity for all” by 2030 as part of its Sustainable Development Goals. As a result, virtually every major aid-granting agency is either incubating, researching, or piloting a digital identity program.
Et hop, Palantir dans la boucle... humanitaire, tant qu’à faire.
The UN’s World Food Programme recently announced a new $45 million, five-year collaboration with Palantir that will use the Palo Alto firm’s “range of digital analytical solutions” to streamline and track the dispersal of humanitarian aid. The move was immediately met with skepticism among privacy advocates: a group of more than 60 human rights activists sent an open letter to WFP executives, expressing deep concern over the partnership and urging WFP leaders to “reconsider the terms and scope of the agreement with Palantir.”
They argued that not only would the partnership threaten to “seriously damage the reputation of the WFP,” but also that it could “seriously undermine the rights of 90 million people the WFP serves.” The controversy, researchers said, should be a “wake-up call” to the humanitarian community about the dangers of relying on digital data and entrusting their networks to third parties.
In a statement responding to these concerns, the WFP wrote that a series of “checks and balances” would protect private, identifying data, and that Palantir would not be able to use it for commercial gain. In an e-mail to MIT Technology Review, a WFP representative wrote that the agency has its own solutions to managing refugee identities, and that “the WFP-Palantir partnership does not focus on areas that require personally identifiable information (PII) of beneficiaries, nor does it focus on digital identity. No PII data is ever shared with Palantir or with any other partner. Only anonymized/encrypted information is used to analyze allocation of assistance to ensure complete privacy and security for the people we serve.”
Yet as researcher Faine Greenwood said in Slate, the WFP may be overestimating its ability to protect and anonymize sensitive data.
Expérimenter la blockchain sur des populations fragilisées comme les Rohynga, quelle bonne idée.
Both the promise and the risks of digital identity have already become evident in the work of a small army of blockchain and biometric startups. The immutable, decentralized nature of the blockchain has led a number of startups to pin their hopes on the emerging technology as a solution to the problem of storing and protecting sensitive information, including biometric data.
Passbase, which bills itself as “the first self-sovereign identity platform backed by verified government documents, linked social media accounts, and biometric signatures,” has raised seed funding from Alphabet and Stanford, and currently accepts documents from over 150 countries. Vinny Lingham, cofounder of the blockchain identity verification company Civic, goes so far as to claim that his company can help save democracy. WFP.s Building Blocks program also uses blockchain inside a refugee camp in Jordan.
Maybe blockchain will save democracy. Or maybe it will make future political crises even worse. The Rohingya Project distributed blockchain-based digital identity cards to Rohingya refugees in order to help them access financial, legal, and medical services. It is, on the face of things, an altruistic, forward-looking humanitarian initiative. But uploading highly sensitive, identifying biometric information to an immutable ledger and testing emerging technology on a vulnerable population means exposing that population to untold risks.
Data breaches, like those that have repeatedly exposed personal information in India’s Aadhaar biometric identification program, have exposed at-risk populations to new dangers. And they are all too common: in March, a data breach at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency exposed the personal information of 2.3 million survivors of American wildfires and hurricanes, leaving them vulnerable to identity fraud. In April, Kaspersky Labs reported that over 60,000 user digital identities could be bought for $5 to $200 via a dark-net marketplace. No technology is invulnerable to error, and no database, no matter how secure, is 100% protected from a breach.
As digital identification technologies flood into the market, it is difficult to imagine predicting or preventing the disruptions—good and bad—that they will cause. Blockchain and biometric technologies have touched off a critical reevaluation of the most existential questions: What determines identity, and how many identities can one person claim? What will it mean when official identification eventually—inevitably—is no longer the purview of the nation-state?
“Everybody deserves to have formal identification that they can use to exert their rights,” says Brandie Nonnecke, director of UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab, which works on technology development in the social interest.
But the rush of public and private digital identity programs has already begun to complicate fundamental questions about identification, registration, citizenship, and belonging. Even the simplest questions about digital identity have yet to be determined, Nonnecke says: “Do you have one identity, or do you have multiple identities across institutions? Is that a safeguard, or does it create more risk?”
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What you don’t know about your health data will make you sick
▻https://www.fastcompany.com/90317471/what-you-dont-know-about-your-health-data-privacy-will-make-you-sickChances are, at least one of you is being monitored by a third party like data analytics giant Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, Inc. Since 1993, it’s captured medical data—lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions, and more—from 150 million Americans. That’s almost half of the U.S. population.
“They’re the ones that are tapping the data. They’re in there. I can’t remove them from my own health insurance contracts. So I’m stuck. It’s just part of the system,” says Joel Winston, an attorney who specializes in privacy and data protection law.
Healthcare providers can legally sell their data to a now-dizzyingly vast spread of companies, who can use it to make decisions, from designing new drugs to pricing your insurance rates to developing highly targeted advertising.
Yet not all health-related information is protected by privacy rules. Companies can now derive insights about your health from growing piles of so-called “alternative” data that fall outside of HIPAA. This data—what some researchers refer to as your “shadow health record”—can include credit scores, court documents, smartphone locations, sub-prime auto loans, search histories, app activity, and social media posts.
Your health data can be deployed in alarming ways, privacy experts say. Insurance companies can raise your rate based on a photo on your Instagram feed. Digital advertisers can fold shadow health data into ads that target or discriminate against you. It can even seem invasive and predatory. One trend among personal injury lawyers, for example, is geo-targeted ads to patients’ phones in emergency rooms.
Uniquely valuable health data is also increasingly the target of hackers, ransomware attacks, breaches, or what some patients call just plain shadiness, which has led to litigation and can ultimately further undermine trust in the healthcare system. A 2017 breach at a New York hospital leaked sensitive information about more than 7,000 patients, including addiction histories, medical diagnoses, and reports of sexual assault and domestic violence. Criminals can use that kind of data to commit identity and insurance fraud.
“There’s a great deal of trust that’s placed in our interactions with doctors and healthcare institutions,” says Mary Madden, research lead at Data & Society, who studies consumer and health privacy. “The current process of seeking consent for data collection and use in many health settings is often treated as an administrative afterthought, rather than a meaningful exchange that makes patients feel empowered and informed.”
Your health-related data are compiled into a specialty report akin to the consumer credit reports made famous—or infamous—by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Insurers claim these reports are crucial to evaluating and pricing risk, and they can use this data to raise your rate, or to deny your application entirely. If your application is rejected—it’s called an “adverse event”—you are legally entitled to receive a copy of your specialty report and to potentially dispute an error.
“Many people don’t understand that the data from a Fitbit or other health wearable or health device can actually be sold and is, in fact, today being sold. It is being sold for behavioral analytics, for advertising targeting. People don’t understand that is happening,” she told the committee. (After this story was published, a Fitbit spokesperson sent Fast Company a statement saying that the company does not “sell customer personal data, and we do not share customer personal information except in the limited circumstances described in our privacy policy.”)
The demand for all this data is rising, as it has for years. The health data market was approximately $14.25 billion in 2017, according to BIS Research. The firm predicts that in just under seven years—by the end of 2025—the market will grow nearly five times bigger, to $68.75 billion.
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How does Tor actually work?
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-does-tor-really-work-5909b9bd232c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4The United States Naval Research Laboratory developed The Onion Routing Protocol (T0r) to project U.S. intelligence communications online. Ironically, Tor has seen widespread use by everyone — even those organisations which the U.S. Navy fights against.You may know Tor as the hometown of online illegal activities, a place where you can buy any drug you want, a place for all things illegal. Tor is much larger than what the media makes it out to be. According to Kings College much of Tor is legal.This article doesn’t talk about what’s on Tor, or how to access Tor. This article gives a technical rundown of how the technology works, without speculation and without exaggeration of what Tor is.The core principle of Tor is onion routing which is a technique for anonymous & secure communication (...)
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Kenya: LGBTI Refugees Detained after Delay of Ruling on Decriminalising Homosexuality
20 refugees who arrived to Kenya on February 22, the day of an expected land-mark ruling on decriminalising homosexual conduct by the High Court, have been detained and are suffering severe abuse.
The ruling by the High Court was postponed last minute and the group of refugees who had arrived to escape repression and abuse in other African countries were instead arrested on charges of “creating a public nuisance, trespassing, and defecating in public,” near United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) headquarters in Nairobi.
Six detainees in the men-only prison identify as trans women. The Washington Post was allowed interviews with five of the detainees who revealed that they were facing sexual abuse and violence from prison guards and other inmates. According to UNHCR spokeswoman Yvonne Ndege, the agency is looking into the allegations and plans to visit the detainees.
Following attacks on LGBT refugees in December 2018 in the Kakuma camp injuring 20 people UNHCR relocated victims to safe-houses in Nairobi. According to a UNHCR spokeswoman quoted at the time: “the Kakuma context does not provide a safe environment for LGBTI refugees and asylum-seekers.”
The annual report (▻https://ilga.org/downloads/ILGA_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_2019_light.pdf) on State Sponsored Homophobia from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) states on the situation in East Africa: “continued criminalization of private consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex, as well as the outlawing of diverse gender expressions are indicators of States’ interest to entrench discrimination and violence based on real or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”
▻https://www.ecre.org/kenya-lgbti-refugees-detained-after-delay-of-ruling-on-decriminalising-homosex
#Kenya #réfugiés #homosexualité #LGBT -
Interview with Senior #research Scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory: Dr. Leslie Smith
▻https://hackernoon.com/interview-with-senior-research-scientist-at-the-us-naval-research-laboraInterview with Senior Research Scientist at the United States Naval Research Laboratory: Dr. Leslie SmithPart 23 of The series where I interview my heroes.Today, I’m super excited to be talking to Dr. Leslie Smith.Dr. Leslie SmithI’m sure Leslie needs no introduction to our friends from the fast.ai community. For our readers from outside of fast.ai:Leslie is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at the Naval Center for Applied Research in AI, United States Naval Research Laboratory.His past research works include includes deep neural networks and reinforcement learning applied to robotics research. Prior to that, he has worked in the Maritime Surveillance Section.He has a background in Chemistry, he has done his Ph.D. in the Quantum Chemistry domain.His Research Objectives are to (...)
#machine-learning #fastai #deep-learning #artificial-intelligence
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Huntington Ingalls wins $15 billion deal for two aircraft carriers | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huntington-us-pentagon-idUSKCN1PP336The Pentagon said on Thursday it awarded Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc a $15.2 billion contract to build two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The U.S. Navy told lawmakers in December it intended to pursue a block purchase of two Ford-class aircraft carriers, a step officials have said could save billions of dollars as the Trump administration tries to expand the size of the fleet.
The Navy commissioned the first Ford-class aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in July 2017, three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The Ford cost about $13 billion.
The ships, which will be built at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia, are scheduled to be delivered in 2028 and 2032, Huntington Ingalls said.
The largest military shipbuilding company said the two-ship deal would save the Navy more than $4 billion.
15 milliards de dollars, un vrai prix d’ami !
À ce prix-là, tu avais le Gerald R. Ford (qui ne marche toujours pas,…)
J’te fais une ristourne supérieure à 4 milliards ! -
Israeli author Amos Oz dead at 79 | MEO
▻https://middle-east-online.com/en/israeli-author-amos-oz-dead-79La photo choisie pour illustrer une nécro sur Amos Oz dans une publication en ligne financée par les Emirats...
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ronnie barkan @ronnie_barkan | 29 déc.
▻https://twitter.com/ronnie_barkan/status/10788868731609128961/ Good riddance #AmosOz.
Oz was a leading apologist for mass-murder and #apartheid - all in the name of peace of course.
Below is a letter by authors and self-proclaimed leftists Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, which was sent in April 2010 to the UC Berkeley student senate.2/ The two have the gull to blame the Berkeley students of antisemitism, or at the very least allude to that, coz the student senate had voted to divest from American companies General Electric and United Technologies that supplied #apartheid Israel
▻https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U1Kmae17OsjXmD2Vb7IzN_aJGS3JLEQa/edit3/ with the means of destruction that were used during its assault on #Gaza the year before - massacring 1400 people, including over 350 children. The two low-lives, Oz and Yehoshua, blamed the students of antisemitism for what exactly?!
4/ For refusing to fund two American weapon manufacturers whose war machines were used for the massacre of children in the besieged #Gaza ghetto. In a way, their propaganda letter could not have been a more sinister & grotesque creation. Maybe they’re talented writers after all!
5/ Want another of many such examples?
As a dedicated apologist for Israeli mass-murder, #Oz begins the Deutsche Welle interview of 2014, during another onslaught on #Gaza, with these outrageous lies:6/ Amos Oz: I would like to begin the interview in a very unusual way: by presenting one or two questions to your readers and listeners. May I do that?
Deutsche Welle: Go ahead!
Amos Oz: Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony,7/ puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?
Amos Oz: Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?8/ These are your peaceniks, Israel. Their sheer supremacy and moral depravity will not be missed.
NOTE: If you were offended by the above text - still desperately clinging on to the notion that Oz represents the good side of humanity -9/ ask yourself whether you’d be upset w/ writing about the demise of an outright fascist? Oz and his ilk represent, as far as I’m concerned, a far greater danger than the Liebermans & Netanyahus of the world, and your attempt to see him as any different exactly proves my point.
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Amos Oz : le mythe tenace du sioniste libéral
Ben White – 1 janvier 2019
▻https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinions/amos-oz-le-mythe-tenace-du-sioniste-lib-ral-2041749222 -
The Prophet Amos Oz Was the Last of the Moral Zionists
Amos railed against the occupation from the very beginning, even if he took a symmetrical approach to the Israelis and Palestinians – a symmetry that never existed
Gideon Levy – Dec 30, 2018 2:50 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-prophet-amos-oz-was-the-last-of-the-moral-zionists-1.6788916
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The Ghost of King Leopold II Still Haunts Us – Media Diversified
▻https://mediadiversified.org/2015/04/20/the-ghost-of-king-leopold-ii-still-haunts-us-belgium-colonization-
Merci Meta pour le signalement !
In an article entitled “The Early Spread and Epidemic Ignition of HIV-1 in Human Populations” in the magazine Science in October 2014, Nuno Faria and his fellow researchers revealed the location of Ground Zero for one of the world’s most deadly infectious diseases—HIV. They discovered that HIV-1 originated in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and explain that the deadly virus spread throughout the Congo via the railroad network. HIV-1 was subsequently transmitted by Haitian professionals back to Haiti and then to the United States (1).
Faria and colleagues presented their research findings as follows:
Our estimated location of pandemic origin explains the observation that Kinshasa exhibits more contemporary HIV-1 genetic diversity than anywhere else. It clarifies why the oldest known HIV-1 sequences were sourced from this city and why several early cases indicative of AIDS are linked to Kinshasa (p. 57).
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ça me rappelle le livre « Les fantômes du roi Léopold » que j’avais lu il y a 20 ans...
Les Fantômes du Roi Léopold, un #holocauste oublié« Le remarquable document d’Hochschild dépasse toutes les autres études sur le Congo. Il montre comment l’Europe entière - et les États-Unis - s’est rendue complice de l’holocauste perpétré par le roi Léopold sur le peuple congolais. », Nadine Gordimer.
« Un ouvrage exceptionnel, profondément stimulant, qui m’a bouleversé comme l’avait fait en son temps Au cœur des ténèbres, et pour la même raison : parce qu’il révèle les horreurs cachées commises au Congo. Passé obscur, sur lequel Hochschild fait la lumière, c’est notre passé à tous. », Paul Theroux.
Dans les années 1880, alors que l’Europe se lance dans la colonisation de l’Afrique, le roi #Léopold_II de #Belgique s’empare, à titre personnel, des immenses territoires traversés par le fleuve Congo, afin de faire main basse sur ses prodigieuses richesses. Réduite en esclavage, la population subit travail forcé, tortures et mutilations, au point qu’on estime à 10 millions le nombre d’Africains qui périrent. Tandis que Léopold II continue de cultiver sa réputation d’humaniste, des voix commencent à dénoncer ce crime de masse, donnant naissance au premier mouvement international de défense des droits de l’homme du XXe siècle…
Avec une force d’évocation exceptionnelle, Adam Hochschild peint le portrait d’un roi mégalomane et décrit les combats de ses opposants, la vie des témoins - explorateurs, missionnaires - et celle des victimes. S’il révèle un épisode tragique de l’histoire contemporaine, il dissèque aussi l’ensemble du système colonial, offrant des clés indispensables à la compréhension d’une actualité dramatique.
▻https://www.librairiedialogues.fr/livre/852912-les-fantomes-du-roi-leopold-un-holocauste-oublie-adam-hochCe livre m’avait profondément marquée...
#livre -
Et ce reportage passé sur arte sur la question #sida et #HIV, en lien avec le #colonialisme et la #colonisation :
Sida, un héritage de l’époque colonialeDes scientifiques mènent une enquête au coeur de l’Afrique, à la recherche des origines du VIH. Un documentaire captivant, diffusé à l’occasion de la Journée mondiale de lutte contre le sida, le 1er décembre.
Il est l’un des plus grands tueurs de la planète. Avec plus de 36 millions de morts et près de 37 millions de personnes infectées, le sida constitue à ce jour la pandémie la plus destructrice de l’histoire contemporaine. Afin de mieux la connaître, une équipe de scientifiques part sur les traces de son origine, au cœur de l’Afrique, dans l’ancien Congo belge. En parvenant à mettre la main sur d’anciens prélèvements humains contenant le virus, ils arrivent à la conclusion que la première transmission du sida – du chimpanzé à l’homme – se situe autour de l’an 1908, des décennies avant les premiers cas connus.
Catastrophe en germe
Les chercheurs ne s’arrêtent pas là. Ils se plongent dans l’histoire coloniale du Congo pour comprendre comment le VIH a pu se propager. Au début du XXe siècle, soucieuses de ne pas perdre la main-d’oeuvre indigène qu’elles exploitent, les autorités coloniales lancent des campagnes massives de vaccination contre la maladie du sommeil, où l’on a souvent recours à des seringues mal stérilisées. De même, la syphilis, qui se répand alors, augmente considérablement les risques de transmission du sida entre les hommes. Parallèlement, le chemin de fer se développe dans le pays car Kinshasa est une plaque tournante de l’industrie minière. Le virus devient mouvant. Lors de l’indépendance du Congo, en 1960, la pandémie couve. Dans les années 1970, les ravages successifs de la guerre civile, puis les errements du régime prédateur de Mobutu, qui ruine l’économie, créent les conditions chaotiques d’une propagation fulgurante du virus...
Carl Gierstorfer signe un documentaire passionnant, où l’enquête scientifique se mêle à des images d’archives, parfois dures, témoignant de la cruauté et des ravages de la colonisation. Il rappelle également qu’à l’heure où les maladies infectieuses se développent dans le monde entier, les conditions d’une nouvelle pandémie sont peut-être à nouveau réunies.►https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/051599-000-A/sida-un-heritage-de-l-epoque-coloniale
#film_documentaire #documentaire #film #épidémies #santé #maladie
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Je viens de voir qu’il y a une « Avenue Léopold II » dans le 16e arrondissement et je me demande « quelle est la date limite » : on aurait pas idée de nommer une rue Pol Pot, Pétain, Staline ou Hitler, mais Léopold II ne pose pas de problème. Date limite, vers 1900 ?
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/a7lg7ep2d1fny73/Capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202018-12-07%20%C3%A0%2013.20.05.png?dl=0 
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/fkcqpubalmidqb5/Capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202018-12-07%20%C3%A0%2013.21.21.png?dl=0
Il y a des exceptions comme Robespierre qui a ses rus en province ou en banlieue mais pas à Paris parce que c’était un personnage « assoiffé de sang » :
Une rue Robespierre dans la capitale, par Alexis Corbière
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/06/27/une-rue-robespierre-dans-la-capitale_1541487_3232.html
❝Une rue Robespierre dans la capitale, par Alexis Corbière
Robespierre n’était pas au sein du Comité de salut public le personnage « assoiffé de sang » qu’un vulgaire révisionnisme historique a dépeint par la suite.
Publié le 27 juin 2011 à 13h35 - Mis à jour le 27 juin 2011
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Apparemment Rue de Pétin existe... mon étudiant a contrôlé l’autre jour...
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@cdb_77 c’est peut-être un autre pétin ? si c’est la bonne orthographe sinon c’est Pétain
▻https://www.france24.com/fr/20130409-france-derniere-rue-marechal-petain-debaptisee-belrain
Le petit village de Belrain, dans la Meuse (Est), possédait la dernière rue en France dénommée en hommage au Maréchal-Pétain. Sur décision de ses élus, le lieu a été débaptisé et attend son nouveau nom. La dernière « rue du Maréchal-Pétain », en France, a été débaptisée.
Seulement en 2013 !
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• il y a une rue de Petin à Baileux, juste à côté des bières de Chimay dans le Hainaut belge,
• il y a une rue du Petin à Verchin, sur les bords de la Lys dans le Pas-de-Calais
• il y a un Henri Pétin (et quelques autres cf. les homonymes en haut de page)
Henri Pétin — Wikipédia
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_P%C3%A9tinHenri Pétin est un homme politique français né le 16 avril 1870 à Paris et décédé le 20 janvier 1911 à La Seyne-sur-Mer (Var).
Biographie
Auteur de théâtre et de chansons sous le pseudonyme d’Henri de Mamers, il est aussi à la tête d’une maison de commerce en métaux à La Seyne-sur-Mer et se lance dans la construction navale. Maire de La Seyne-sur-Mer de 1904 à 1911, conseiller général, il est député du Var de 1909 à 1910, siégeant au groupe radical-socialiste.
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Bonne nouvelle : mort d’un pourri ! par LBE – Le Libre Penseur
▻https://www.lelibrepenseur.org/bonne-nouvelle-mort-dun-pourri-par-lbeÀ la une
Bonne nouvelle : mort d’un pourri ! par LBE
Le Bouc Émissaire, 4 heures de cela 0 1 min de lecture 905
Je n’ai pas pour habitude de me réjouir du décès d’une personne, mais aujourd’hui je ne peux faire autrement. Le criminel de guerre, la raclure de l’humanité, le destructeur du Moyen-Orient, le tueur de musulmans Georges Bush sénior vient de mourir. J’irais avec plaisir pisser sur sa tombe.J’attends avec impatience la mort de son abruti de fils W, il a esquivé une chaussure, il n’esquivera pas la mort. Vivement que Collins Powell et sa fausse fiole d’Anthrax qui a permis la destruction de l’Irak pour la deuxième fois rende l’âme. Sans oublier la momie Madeleine Albright qui trouvait que la mort de 500 000 enfants irakiens due à l’embargo des USA concernant les médicaments et les produits de nécessité était le prix à payer et trouvait ça normal.
United States of America : premier producteur mondial de crapules scélérates qui hélas ne seront jamais jugées pour crime contre l’humanité. On laisse les dictateurs africains (merci au réseau Foccart et à la Françafrique) ou les généraux des Balkans (les employés US) se faire juger à leurs places à la parodie de justice qu’est le Tribunal pénal international de La Haye.
Ce soir un criminel n’est plus de ce monde et c’est une bonne chose. Paix aux âmes des millions d’Afghans, d’Irakiens et autres habitants du M.O qu’il a fait assassiner.
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Pour Gibraltar, l’Espagne menace de bloquer l’accord sur le Brexit
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/referendum-sur-le-brexit/article/2018/11/21/pour-gibraltar-l-espagne-menace-de-bloquer-l-accord-sur-le-brexit_5386401_48
A la frontière entre l’Espagne et Gibraltar, en 2017.
JORGE GUERRERO / AFPMadrid exige un droit de veto sur le statut du territoire britannique, dernier caillou dans la chaussure de Michel Barnier dans les négociations sur le Brexit.
« A ce jour, je regrette de dire qu’un pays aussi proeuropéen que l’Espagne votera, s’il n’y a pas de changement, non au Brexit. » Le président du gouvernement espagnol, le socialiste Pedro Sanchez, a été on ne peut plus clair, mardi 20 novembre : si l’accord de sortie du Royaume-Uni de l’Union européenne ne précise pas noir sur blanc que le sort de Gibraltar, une fois le Brexit consommé, devra être traité à part, lors de discussions bilatérales entre Madrid et Londres, l’Espagne s’opposera au texte.
[…]
Un protocole spécial sur Gibraltar a ainsi été joint à l’accord du Brexit, tout comme pour Chypre ou l’Irlande du Nord. Il garantit la libre circulation des 14 000 travailleurs transfrontaliers durant la période de transition, définit la procédure de négociation future entre Londres et Madrid, et prévoit déjà la création de trois commissions bilatérales pour aborder six grandes questions, des droits des travailleurs frontaliers à la lutte contre la contrebande de tabac, en passant par la pêche, l’environnement ou la coopération fiscale, policière et douanière. A priori, Madrid a donc obtenu gain de cause.
Mais l’article 184, ajouté tardivement au brouillon de l’accord du Brexit, a provoqué une certaine inquiétude en Espagne. L’avocat général de l’Etat estime en effet que derrière ce texte confus de six lignes, qui lie la « relation future » de l’UE et le Royaume-Uni à la « déclaration politique » qui doit encore être prononcée et à des négociations communes, il est possible que soit inclus implicitement Gibraltar.-
Pour ceux qui se demanderaient, l’article 184 (l’avant-dernier du projet, juste avant celui qui traite de l’entrée en vigueur de l’accord).
▻https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/draft_withdrawal_agreement_0.pdf
ARTICLE 184 - Negotiations on the future relationship
The Union and the United Kingdom shall use their best endeavours, in good faith and in full respect of their respective legal orders, to take the necessary steps to negotiate expeditiously the agreements governing their future relationship referred to in the political declaration of [DD/MM/2018] and to conduct the relevant procedures for the ratification or conclusion of those agreements, with a view to ensuring that those agreements apply, to the extent possible, as from the end of the transition period.
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Detainees Evacuated out of Libya but Resettlement Capacity Remains Inadequate
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (#UNHCR) 262 migrants detained in Libya were evacuated to Niger on November 12- the largest evacuation from Libya carried out to date. In addition to a successful airlift of 135 people in October this year, this brings the total number of people evacuated to more than 2000 since December 2017. However Amnesty International describes the resettlement process from Niger as slow and the number of pledges inadequate.
The evacuations in October and November were the first since June when the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) centre in Niger reached its full capacity of 1,536 people, which according to Amnesty was a result of a large number of people “still waiting for their permanent resettlement to a third country.”
57,483 refugees and asylum seekers are registered by UNHCR in Libya; as of October 2018 14,349 had agreed to Voluntary Humanitarian Return. Currently 3,886 resettlement pledges have been made by 12 states, but only 1,140 have been resettled.
14,595 people have been intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and taken back to Libya, however it has been well documented that their return is being met by detention, abuse, violence and torture. UNHCR recently declared Libya unsafe for returns amid increased violence in the capital, while Amnesty International has said that “thousands of men, women and children are trapped in Libya facing horrific abuses with no way out”.
In this context, refugees and migrants are currently refusing to disembark in Misrata after being rescued by a cargo ship on November 12, reportedly saying “they would rather die than be returned to land”. Reuters cited one Sudanese teenager on board who stated “We agree to go to any place but not Libya.”
UNHCR estimates that 5,413 refugees and migrants remain detained in #Directorate_for_Combatting_Illegal_Migration (#DCIM) centres and the UN Refugee Agency have repetedly called for additional resettlement opportunities for vulnerable persons of concern in Libya.
▻https://www.ecre.org/detainees-evacuated-out-of-libya-but-resettlement-capacity-remains-inadequate
#réinstallation #Niger #Libye #évacuation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #HCR #détention #centres_de_détention #Emergency_Transit_Mechanism (#ETM)-
ET DES INFORMATIONS PLUS ANCIENNES DANS LE FIL CI-DESSOUS
Libya: evacuations to Niger resumed – returns from Niger begun
After being temporarily suspended in March as the result of concerns from local authorities on the pace of resettlement out of Niger, UNHCR evacuations of vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers from Libya through the Emergency Transit Mechanism has been resumed and 132 vulnerable migrants flown to the country. At the same time the deportation of 132 Sudanese nationals from Niger to Libya has raised international concern.
Niger is the main host for refugees and asylum seekers from Libya evacuated by UNHCR. Since the UN Refugee Agency began evacuations in cooperation with EU and Libyan authorities in November 2017, Niger has received 1,152 of the 1,474 people evacuated in total. While UNHCR has submitted 475 persons for resettlement a modest 108 in total have been resettled in Europe. According to UNHCR the government in Niger has now offered to host an additional 1,500 refugees from Libya through the Emergency Transit Mechanism and upon its revival and the first transfer of 132 refugees to Niger, UNHCR’s Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean Situation, Vincent Cochetel stated: “We now urgently need to find resettlement solutions for these refugees in other countries.”
UNHCR has confirmed the forced return by authorities in Niger of at least 132 of a group of 160 Sudanese nationals arrested in the migrant hub of Agadez, the majority after fleeing harsh conditions in Libya. Agadez is known as a major transit hub for refugees and asylum seekers seeking passage to Libya and Europe but the trend is reversed and 1,700 Sudanese nationals have fled from Libya to Niger since December 2017. In a mail to IRIN News, Human Rights Watch’s associate director for Europe and Central Asia, Judith Sunderland states: “It is inhuman and unlawful to send migrants and refugees back to Libya, where they face shocking levels of torture, sexual violence, and forced labour,” with reference to the principle of non-refoulement.
According to a statement released by Amnesty International on May 16: “At least 7,000 migrants and refugees are languishing in Libyan detention centres where abuse is rife and food and water in short supply. This is a sharp increase from March when there were 4,400 detained migrants and refugees, according to Libyan officials.”
▻https://www.ecre.org/libya-evacuations-to-niger-resumed-returns-from-niger-begun
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Libya: return operations running but slow resettlement is jeopardizing the evacuation scheme
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) 15.000 migrants have been returned from Libya to their country of origin and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has assisted in the evacuation of more than 1,300 refugees from Libya thereby fulfilling the targets announced at the AU-EU-UN Taskforce meeting in December 2017. However, a modest 25 of the more than 1000 migrants evacuated to Niger have been resettled to Europe and the slow pace is jeopardizing further evacuations.
More than 1000 of the 1300 migrants evacuated from Libya are hosted by Niger and Karmen Sakhr, who oversees the North Africa unit at the UNHCR states to the EU Observer that the organisation: “were advised that until more people leave Niger, we will no longer be able to evacuate additional cases from Libya.”
During a meeting on Monday 5 March with the Civil Liberties Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee MEPs, members of the Delegation for relations with Maghreb countries, Commission and External Action Service representatives on the mistreatment of migrants and refugees in Libya, and arrangements for their resettlement or return, UNHCR confirmed that pledges have been made by France, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Malta as well as unspecified non-EU countries but that security approvals and interviewing process of the cases is lengthy resulting in the modest number of resettlements, while also warning that the EU member states need to put more work into resettlement of refugees, and that resettlement pledges still fall short of the needs. According to UNHCR 430 pledges has been made by European countries.
An estimated 5000 people are in government detention and an unknown number held by private militias under well documented extreme conditions.
▻https://www.ecre.org/libya-return-operations-running-but-slow-resettlement-is-jeopardizing-the-evac
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Libya: migrants and refugees out by plane and in by boat
The joint European Union (EU), African Union (AU) and United Nations (UN) Task Force visited Tripoli last week welcoming progress made evacuating and returning migrants and refugees out of Libya. EU has announced three new programmes, for protecting migrants and refugees in Libya and along the Central Mediterranean Route, and their return and reintegration. Bundestag Research Services and NGOs raise concerns over EU and Member State support to Libyan Coast Guard.
Representatives of the Task Force, created in November 2017, met with Libyan authorities last week and visited a detention centres for migrants and a shelter for internally displaced people in Tripoli. Whilst they commended progress on Voluntary Humanitarian Returns, they outlined a number of areas for improvement. These include: comprehensive registration of migrants at disembarkation points and detention centres; improving detention centre conditions- with a view to end the current system of arbitrary detention; decriminalizing irregular migration in Libya.
The three new programmes announced on Monday, will be part of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. €115 million will go towards evacuating 3,800 refugees from Libya, providing protection and voluntary humanitarian return to 15,000 migrants in Libya and will support the resettlement of 14,000 people in need of international protection from Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. €20 million will be dedicated to improving access to social and protection services for vulnerable migrants in transit countries in the Sahel region and the Lake Chad basin. €15 million will go to supporting sustainable reintegration for Ethiopian citizens.
A recent report by the Bundestag Research Services on SAR operations in the Mediterranean notes the support for the Libyan Coast Guard by EU and Member States in bringing refugees and migrants back to Libya may be violating the principle of non-refoulement as outlined in the Geneva Convention: “This cooperation must be the subject of proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights, because the people who are being forcibly returned with the assistance of the EU are being inhumanely treated, tortured or killed.” stated Andrej Hunko, European policy spokesman for the German Left Party (die Linke). A joint statement released by SAR NGO’s operating in the Mediterranean calls on the EU institutions and leaders to stop the financing and support of the Libyan Coast Guard and the readmissions to a third country which violates fundamental human rights and international law.
According to UNHCR, there are currently 46,730 registered refugees and asylum seekers in Libya. 843 asylum seekers and refugees have been released from detention so far in 2018. According to IOM 9,379 people have been returned to their countries of origin since November 2017 and 1,211 have been evacuated to Niger since December 2017.
▻https://www.ecre.org/libya-migrants-and-refugees-out-by-plane-and-in-by-boat
Complément de Emmanuel Blanchard (via la mailing-list Migreurop):
Selon le HCR, il y aurait actuellement environ 6000 personnes détenues dans des camps en Libye et qui seraient en attente de retour ou de protection (la distinction n’est pas toujours très claire dans la prose du HCR sur les personnes à « évacuer » vers le HCR...). Ces données statistiques sont très fragiles et a priori très sous-estimées car fondées sur les seuls camps auxquels le HCR a accès.
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First group of refugees evacuated from new departure facility in Libya
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in coordination with Libyan authorities, evacuated 133 refugees from Libya to Niger today after hosting them at a Gathering and Departure Facility (GDF) in Tripoli which opened on Tuesday.
Most evacuees, including 81 women and children, were previously detained in Libya. After securing their release from five detention centres across Libya, including in Tripoli and areas as far as 180 kilometres from the capital, they were sheltered at the GDF until the arrangements for their evacuation were concluded.
The GDF is the first centre of its kind in Libya and is intended to bring vulnerable refugees to a safe environment while solutions including refugee resettlement, family reunification, evacuation to emergency facilities in other countries, return to a country of previous asylum, and voluntary repatriation are sought for them.
“The opening of this centre, in very difficult circumstances, has the potential to save lives. It offers immediate protection and safety for vulnerable refugees in need of urgent evacuation, and is an alternative to detention for hundreds of refugees currently trapped in Libya,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
The centre is managed by the Libyan Ministry of Interior, UNHCR and UNHCR’s partner LibAid. The initiative is one of a range of measures needed to offer viable alternatives to the dangerous boat journeys undertaken by refugees and migrants along the Central Mediterranean route.
With an estimated 4,900 refugees and migrants held in detention centres across Libya, including 3,600 in need of international protection, the centre is a critical alternative to the detention of those most vulnerable.
The centre, which has been supported by the EU and other donors, has a capacity to shelter up to 1,000 vulnerable refugees identified for solutions out of Libya.
At the facility, UNHCR and partners are providing humanitarian assistance such as accommodation, food, medical care and psychosocial support. Child friendly spaces and dedicated protection staff are also available to ensure that refugees and asylum-seekers are adequately cared for.
►https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2018/12/5c09033a4/first-group-refugees-evacuated-new-departure-facility-libya.html
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Migration : à Niamey, des migrants rapatriés de Libye protestent contre leurs conditions de séjour
Les manifestants protestent contre leur détention de vie qu’ils jugent « déplorables » et pour amplifier leurs mouvements, ils ont brandi des pancartes sur lesquelles ils ont écrit leurs doléances. Les migrants manifestant s’indignent également de leur séjour qui ne cesse de se prolonger, sans véritable alternatives ou visibilité sur leur situation. « Ils nous ont ramené de la Libye pour nous laisser à nous-mêmes ici », « on ne veut pas rester ici, laisser nous partir là où on veut », sont entre autres les slogans que les migrants ont scandés au cours de leur sit-in devant les locaux de l’agence onusienne. Plusieurs des protestataires sont venus à la manifestation avec leurs bagages et d’autres avec leurs différents papiers, qui attestent de leur situation de réfugiés ou demandeurs d’asiles.
La situation, quoique déplorable, n’a pas manqué de susciter divers commentaires. Il faut dire que depuis le début de l’opération de rapatriement des migrants en détresse de Libye, ils sont des centaines à vivre dans la capitale mais aussi à Agadez où des centres d’accueil sont mis à leurs dispositions par les agences onusiennes (UNHCR, OIM), avec la collaboration des autorités nigériennes. Un certain temps, leur présence de plus en plus massive dans divers quartiers de la capitale où des villas sont mises à leur disposition, a commencé à inquiéter les habitants sur d’éventuels risques sécuritaires.
Le gouvernement a signé plusieurs accords et adopté des lois pour lutter contre l’immigration clandestine. Il a aussi signé des engagements avec certains pays européens notamment la France et l’Italie, pour l’accueil temporaire des réfugiés en provenance de la Libye et en transit en attendant leur réinstallation dans leur pays ou en Europe pour ceux qui arrivent à obtenir le sésame pour l’entrée. Un geste de solidarité décrié par certaines ONG et que les autorités regrettent presque à demi-mot, du fait du non-respect des contreparties financières promises par les bailleurs et partenaires européens. Le pays fait face lui-même à un afflux de réfugiés nigérians et maliens sur son territoire, ainsi que des déplacés internes dans plusieurs régions, ce qui complique davantage la tâche dans cette affaire de difficile gestion de la problématique migratoire.
Le Niger accueille plusieurs centres d’accueil pour les réfugiés et demandeurs d’asiles rapatriés de Libye. Le 10 décembre dernier, l’OFPRA français a par exemple annoncé avoir achevé une nouvelle mission au Niger avec l’UNHCR, et qui a concerné 200 personnes parmi lesquelles une centaine évacuée de Libye. En novembre dernier, le HCR a également annoncé avoir repris les évacuations de migrants depuis la Libye, avec un contingent de 132 réfugiés et demandeurs d’asiles vers le Niger.
Depuis novembre 2017, le HCR a assuré avoir effectué vingt-trois (23) opérations d’évacuation au départ de la Libye et ce, « malgré d’importants problèmes de sécurité et les restrictions aux déplacements qui ont été imposées ». En tout, ce sont 2.476 réfugiés et demandeurs d’asile vulnérables qui ont pu être libérés et acheminés de la Libye vers le Niger (2.069), l’Italie (312) et la Roumanie (95).
https://www.actuniger.com/images/stories/articles/societe/migrants_devant_siege_UNHCR_BIS.jpg 
https://www.actuniger.com/images/stories/articles/societe/migrants_devant_siege_UNHCR.jpg
▻https://www.actuniger.com/societe/14640-migration-a-niamey-des-migrants-rapatries-de-libye-protestent-contrJe découvre ici que les évacuations se sont faites aussi vers l’#Italie et... la #Roumanie !
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Destination Europe: Evacuation. The EU has started resettling refugees from Libya, but only 174 have made it to Europe in seven months
As the EU sets new policies and makes deals with African nations to deter hundreds of thousands of migrants from seeking new lives on the continent, what does it mean for those following dreams northwards and the countries they transit through? From returnees in Sierra Leone and refugees resettled in France to smugglers in Niger and migrants in detention centres in Libya, IRIN explores their choices and challenges in this multi-part special report, Destination Europe.
Four years of uncontrolled migration starting in 2014 saw more than 600,000 people cross from Libya to Italy, contributing to a populist backlash that is threatening the foundations of the EU. Stopping clandestine migration has become one of Europe’s main foreign policy goals, and last July the number of refugees and migrants crossing the central Mediterranean dropped dramatically. The EU celebrated the reduced numbers as “good progress”.
But, as critics pointed out, that was only half the story: the decline, resulting from a series of moves by the EU and Italy, meant that tens of thousands of people were stuck in Libya with no way out. They faced horrific abuse, and NGOs and human rights organisations accused the EU of complicity in the violations taking place.
Abdu is one who got stuck. A tall, lanky teenager, he spent nearly two years in smugglers’ warehouses and official Libyan detention centres. But he’s also one of the lucky ones. In February, he boarded a flight to Niger run (with EU support) by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, to help some of those stranded in Libya reach Europe. Nearly 1,600 people have been evacuated on similiar flights, but, seven months on, only 174 have been resettled to Europe.
The evacuation programme is part of a €500-million ($620-million) effort to resettle 50,000 refugees over the next two years to the EU, which has a population of more than 500 million people. The target is an increase from previous European resettlement goals, but still only represents a tiny fraction of the need – those chosen can be Syrians in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon as well as refugees in Libya, Egypt, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia – countries that combined host more than 6.5 million refugees.
The EU is now teetering on the edge of a fresh political crisis, with boats carrying people rescued from the sea being denied ports of disembarkation, no consensus on how to share responsibility for asylum seekers and refugees within the continent, and increasing talk of further outsourcing the management of migration to African countries.
Against this backdrop, the evacuation and resettlement programme from Libya is perhaps the best face of European policy in the Mediterranean. But, unless EU countries offer more spots for refugees, it is a pathway to safety for no more than a small handful who get the luck of the draw. As the first evacuees adjust to their new lives in Europe, the overwhelming majority are left behind.
Four months after arriving in Niger, Abdu is still waiting to find out if and when he will be resettled to Europe. He’s still in the same state of limbo he was in at the end of March when IRIN met him in Niamey, the capital of Niger. At the time, he’d been out of the detention centre in Libya for less than a month and his arms were skeletally thin.
“I thought to go to Europe [and] failed. Now, I came to Niger…. What am I doing here? What will happen from here? I don’t know,” he said, sitting in the shade of a canopy in the courtyard of a UNHCR facility. “I don’t know what I will be planning for the future because everything collapsed; everything finished.”
Abdu’s storyBorn in Eritrea – one of the most repressive countries in the world – Abdu’s mother sent him to live in neighbouring Sudan when he was only seven. She wanted him to grow up away from the political persecution and shadow of indefinite military service that stifled normal life in his homeland.
But Sudan, where he was raised by his uncle, wasn’t much better. As an Eritrean refugee, he faced discrimination and lived in a precarious legal limbo. Abdu saw no future there. “So I decided to go,” he said.
Like so many other young Africans fleeing conflict, political repression, and economic hardship in recent years, he wanted to try to make it to Europe. But first he had to pass through Libya.
After crossing the border from Sudan in July 2016, Abdu, then 16 years old, was taken captive and held for 18 months. The smugglers asked for a ransom of $5,500, tortured him while his relatives were forced to listen on the phone, and rented him out for work like a piece of equipment.
Abdu tried to escape, but only found himself under the control of another smuggler who did the same thing. He was kept in overflowing warehouses, sequestered from the sunlight with around 250 other people. The food was not enough and often spoiled; disease was rampant; people died from malaria and hunger; one woman died after giving birth; the guards drank, carried guns, and smoked hashish, and, at the smallest provocation, spun into a sadistic fury. Abdu’s skin started crawling with scabies, his cheeks sank in, and his long limbs withered to skin and bones.
One day, the smuggler told him that, if he didn’t find a way to pay, it looked like he would soon die. As a courtesy – or to try to squeeze some money out of him instead of having to deal with a corpse – the smuggler reduced the ransom to $1,500.
Finally, Abdu’s relatives were able to purchase his freedom and passage to Europe. It was December 2017. As he finally stood on the seashore before dawn in the freezing cold, Abdu remembered thinking: “We are going to arrive in Europe [and] get protection [and] get rights.”
But he never made it. After nearly 24 hours at sea, the rubber dinghy he was on with around 150 other people was intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard, which, since October 2016, has been trained and equipped by the EU and Italy.
Abdu was brought back to the country he had just escaped and put in another detention centre.
This one was official – run by the Libyan Directorate for Combating Irregular Migration. But it wasn’t much different from the smuggler-controlled warehouses he’d been in before. Again, it was overcrowded and dirty. People were falling sick. There was no torture or extortion, but the guards could be just as brutal. If someone tried to talk to them about the poor conditions “[they are] going to beat you until you are streaming blood,” Abdu said.
Still, he wasn’t about to try his luck on his own again in Libya. The detention centre wasn’t suitable for human inhabitants, Abdu recalled thinking, but it was safer than anywhere he’d been in over a year. That’s where UNHCR found him and secured his release.
The lucky few
The small village of Thal-Marmoutier in France seems like it belongs to a different world than the teeming detention centres of Libya.
The road to the village runs between gently rolling hills covered in grapevines and winds through small towns of half-timbered houses. About 40 minutes north of Strasbourg, the largest city in the region of Alsace, bordering Germany, it reaches a valley of hamlets that disrupt the green countryside with their red, high-peaked roofs. It’s an unassuming setting, but it’s the type of place Abdu might end up if and when he is finally resettled.
In mid-March, when IRIN visited, the town of 800 people was hosting the first group of refugees evacuated from Libya.
It was unseasonably cold, and the 55 people housed in a repurposed section of a Franciscan convent were bundled in winter jackets, scarves, and hats. Thirty of them had arrived from Chad, where they had been long-time residents of refugee camps after fleeing Boko Haram violence or conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur. The remaining 25 – from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan – were the first evacuees from Libya. Before reaching France, they, like Abdu, had been flown to Niamey.
The extra stop is necessary because most countries require refugees to be interviewed in person before offering them a resettlement spot. The process is facilitated by embassies and consulates, but, because of security concerns, only one European country (Italy) has a diplomatic presence in Libya.
To resettle refugees stuck in detention centres, UNHCR needed to find a third country willing to host people temporarily, one where European resettlement agencies could carry out their procedures. Niger was the first – and so far only – country to volunteer.
“For us, it is an obligation to participate,” Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s influential interior minister, said when interviewed by IRIN in Niamey. Niger, the gateway between West Africa and Libya on the migration trail to Europe, is the top recipient of funds from the EU Trust Fund for Africa, an initiative launched in 2015 to “address the root causes of irregular migration”.
“It costs us nothing to help,” Bazoum added, referring to the evacuation programme. “But we gain a sense of humanity in doing so.”
‘Time is just running from my life’
The first evacuees landed in Niamey on 12 November. A little over a month later, on 19 December, they were on their way to France.
By March, they had been in Thal-Marmoutier for three months and were preparing to move from the reception centre in the convent to individual apartments in different cities.
Among them, several families with children had been living in Libya for a long time. But most of the evacuees were young women who had been imprisoned by smugglers and militias, held in official detention centres, or often both.
“In Libya, it was difficult for me,” said Farida, a 24-year-old aspiring runner from Ethiopia. She fled her home in 2016 because of the conflict between the government and the Oromo people, an ethnic group.
After a brief stay in Cairo, she and her husband decided to go to Libya because they heard a rumour that UNHCR was providing more support there to refugees. Shortly after crossing the border, Farida and her husband were captured by a militia and placed in a detention centre.
“People from the other government (Libya has two rival governments) came and killed the militiamen, and some of the people in the prison also died, but we got out and were taken to another prison,” she said. “When they put me in prison, I was pregnant, and they beat me and killed the child in my belly.”
Teyba, a 20-year-old woman also from Ethiopia, shared a similar story: “A militia put us in prison and tortured us a lot,” she said. “We stayed in prison for a little bit more than a month, and then the fighting started…. Some people died, some people escaped, and some people, I don’t know what happened to them.”
Three months at the reception centre in Thal-Marmoutier had done little to ease the trauma of those experiences. “I haven’t seen anything that made me laugh or that made me happy,” Farida said. “Up to now, life has not been good, even after coming to France.”
The French government placed the refugees in the reception centre to expedite their asylum procedures, and so they could begin to learn French.
Everyone in the group had already received 10-year residency permits – something refugees who are placed directly in individual apartments or houses usually wait at least six months to receive. But many of them said they felt like their lives had been put on pause in Thal-Marmoutier. They were isolated in the small village with little access to transportation and said they had not been well prepared to begin new lives on their own in just a few weeks time.
“I haven’t benefited from anything yet. Time is just running from my life,” said Intissar, a 35-year-old woman from Sudan.
A stop-start process
Despite their frustrations with the integration process in France, and the still present psychological wounds from Libya, the people in Thal-Marmoutier were fortunate to reach Europe.
By early March, more than 1,000 people had been airlifted from Libya to Niger. But since the first group in December, no one else had left for Europe. Frustrated with the pace of resettlement, the Nigerien government told UNHCR that the programme had to be put on hold.
“We want the flow to be balanced,” Bazoum, the interior minister, explained. “If people arrive, then we want others to leave. We don’t want people to be here on a permanent basis.”
Since then, an additional 148 people have been resettled to France, Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands, and other departures are in the works. “The situation is improving,” said Louise Donovan, a UNHCR communications officer in Niger. “We need to speed up our processes as much as possible, and so do the resettlement countries.”
A further 312 people were evacuated directly to Italy. Still, the total number resettled by the programme remains small. “What is problematic right now is the fact that European governments are not offering enough places for resettlement, despite continued requests from UNHCR,” said Matteo de Bellis, a researcher with Amnesty International.
Less than 1 percentGlobally, less than one percent of refugees are resettled each year, and resettlement is on a downward spiral at the moment, dropping by more than 50 percent between 2016 and 2017. The number of refugees needing resettlement is expected to reach 1.4 million next year, 17 percent higher than in 2018, while global resettlement places dropped to just 75,000 in 2017, UNHCR said on Monday.
The Trump administration’s slashing of the US refugee admissions programme – historically the world’s leader – means this trend will likely continue.
Due to the limited capacity, resettlement is usually reserved for people who are considered to be the most vulnerable.
In Libya alone, there are around 19,000 refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan registered with UNHCR – a number increasing each month – as well as 430,000 migrants and potential asylum seekers from throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Many have been subjected to torture, sexual violence, and other abuses. And, because they are in Libya irregularly, resettlement is often the only legal solution to indefinite detention.
In the unlikely scenario that all the sub-Saharan refugees in Libya were to be resettled, they would account for more than one third of the EU’s quota for the next two years. And that’s not taking into account people in Libya who may have legitimate grounds to claim asylum but are not on the official radar. Other solutions are clearly needed, but given the lack of will in the international community, it is unclear what those might be.
“The Niger mechanism is a patch, a useful one under the circumstance, but still a patch,” de Bellis, the Amnesty researcher, said. “There are refugees… who cannot get out of the detention centres because there are no resettlement places available to them.”
It is also uncertain what will happen to any refugees evacuated to Niger that aren’t offered a resettlement spot by European countries.
UNHCR says it is considering all options, including the possibility of integration in Niger or return to their countries of origin – if they are deemed to be safe and people agree to go. But resettlement is the main focus. In April, the pace of people departing for Europe picked up, and evacuations from Libya resumed at the beginning of May – ironically, the same week the Nigerien government broke new and dangerous ground by deporting 132 Sudanese asylum seekers who had crossed the border on their own back to Libya.
For the evacuees in Niger awaiting resettlement, there are still many unanswered questions.
As Abdu was biding his time back in March, something other than the uncertainty about his own future weighed on him: the people still stuck in the detention centres in Libya.
He had started his travels with his best friend. They had been together when they were first kidnapped and held for ransom. But Abdu’s friend was shot in the leg by a guard who accused him of stealing a cigarette. When Abdu tried to escape, he left his friend behind and hasn’t spoken to him or heard anything about him since.
“UNHCR is saying they are going to find a solution for me; they are going to help me,” Abdu said. “It’s okay. But what about the others?”
►https://www.irinnews.org/special-report/2018/06/26/destination-europe-evacuation
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Vincent Cochtel, 14.02.2019 :
159 refugees evacuated from #Libya to #Niger last night. For many, it may sound like a drop of water in an ocean of needs, for us, it is brining refugees to protection they cannot get in Libya & saving lives
▻https://twitter.com/cochetel/status/1095939544833277952 -
Hot Spots #1 : Niger, les évacués de l’enfer libyen
Fuir l’enfer libyen, sortir des griffes des trafiquants qui séquestrent pendant des mois leurs victimes dans des conditions inhumaines. C’est de l’autre côté du désert, au Niger, que certains migrants trouvent un premier refuge grâce à un programme d’#évacuation d’urgence géré par les Nations Unies depuis novembre 2017.
▻https://guitinews.fr/video/2019/03/12/hot-spots-1-niger-les-evacues-de-lenfer-libyen
Lien vers la #vidéo :
« Les gens qu’on évacue de la Libye, ce sont des individus qui ont subi une profonde souffrance. Ce sont tous des victimes de torture, des victimes de violences aussi sexuelles, il y a des femmes qui accouchent d’enfants fruits de cette violences sexuelles. » Alexandra Morelli, Représentante du HCR au Niger.
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Une trentaine de réfugiés érythréens ont quitté le camp du HCR à Niamey depuis lequel ils devaient être réinstallés en Europe.Tous évacués de l’enfer libyen,certains attendent depuis + d’un an de pouvoir reprendre leur vie
source : ▻https://twitter.com/JuliaPascualita/status/1177286212379435009
#limbe
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Suicide, mode d’emploi
▻http://www.dedefensa.org/article/suicide-mode-demploiSuicide, mode d’emploi
On s’arrêtera à ce remarquable texte d’Ivan Danilov, à partir d’un rapport du Pentagone dont l’analyste Andy Home, de Reuters, a obtenu une copie. Le rapport a été diffusé en septembre au sein de la hiérarchie du Pentagone, sous le titre : « Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States » ; il s’agit donc d’une estimation des capacités de la base industrielle et de la base technologique qui, aux USA, sont censées maintenir les forces armées en l’état d’une puissance jugée nécessaire pour la sécurité nationale de ce pays.
Les conclusions sont catastrophiques, notamment dans le chef de la disposition de très nombreux artefact et composants industriels et technologiques qui permettent aux systèmes d’armes de fonctionner ; (...)
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Pour la première fois, une université britannique désinvestit des entreprises fournissant l’armée israélienne
6 novembre | Middle East Monitor |Traduction CG pour l’AURDIP
▻https://www.aurdip.org/pour-la-premiere-fois-une.htmlDans ce qui est la première démarche de cette sorte, une université britannique a désinvesti des entreprises fournissant des équipements militaires à l’armée israélienne, à la suite d’une campagne des étudiants.
En fin de semaine dernière, l’université de Leeds a pris la décision de désinvestir de trois compagnies dont la complicité dans la violation des droits humains palestiniens a été avérée : Airbus, United Technologies et Keyence Corporation. Une quatrième compagnie – HSBC – est aussi sous examen des responsables d’investissement de l’université, parce qu’elle procurerait des crédits à Elbit Systems, Caterpillar et BAE Systems, qui toutes vendent des armes et des équipements militaires au gouvernement israélien.
La décision a été prise après la découverte que, pour cette seule année, l’université de Leeds avait investi 2,4 millions de livres (2,75 millions d’euros) dans ces compagnies. Le montant a été révélé par une requête d’août sous la loi Freedom of Information (« Liberté d’information »), par laquelle le public britannique peut demander à avoir accès à des informations détenues par les autorités publiques.
#BDS
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Uganda’s refugee policies: the history, the politics, the way forward
Uganda’s refugee policy urgently needs an honest discussion, if sustainable solutions for both refugees and host communities are to be found, a new policy paper by International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) reveals.
The paper, entitled Uganda’s refugee policies: the history, the politics, the way forward puts the “Ugandan model” in its historical and political context, shines a spotlight on its implementation gaps, and proposes recommendations for the way forward.
Uganda has since 2013 opened its borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees from South Sudan, bringing the total number of refugees to more than one million. It has been praised for its positive steps on freedom of movement and access to work for refugees, going against the global grain. But generations of policy, this paper shows, have only entrenched the sole focus on refugee settlements and on repatriation as the only viable durable solution. Support to urban refugees and local integration have been largely overlooked.
The Ugandan refugee crisis unfolded at the same time as the UN adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, and states committed to implement a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF). Uganda immediately seized this opportunity and adopted its own strategy to implement these principles. As the world looks to Uganda for best practices in refugee policy, and rightly so, it is vital to understand the gaps between rhetoric and reality, and the pitfalls of Uganda’s policy. This paper identifies the following challenges:
There is a danger that the promotion of progressive refugee policies becomes more rhetoric than reality, creating a smoke-screen that squeezes out meaningful discussion about robust alternatives. Policy-making has come at the expense of real qualitative change on the ground.
Refugees in urban areas continue to be largely excluded from any support due to an ongoing focus on refugee settlements, including through aid provision
Local integration and access to citizenship have been virtually abandoned, leaving voluntary repatriation as the only solution on the table. Given the protracted crises in South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, this remains unrealistic.
Host communities remain unheard, with policy conversations largely taking place in Kampala and Geneva. Many Ugandans and refugees have neither the economic resources nor sufficient political leverage to influence the policies that are meant to benefit them.The policy paper proposes a number of recommendations to improve the Ugandan refugee model:
First, international donors need to deliver on their promise of significant financial support.
Second, repatriation cannot remain the only serious option on the table. There has to be renewed discussion on local integration with Uganda communities and a dramatic increase in resettlement to wealthier states across the globe.
Third, local communities hosting refugees must be consulted and their voices incorporated in a more meaningful and systematic way, if tensions within and between communities are to be avoided.
Fourth, in order to genuinely enhance refugee self-reliance, the myth of the “local settlement” needs to be debunked and recognized for what it is: the ongoing isolation of refugees and the utilization of humanitarian assistance to keep them isolated and dependent on aid.
▻http://refugee-rights.org/uganda-refugee-policies-the-history-the-politics-the-way-forward
#modèle_ougandais #Ouganda #asile #migrations #réfugiésPour télécharger le #rapport:
▻http://refugee-rights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IRRI-Uganda-policy-paper-October-2018-Paper.pdf-
A New Deal for Refugees
Global policies that aim to resettle and integrate displaced populations into local societies is providing a way forward.
For many years now, groups that work with refugees have fought to put an end to the refugee camp. It’s finally starting to happen.
Camps are a reasonable solution to temporary dislocation. But refugee crises can go on for decades. Millions of refugees have lived in their country of shelter for more than 30 years. Two-thirds of humanitarian assistance — intended for emergencies — is spent on crises that are more than eight years old.
Camps are stagnant places. Refugees have access to water and medical care and are fed and educated, but are largely idle. “You keep people for 20 years in camps — don’t expect the next generation to be problem-free,” said Xavier Devictor, who advises the World Bank on refugee issues. “Keeping people in those conditions is not a good idea.” It’s also hard to imagine a better breeding ground for terrorists.
“As long as the system is ‘we feed you,’ it’s always going to be too expensive for the international community to pay for,” Mr. Devictor said. It’s gotten more and more difficult for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to raise that money; in many crises, the refugee agency can barely keep people from starving. It’s even harder now as nations turn against foreigners — even as the number of people fleeing war and violence has reached a record high.
At the end of last year, nearly 70 million people were either internally displaced in their own countries, or had crossed a border and become a refugee. That is the largest number of displaced in history — yes, more than at the end of World War II. The vast majority flee to neighboring countries — which can be just as badly off.
Last year, the United States accepted about 30,000 refugees.
Uganda, which is a global model for how it treats refugees, has one-seventh of America’s population and a tiny fraction of the wealth. Yet it took in 1,800 refugees per day between mid-2016 and mid-2017 from South Sudan alone. And that’s one of four neighbors whose people take refuge in Uganda.
Bangladesh, already the world’s most crowded major nation, has accepted more than a million Rohingya fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. “If we can feed 160 million people, then (feeding) another 500,00-700,000 …. We can do it. We can share our food,” Shiekh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister, said last year.
Lebanon is host to approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees, in addition to a half-million Palestinians, some of whom have been there for generations. One in three residents of Lebanon is a refugee.
The refugee burden falls heavily on a few, poor countries, some of them at risk of destabilization, which can in turn produce more refugees. The rest of the world has been unwilling to share that burden.
But something happened that could lead to real change: Beginning in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees crossed the Mediterranean in small boats and life rafts into Europe.
Suddenly, wealthy European countries got interested in fixing a broken system: making it more financially viable, more dignified for refugees, and more palatable for host governments and communities.
In September 2016, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution stating that all countries shared the responsibility of protecting refugees and supporting host countries. It also laid out a plan to move refugees out of camps into normal lives in their host nations.
Donor countries agreed they would take more refugees and provide more long-term development aid to host countries: schools, hospitals, roads and job-creation measures that can help both refugees and the communities they settle in. “It looked at refugee crises as development opportunities, rather than a humanitarian risk to be managed,” said Marcus Skinner, a policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee.
The General Assembly will vote on the specifics next month (whatever they come up with won’t be binding). The Trump administration pulled out of the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration, but so far it has not opposed the refugee agreement.
There’s a reason refugee camps exist: Host governments like them. Liberating refugees is a hard sell. In camps, refugees are the United Nations’ problem. Out of camps, refugees are the local governments’ problem. And they don’t want to do anything to make refugees comfortable or welcome.
Bangladesh’s emergency response for the Rohingya has been staggeringly generous. But “emergency” is the key word. The government has resisted granting Rohingya schooling, work permits or free movement. It is telling Rohingya, in effect, “Don’t get any ideas about sticking around.”
This attitude won’t deter the Rohingya from coming, and it won’t send them home more quickly. People flee across the closest border — often on foot — that allows them to keep their families alive. And they’ll stay until home becomes safe again. “It’s the simple practicality of finding the easiest way to refuge,” said Victor Odero, regional advocacy coordinator for East Africa and the Horn of Africa at the International Rescue Committee. “Any question of policies is a secondary matter.”
So far, efforts to integrate refugees have had mixed success. The first experiment was a deal for Jordan, which was hosting 650,000 Syrian refugees, virtually none of whom were allowed to work. Jordan agreed to give them work permits. In exchange, it got grants, loans and trade concessions normally available only to the poorest countries.
However, though the refugees have work permits, Jordan has put only a moderate number of them into jobs.
Any agreement should include the views of refugees from the start — the Jordan Compact failed to do this. Aid should be conditioned upon the right things. The deal should have measured refugee jobs, instead of work permits. Analysts also said the benefits should have been targeted more precisely, to reach the areas with most refugees.
To spread this kind of agreement to other nations, the World Bank established a $2 billion fund in July 2017. The money is available to very poor countries that host many refugees, such as Uganda and Bangladesh. In return, they must take steps to integrate refugees into society. The money will come as grants and zero interest loans with a 10-year grace period. Middle-income countries like Lebanon and Colombia would also be eligible for loans at favorable rates under a different fund.
Over the last 50 years, only one developing country has granted refugees full rights. In Uganda, refugees can live normally. Instead of camps there are settlements, where refugees stay voluntarily because they get a plot of land. Refugees can work, live anywhere, send their children to school and use the local health services. The only thing they can’t do is become Ugandan citizens.
Given the global hostility to refugees, it is remarkable that Ugandans still approve of these policies. “There have been flashes of social tension or violence between refugees and their hosts, mostly because of a scarcity of resources,” Mr. Odero said. “But they have not become widespread or protracted.”
This is the model the United Nations wants the world to adopt. But it is imperiled even in Uganda — because it requires money that isn’t there.
The new residents are mainly staying near the South Sudan border in Uganda’s north — one of the least developed parts of the country. Hospitals, schools, wells and roads were crumbling or nonexistent before, and now they must serve a million more people.
Joël Boutroue, the head of the United Nations refugee agency in Uganda, said current humanitarian funding covered a quarter of what the crisis required. “At the moment, not even half of refugees go to primary school,” he said. “There are around 100 children per classroom.”
Refugees are going without food, medical care and water. The plots of land they get have grown smaller and smaller.
Uganda is doing everything right — except for a corruption scandal. It could really take advantage of the new plan to develop the refugee zone. That would not only help refugees, it would help their host communities. And it would alleviate growing opposition to rights for refugees. “The Ugandan government is under pressure from politicians who see the government giving favored treatment to refugees,” Mr. Boutroue said. “If we want to change the perception of refugees from recipients of aid to economic assets, we have to showcase that refugees bring development.”
The World Bank has so far approved two projects — one for water and sanitation and one for city services such as roads and trash collection. But they haven’t gotten started yet.
Mr. Devictor said that tackling long-term development issues was much slower than providing emergency aid. “The reality is that it will be confusing and confused for a little while,” he said. Water, for example, is trucked in to Uganda’s refugee settlements, as part of humanitarian aid. “That’s a huge cost,” he said. “But if we think this crisis is going to last for six more months, it makes sense. If it’s going to last longer, we should think about upgrading the water system.”
Most refugee crises are not surprises, Mr. Devictor said. “If you look at a map, you can predict five or six crises that are going to produce refugees over the next few years.” It’s often the same places, over and over. That means developmental help could come in advance, minimizing the burden on the host. “Do we have to wait until people cross the border to realize we’re going to have an emergency?” he said.
Well, we might. If politicians won’t respond to a crisis, it’s hard to imagine them deciding to plan ahead to avert one. Political commitment, or lack of it, always rules. The world’s new approach to refugees was born out of Europe’s panic about the Syrians on their doorstep. But no European politician is panicking about South Sudanese or Rohingya refugees — or most crises. They’re too far away. The danger is that the new approach will fall victim to the same political neglect that has crippled the old one.
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/refugee-camps-integration.html
#Ouganda #modèle_ougandais #réinstallation #intégration
avec ce commentaire de #Jeff_Crisp sur twitter :
“Camps are stagnant places. Refugees have access to water and medical care and are fed and educated, but are largely idle.”
Has this prizewinning author actually been to a refugee camp? -
Appreciating Uganda’s ‘open door’ policy for refugees
While the rest of the world is nervous and choosing to take an emotional position on matters of forced migration and refugees, sometimes closing their doors in the face of people who are running from persecution, Uganda’s refugee policy and practice continues to be liberal, with an open door to all asylum seekers, writes Arthur Matsiko
▻http://thisisafrica.me/appreciating-ugandas-open-door-policy-refugees
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Is Uganda the best place to be a refugee?
The country’s unusual open policy gives refugees land, education and a chance to work – but instability in neighbouring nations is putting pressure on resources
▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/aug/20/is-uganda-the-best-place-to-be-a-refugee?CMP=share_btn_tw -
Why Uganda is a model for dealing with refugees
Uganda’s population of some 500,000 refugees can work, vote and start businesses
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/10/economist-explains-24?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed
#modèle -
Uganda farming classes transform refugees into entrepreneurs
Trained to expand their rice and pepper harvests, Congolese refugees in Uganda use earnings to start new businesses and become more self-reliant.
▻http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/10/581300654/uganda-farming-classes-transform-refugees-entrepreneurs.html?platform=hootsui
#agriculture -
Uganda : An Oasis Of Light For Refugees Fleeing War
PAGRINYA REFUGEE SETTLEMENT, Uganda – Ayen looked directly into my eyes as she gripped her children’s hands tightly, calmly recounting the moment she was forced to flee her home in South Sudan in the middle of the night after rebels murdered her husband and eldest son in her presence.
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/uganda-an-oasis-of-light-for-refugees-fleeing-war_us_581b5b06e4b0f1c
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The Reality Behind Uganda’s Refugee Model
Uganda has been hailed as a world leader in dealing with refugees. African Great Lakes expert David Kigozi argues that praise for progressive policies must be tempered with the harsher reality that many refugees actually experience in the country.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2017/05/30/the-reality-behind-ugandas-glowing-reputation
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Why a Ugandan farmer gave land to a refugee
In less than a year, a camp in northern Uganda has taken in more refugees than any other in the world, and all of them from war-torn South Sudan.
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40365249
#modèle_ougandais #terre -
Is Uganda the world’s best place for refugees?
Once refugees themselves, Ugandans look to ‘return the good’ to people fleeing war in South Sudan by offering land and help
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/01/is-uganda-worlds-best-place-for-refugees-south-sudan?platform=hootsuite
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The refugee scandal unfolding in Uganda
Uganda, the country with the world’s fastest growing refugee burden, is failing to secure the help it needs to care for those forced across the border from South Sudan by war and hunger.
►https://www.irinnews.org/analysis/2017/07/25/refugee-scandal-unfolding-uganda
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How can countries help refugees while also raising their GDP? Let them work.
Uganda is an eye-opening example of how displaced people can lift up a nation, say economics professor Paul Collier and refugee researcher Alexander Betts.
▻http://ideas.ted.com/how-can-countries-help-refugees-while-also-raising-their-gdp-let-them-wor
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Ouganda. La générosité intéressée du pays le plus ouvert du monde aux réfugiés
L’Ouganda est le pays qui accueille le plus de réfugiés. Un million de Sud-Soudanais fuyant la guerre s’y sont installés. Mais cette noble intention des autorités cache aussi des calculs moins avouables : l’arrivée massive de l’aide internationale encourage l’inaction et la #corruption.
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/ouganda-la-generosite-interessee-du-pays-le-plus-ouvert-du-mo
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Refugees in Uganda to benefit from Dubai-funded schools but issues remain at crowded settlement
Dubai Cares is building three classrooms in a primary school at Ayilo II but the refugee settlement lacks a steady water supply, food and secondary schools, Roberta Pennington writes from Adjumani
▻https://www.thenational.ae/uae/refugees-in-uganda-to-benefit-from-dubai-funded-schools-but-issues-remai -
FUGA DAL SUD SUDAN. LUIS, L’UGANDA E QUEL PEZZO DI TERRA DONATA AI PROFUGHI
Luis zappa, prepara dei fori per tirare su una casa in attesa di ritrovare la sua famiglia. Il terreno è una certezza, glielo ha consegnato il Governo ugandese. Il poterci vivere con i suoi cari non ancora. L’ultima volta li ha visti in Sud Sudan. Nel ritornare a casa sua moglie e i suoi otto figli non c’erano più. É sicuro si siano messi in cammino verso l’Uganda, così da quel giorno è iniziata la sua rincorsa. É certo che li ritroverà nella terra che ora lo ha accolto. Quella di Luis è una delle tante storie raccolte nei campi profughi del nord dell’Uganda, in una delle ultime missioni di Amref, in cui era presente anche Giusi Nicolini, già Sindaco di Lampedusa e Premio Unesco per la pace.
Modello Uganda? Dell’Uganda il mondo dice «campione di accoglienza». Accoglienza che sta sperimentando da mesi nei confronti dei profughi sud sudanesi, che scappano da uno dei Paesi più drammaticamente in crisi al mondo. Sono 4 milioni le persone che in Sud Sudan hanno dovuto lasciare le proprie case. Chi muovendosi verso altri Paesi e chi in altre regioni sud sudanesi. In questi ultimi tempi arrivano in Uganda anche persone che fuggono dalla Rep. Democratica del Congo.
▻https://www.amref.it/2018_02_23_Fuga_dal_Sud_Sudan_Luis_lUganda_e_quel_pezzo_di_terra_donata_ai_pro
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As Rich Nations Close the Door on Refugees, Uganda Welcomes Them
President Trump is vowing to send the military to stop migrants trudging from Central America. Europe’s leaders are paying African nations to block migrants from crossing the Mediterranean — and detaining the ones who make it in filthy, overcrowded camps.
But Solomon Osakan has a very different approach in this era of rising xenophobia. From his uncluttered desk in northwest Uganda, he manages one of the largest concentrations of refugees anywhere in the world: more than 400,000 people scattered across his rural district.
He explained what he does with them: Refugees are allotted some land — enough to build a little house, do a little farming and “be self-sufficient,” said Mr. Osakan, a Ugandan civil servant. Here, he added, the refugees live in settlements, not camps — with no barbed wire, and no guards in sight.
“You are free, and you can come and go as you want,” Mr. Osakan added.
As many nations are securing their borders and turning refugees away, Uganda keeps welcoming them. And they keep coming, fleeing catastrophes from across this part of Africa.
In all, Uganda has as many as 1.25 million refugees on its soil, perhaps more, making it one of the most welcoming countries in the world, according to the United Nations.
And while Uganda’s government has made hosting refugees a core national policy, it works only because of the willingness of rural Ugandans to accept an influx of foreigners on their land and shoulder a big part of the burden.
Uganda is not doing this without help. About $200 million in humanitarian aid to the country this year will largely pay to feed and care for the refugees. But they need places to live and small plots to farm, so villages across the nation’s north have agreed to carve up their communally owned land and share it with the refugees, often for many years at a time.
“Our population was very few and our community agreed to loan the land,” said Charles Azamuke, 27, of his village’s decision in 2016 to accept refugees from South Sudan, which has been torn apart by civil war. “We are happy to have these people. We call them our brothers.”
United Nations officials have pointed to Uganda for its “open border” policy. While the United States, a much more populous nation, has admitted more than three million refugees since 1975, the American government settles them in the country after they have first been thoroughly screened overseas.
By contrast, Uganda has essentially opened its borders to refugees, rarely turning anyone away.
Some older Ugandans explain that they, too, had been refugees once, forced from their homes during dictatorship and war. And because the government ensures that spending on refugees benefits Ugandans as well, younger residents spoke of how refugees offered them some unexpected opportunities.
“I was a farmer. I used to dig,” Mr. Azamuke said. But after learning Arabic from refugees from South Sudan, he got a better job — as a translator at a new health clinic that serves the newcomers.
His town, Ofua, is bisected by a dirt road, with the Ugandans living on the uphill side and the South Sudanese on the downhill side. The grass-thatched homes of the Ugandans look a bit larger and sturdier, but not much.
As the sun began to set one recent afternoon, a group of men on the Ugandan side began to pass around a large plastic bottle of waragi, a home brew. On the South Sudanese side, the men were sober, gathered around a card game.
On both sides, the men had nothing but tolerant words for one another. “Actually, we don’t have any problems with these people,” said Martin Okuonzi, a Ugandan farmer cleaning his fingernails with a razor blade.
As the men lounged, the women and girls were still at work, preparing dinner, tending children, fetching water and gathering firewood. They explained that disputes did arise, especially as the two groups competed for limited resources like firewood.
“We’ve been chased away,” said Agnes Ajonye, a 27-year-old refugee from South Sudan. “They say we are destroying their forests.”
And disputes broke out at the well, where Ugandan women insist they should be allowed to skip ahead of refugees.
“If we hadn’t given you the land you live on, wouldn’t you be dying in Sudan?” said Adili Chandia, a 62-year-old refugee, recounting the lecture she and others got from a frustrated Ugandan woman waiting in line.
Ugandan officials often talk about the spirit of Pan-Africanism that motivates their approach to refugees. President Yoweri Museveni, an autocratic leader who has been in power for 32 years, says Uganda’s generosity can be traced to the precolonial days of warring kingdoms and succession disputes, when losing factions often fled to a new land.
This history of flight and resettlement is embedded in some of the names of local groups around western Uganda, like Batagwenda, which means “the ones that could not continue traveling.”
The government encourages the nation to go along with its policy by directing that 30 percent of foreign aid destined for refugees be spent in ways that benefit Ugandans nearby. So when money for refugees results in new schools, clinics and wells, Ugandans are more likely to welcome than resent them.
For Mr. Museveni, hosting refugees has given him relevance and political capital abroad at a time when he would otherwise have little.
A former guerrilla fighter who quickly stabilized much of his country, Mr. Museveni was once hailed as an example of new African leadership. He was relatively quick to confront the AIDS epidemic, and he invited back Ugandans of Indian and Pakistani descent who had been expelled during the brutal reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s.
But his star has fallen considerably. He has clung to power for decades. His security forces have beaten political opponents. Freedom of assembly and expression are severely curtailed.
Even so, Uganda’s openness toward refugees makes Mr. Museveni important to European nations, which are uneasy at the prospect of more than a million refugees heading for Europe.
Other African nations also host a significant number of refugees, but recent polls show that Ugandans are more likely than their neighbors in Kenya or Tanzania to support land assistance or the right to work for refugees.
Part of the reason is that Ugandans have fled their homes as well, first during the murderous reign of Mr. Amin, then during the period of retribution after his overthrow, and again during the 1990s and 2000s, when Joseph Kony, the guerrilla leader who terrorized northern Uganda, left a trail of kidnapped children and mutilated victims.
Many Ugandans found refuge in what is today South Sudan. Mark Idraku, 57, was a teenager when he fled with his mother to the area. They received two acres of farmland, which helped support them until they returned home six years later.
“When we were in exile in Sudan, they also helped us,” Mr. Idraku said. “Nobody ever asked for a single coin.”
Mr. Idraku has since returned the favor, loaning three acres to a South Sudanese refugee named Queen Chandia, 37. Ms. Chandia said the land — along with additional plots other Ugandans allow her to farm — has made all the difference.
Her homestead of thatched-roof huts teemed with children tending their chores, grinding nuts into paste and maize into meal. Ms. Chandia is the mother of a girl and two boys. But over the years, as violence hollowed out her home country, Ms. Chandia started taking in the orphaned children of relatives and friends. Now 22 children call her “mom.”
A refugee for nearly her entire life, Ms. Chandia arrived in Uganda as a young girl nearly 30 years ago. For years, she worried about being expelled.
Image“Maybe these Ugandans will change their minds on us,” she said, describing the thought that plagued her. Then one day the worry stopped.
But Mr. Osakan, the administrator who oversees refugee affairs in the country’s extreme northwest, is anxious. There is an Ebola outbreak over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Osakan fears what might happen if — or when — a refugee turns up in Uganda with the dreaded illness.
“It would destroy all the harmony between refugees and host communities,” he said, explaining that it would probably lead to calls to seal the border.
For now, the border is very much open, although the number of refugees arriving has fallen significantly. In one of the newer settlements, many of the refugees came last year, fleeing an attack in a South Sudanese city. But some complained about receiving too little land, about a quarter acre per family, which is less than previous refugees had received.
“Even if you have skills — in carpentry — you are not given a chance,” said one refugee, Simon Ludoru. He looked over his shoulder, to where a construction crew was building a nursery school. The schoolhouse would teach both local Ugandan and South Sudanese children together, but the workers were almost entirely Ugandan, he said.
At the construction site, the general contractor, Sam Omongo, 50, said he had hired refugees for the job. “Oh, yes,” he exclaimed.
How many?
“Not a lot, actually,” he acknowledged. “I have about three.” Mr. Omongo called one over.
“Are you a refugee?” Mr. Omongo asked the slight man.
“No, I’m from Uganda,” he said softly. His name was Amos Chandiga, 28. He lived nearby and owned six acres of land, though he worked only four of them. He had lent the other two to a pair of refugees.
“They asked me, and I gave it to them,” Mr. Chandiga explained. He patted his chest. “It comes from here, in my heart.”
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/29/world/00refugees1/merlin_145673475_8c42e47d-e665-40f5-a021-704bfd702dcb-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg 
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/22/world/00refugees8/merlin_145674360_f6c51f09-28e1-4edb-a3c2-cb2642ba0889-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/world/africa/uganda-refugees.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes -
Uganda: a role model for refugee integration?
Uganda hosts the largest refugee population in Africa and is, after Turkey and Pakistan, the third-largest refugee recipient country worldwide. Political and humanitarian actors have widely praised Ugandan refugee policies because of their progressive nature: In Uganda, in contrast to many other refugee-receiving countries, these are de jure allowed to work, to establish businesses, to access public services such as education, to move freely and have access to a plot of land. Moreover, Uganda is a pilot country of the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF). In this Working Paper the authors ascertain whether Uganda indeed can be taken as a role model for refugee integration, as largely portrayed in the media and the political discourse. They identify the challenges to livelihoods and integration to assess Uganda’s self-reliance and settlement approach and its aspiration towards providing refugees and Ugandan communities receiving refugees with opportunities for becoming self-reliant. Drawing on three months of field research in northern and southern Uganda from July to September of 2017 with a particular focus on South Sudanese refugees, the authors concentrate on three aspects: Access to land, employment and education, intra- and inter-group relations. The findings show that refugees in Uganda are far from self-reliant and socially integrated. Although in Uganda refugees are provided with land, the quality and size of the allocated plots is so poor that they cannot earn a living from agricultural production, which thus, rather impedes self-reliance. Inadequate infrastructure also hinders access to markets and employment opportunities. Even though most local communities have been welcoming to refugees, the sentiment has shifted recently in some areas, particularly where local communities that are often not better off than refugees feel that they have not benefitted from the presence of refugees....
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Uganda has a remarkable history of hosting refugees, but its efforts are underfunded
Uganda has agreed to a request from the United States to temporarily accommodate 2,000 refugees from Afghanistan while Washington processes their applications to live in the US. The move underscores the reputation Uganda has of being progressive on refugee issues. Refugee expert Dr Evan Easton-Calabria provides insights into why.
When did Uganda start hosting refugees?Uganda has a long history of hosting refugees. This started in the early 1940s with Polish refugees who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe. The Nakivale refugee settlement – formed in 1959 – in southwest Uganda is the oldest refugee camp in Africa.
Uganda also hosts huge numbers of refugees. In the mid-1950s almost 80,000 Sudanese refugees, fleeing the first civil war, sought refuge in the country. They were only the first of many waves of refugees from different neighbouring countries to arrive. Uganda has hosted significant numbers of refugees ever since.
Today, almost 1.5 million refugees live in Uganda, making it the top refugee-hosting country in Africa and one of the top five hosting countries in the world.
Its longstanding ‘open-door’ policy has benefited it both politically and financially, with hundreds of millions of donor funds provided each year for humanitarian and development projects. These target both refugees and locals. While Kenya, for example, has received Euros 200 million in humanitarian aid from the European Union since 2012, Uganda has received this much from the EU in just over four years.
Is the country more progressive towards refugees than its neighbours?Uganda’s policies towards refugees have been hailed as progressive. It has even been called “the world’s best place for refugees”.
Refugees have the right to work and freedom of movement, thanks to Uganda’s 2006 Refugee Act and 2010 Refugee Regulations, which provide a strong legal and regulatory framework for refugee rights.
Refugees have the right to the same social services as Ugandans, including health care and free primary education. They are not confined to camps but can also live in urban areas. The country has, therefore, received a lot of positive attention for ‘fostering’ the self-reliance of refugees.
However, despite rights on paper in Uganda, refugees still struggle.
They are not legally recognised as refugees if they live in cities besides the capital, Kampala. As ‘self-settled’ urban refugees, they risk being misclassified as economic migrants. Lacking official refugee status (unless they have been registered in a settlement), urban refugees also often lack assistance.
Although refugees in Uganda are economically diverse – one study even identified over 70 different types of livelihoods activities by refugees in Uganda – for many in settlements, subsistence farming is their primary livelihood. But, despite plots of land being provided in settlements, many don’t have enough land to farm on and soil quality is often low. This means that, for many, farming is no longer a viable livelihood. This shows that liberal refugee policies, like those promoting self-reliance in Uganda, must be backed with adequate resources if they are to be more than just words on paper.
Comparatively, Uganda’s neighbours – such as Kenya and Ethiopia – have traditionally been more restrictive. Kenya relies on a system of encampment, where most refugees live in camps, and Ethiopia has only recently expanded its out-of-camp policy to all refugees and aslyum-seekers, although regulatory gaps remain. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that both are major refugee-hosting countries. They host far more refugees than many western (and wealthier) countries. Kenya hosts over half a million refugees, mainly from Somalia and South Sudan. Ethiopia hosts over 788,000 and is the third largest refugee-hosting country in Africa.
How effectively does Uganda manage its refugee community?‘Effectiveness’ is an interesting word in this context. On one hand, Uganda provides an important foundation in terms of providing the legal infrastructure to allow many refugees to lead independent lives. But refugees also enter a challenging context: Uganda struggles to provide adequate services for its own citizens and unemployment is high. It has one of the world’s lowest rankings in the Human Capital Index.
In addition, the 2021 presidential election saw increased political and social unrest which has led to the violation of rights such as the freedom of assembly and expression for citizens and other residents, including refugees. While many Ugandans have welcomed refugees, there are increasing accounts of overburdened cities and strains on resources, like firewood, in some parts of the country.
The corruption of humanitarian aid is also a problem, with UNHCR Uganda accused of mismanaging tens of millions of dollars in 2016-2017. This illustrates the clear need for effective financial management so that refugees can actually be helped.
There is also another important question of responsibility. Despite the positive attention the international community has given the country, donor funds have not often matched the praise. If schools and health facilities are crowded, in part because of refugees, the responsibility to provide additional support should not fall on a refugee-hosting country such as Uganda alone. Limited resources mean limited management. As of June, the 2020-2021 Uganda Refugee Response Plan was only 22% funded, leaving a shortfall of US$596 million to cover all sectors ranging from protection to food security to sanitation.
Does it look likely that Uganda will continue in its role as a leading refugee destination?Uganda has had a strong commitment to hosting refugees for over 70 years –- about the same length that the 1951 Refugee Convention has existed. A spirit of pan-Africanism and first-hand understanding of displacement by many Ugandans have all contributed to its willingness to host refugees. Its recent temporary accommodation of Afghan refugees indicates that it is interested in continuing this role.
That said, no country should host refugees without significant international support. Many refugee response plans, such as Uganda’s, remain significantly underfunded even as displacement rises and challenges – such as the COVID-19 pandemic – remain. Even though Uganda receives a significant amount of money, it’s not enough to support the number of people arriving as evidenced by a funding appeal by refugee response actors in June this year.
Mechanisms such as the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework offer a means to channel resources and increase collaboration on refugee hosting. But it is important to consider what displacement in Central, Eastern, and the Horn of Africa would look like if Uganda closed its borders. Uganda is making an effort in a neighbourhood where few other countries have the same enthusiasm.
▻https://theconversation.com/uganda-has-a-remarkable-history-of-hosting-refugees-but-its-efforts
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[Appli] The Vistorian | Benjamin Bach et al.
Attention pépite.
The Vistorian (anciennement NetworkCube) est une famille d’applications web d’exploration et de co-géo-visualisation de réseaux complexes par domaine (thématique). Gratuite, libre et ouverte, elle est développée par un collectif interdisciplinaire (Bach et al., 2015).
–-> ▻http://vistorian.netThe Vistorian est l’appli. dédiée aux humanités numériques (!), pour leur permettre d’explorer de manière dynamique des réseaux temporels catégoriels (ou typés), temporels, géographiques ou multiples.
▻https://pic.infini.fr/qdi4k1Xj/YbTaj6sv.PNG
A noter que "ConnectoScope" développée par le même ensemble, est dédiée aux neuroscientifiques, pour visualiser des réseaux neuronaux fonctionnels ("brain connectivity networks").
The Vistorian est intéressante, d’abord parce qu’elle propose de charger son propre jeu de données, une matrice (.csv) ; ensuite parce qu’elle permet de le représenter selon plusieurs modalités graphiques (sur le modèle de la variante) ce jeu de données : sous la forme de graphe (analyse de la structure, morphologie), de matrice bloquée (analyse de l’ordonnancement, des relations), de carte (analyse de la géographie des relations) et de diagramme en bande (analyse temporelle, de l’évolution des relations). Enfin, parce qu’elle est facile d’utilisation et fluide...
▻https://pic.infini.fr/pZ20AnsP/sYkFhM4y.PNG
–> Voir une présentation en ligne : ▻https://networkcube.github.io/networkcube/web/index.html#video_div
–> ou consulter les librairies sur leur dépôt : ▻https://github.com/networkcube/networkcubeCes développements résultent d’une collaboration entre Benjamin Bach (The University of Edinburgh), Jean-Daniel Fekete (Inria), Nicole Dufournaud (EHESS, LaDéHIS et Histoire du genre) et Nathalie Henry Riche (Microsoft Research).
Référence : Benjamin Bach, Nathalie Henry Riche, Roland Fernandez, Emmanoulis Giannisakis, Bongshin Lee, Jean-Daniel Fekete. « NetworkCube : Bringing Dynamic Network Visualizations to Domain Scientists ». Posters of the Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis), Oct 2015, Chicago, United States.
▻https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01205822/document–> A noter que le tutoriel sera présenté par Benjamin Bach dans un webinar des TutoM@te, le 18 octobre (14h30-18h30). Contacts : Benoit Tudoux : benoit.tudoux<at>univ-tlse2.fr / Viviane Le Hay : v.le.hay<at>sciencespobordeaux.fr
#flowmap #cartedeflux #matriceOD #reseau #covisualisation #application #gflowiz #graphe #carte
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Three million euro for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
The Farnesina has allocated a contribution of three million euro to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from the Africa Fund of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. It is to strengthen the reception and protection system for refugees in Niger.
The project, called “Strengthening reception conditions for persons in need of international protection in Agadez and in Niamey”, provides support for temporary reception and protection of refugees hosted in Niger, also in the context of the evacuation of vulnerable persons from Libya operated by the UNHCR. About 2,750 refugees and asylum seekers in Niger will benefit from the intervention.
The High Commissioner is committed to supporting refugees in many African countries along the main migratory routes headed for Europe, and particularly in Niger. There are over 344,000 refugees and displaced persons in Niger, plus about 1,500 particularly vulnerable individuals evacuated from Libya.
The recent Italian contribution is part of a broader Italian strategy to support the international organisations responsible for migrants and refugees. In 2017 Italy provided over 51 million dollars to the UNHCR for its activities, thus taking twelfth place among the largest donors of the Agency.▻https://www.esteri.it/mae/en/sala_stampa/archivionotizie/comunicati/2018/09/finanziamento-di-tre-milioni-di-euro-a-favore-dell-alto-commissariato-delle-n
#Italie #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Niger #HCR #UNHCR–-> Cette fragile ligne entre aide aux réfugiés et #externalisation des #contrôles_frontaliers... Aidons-les au Niger pour qu’ils ne viennent pas chez nous !
cc @isskein
