Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

IMMIGRATION

Sweden agrees to accept camp refugees

Sweden and a dozen other European countries have agreed to accept Somali and Eritrean refugees from camps in Kenya and Sudan.

Published: 27 September 2009 11:14 CEST

The refugees will be accepted into Sweden as part of quotas agreed with the UNHCR – the refugee organ of the United Nations.

“It feels good that Sweden can take part in such as large humanitarian operation,” Dan Eliasson, the director-general of the Swedish Migration Board, told Sveriges Radio’s news programme Ekot.

Three further camps on Iraq’s border with Syria will also be emptied in cooperation with the USA. The camps currently house mostly stateless Palestinian refugees.

“These camps are in the some of the most difficult places on Earth where the living conditions are dreadful. Now we can help to ensure…that these people that live there can come to Europe and the USA,” Eliasson said.

Sweden is set to accept a couple of hundred refugees of the total of almost 3,000, according to Ekot.

Sweden has been a driving force within the EU to push member states to accept more of the so-called quota refugees. Sweden is the EU country that accepts the most, with a total of 1,900 last year, of the 4,800 that arrived in Europe.

IMMIGRATION

France ‘will not welcome migrants’ from Lampedusa: interior minister

France "will not welcome migrants" from the island, Gérald Darmanin has insisted

Published: 20 September 2023 09:06 CEST
France 'will not welcome migrants' from Lampedusa: interior minister

France will not welcome any migrants coming from Italy’s Lampedusa, interior minister Gérald Darmanin has said after the Mediterranean island saw record numbers of arrivals.

Some 8,500 people arrived on Lampedusa on 199 boats between Monday and Wednesday last week, according to the UN’s International Organisation for
Migration, prompting European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to travel there Sunday to announce an emergency action plan.

According to Darmanin, Paris told Italy it was “ready to help them return people to countries with which we have good diplomatic relations”, giving the
example of Ivory Coast and Senegal.

But France “will not welcome migrants” from the island, he said, speaking on French television on Tuesday evening.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called on Italy’s EU partners to share more of the responsibility.

The recent arrivals on Lampedusa equal more than the whole population of the tiny Italian island.

The mass movement has stoked the immigration debate in France, where political parties in the country’s hung parliament are wrangling over a draft law governing new arrivals.

France is expected to face a call from Pope Francis for greater tolerance towards migrants later this week during a high-profile visit to Mediterranean city Marseille, where the pontiff will meet President Emmanuel Macron and celebrate mass before tens of thousands in a stadium.

SHOW COMMENTS