26 June 2015 At the European Council meeting in Brussels on 25-26 June, European leaders agreed on a voluntary plan to relocate a total of 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers from Italy and Greece to other EU Member States. Hungary and Bulgaria were excluded...
26 June 2015 Hungary announced, on 23 June, that it would suspend applying the Dublin III Regulation, a key European Union asylum rule, raising concerns among rights monitors and at the European Commission. However in a surprise move, it reversed its decision the next...
26 June 2015 On Friday 19 June at a speech at the GLOBSEC Forum in Slovakia, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced a ‘modest expansion’ to the national resettlement scheme for particularly vulnerable people fleeing Syria. The Vulnerable Person’s Relocation scheme...
26 June 2015 ECRE’s Annual General Conference (AGC) and UNHCR NGO Consultations will be held in The Hague on 14-16 October. Each year, over 100 representatives from the refugee-assisting community in Europe gather for the ECRE AGC. It is a key moment for the ECRE...
26 June 2015 In the first quarter of 2015, Eurostat reported that 185,000 people applied for asylum for the first time in the EU-28 states. This figure shows an increase of 86% in the number of asylum applications submitted in EU countries compared to the same period...
26 June 2015 The European Migration Network (EMN) have released their annual report on immigration and asylum for 2014, providing an overview on the main legal and policy developments in the area of migration and asylum taking place at EU level and within EU Member...
26 June 2015 “The smugglers lied to us; they said we would arrive in Italy in four hours. We stayed two days sitting and waiting for Italy, the sky was dark and a storm was approaching, and we kept asking ourselves “where are we?”.” This is one of the quotes featured...
26 June 2015 The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, calls for better protection for women seeking asylum in the UK, citing concerns about the adequacy of assessments about experiences of gender-based violence. Manjoo’s report was...
26 June 2015 Human Rights Watch’s recent report “The Mediterranean Migration Crisis: Why People Flee, What the EU Should Do” identifies severe human rights violations in asylum seekers’ countries of origin, forcing them to make perilous journeys...
26 June 2015 On 22 June, EU Foreign Affairs Ministers launched the EUNAVFOR Med, “to disrupt human smugglers and traffickers in the Mediterranean”. For an initial mandate of one year, Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Luxemburg, Belgium, the Netherlands,...
