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Charlie Hebdo cartoonist wins top comic award

A youngster's tale of life torn between France and the Middle East by a Charlie Hebdo contributor scooped the top award at one of the world's biggest comics festivals in France on Sunday.

Published: 1 February 2015 20:34 CET

The Angouleme festival, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city in southwestern France, was this year dedicated to the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine.

The town was full of tributes to the satirical cartoonists killed in a jihadist attack last month, with one of the town's squares renamed "Place de Charlie". A new "Charlie Hebdo award for freedom of expression" was also inaugurated on Sunday, this year going to the magazine itself.

The four-day festival climaxed on Sunday with its top prize — for best book of the year — going to "The Arab of the Future: a childhood in the Middle East" by Riad Sattouf, a funny and moving look at life in France and under the dictatorships of Libya and Syria in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Sattouf, who is half-French and half-Syrian, has also featured regularly in Charlie Hebdo with a series called "The Secret Life of Youngsters".

The festival's lifetime achievement award was given on Thursday to Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of the cult Japanese series Akira — the first manga cartoonist to win the prize.

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Sweden scraps automatic asylum for Syrians after six years

Syrians greeted by a Swedish migration officer in Malmö in 2015. Photo: Ola Torkelsson/TT

In September 2013, Sweden was the first country in the world to open its arms fully to those fleeing the country's brutal civil war, with the agency ruling that all Syrians arriving in Sweden would be eligible for permanent residency.

But on Thursday, the agency announced in a press release that it was bringing the policy to an end.

“We had a very special situation in Syria and a special assessment which essentially meant that everyone was able to get a residency permit due to the general situation in the country,” the agency's legal director Fredrik Beijer said in a video posted online.

“We now assess that the situation in Syria has become slightly better – in any case we see that the number of deaths has decreased so much in Syria that the general risk of coming to harm has decreased. We must therefore return to the standard practice that we had before…and we are doing this now.”

In its new legal assessment, the agency said it now judged that people living in the Syrian capital of Damascus, and in the nearby southern provinces of Rif Dimashq, Dara’a, Suwayda, and Quneitra could no longer be considered at risk simply because of where they lived.

The same went for people living in Hassakah in the country's far northeastern corner, which is part of the de facto Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Rojava. Those living in and around the port city of Latakia were also not deemed eligible for asylum.

The agency stressed that the new legal assessment would apply only to Syrians newly arriving in the country, and would not affect those waiting for a ruling or seeking to renew temporary residence permits.

It did also not mean that those living in the more peaceful areas would necessarily be denied asylum.

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“Their individual reasons are now much more important than they were before,” Beijer explained. “Now it will become very important who you are, where you come from, and what risk you are facing.”

Below is a map that was included in the new assessment, showing the six districts in red whose inhabitants could still expect to receive asylum, and those in yellow where a decision was no longer effectively automatic.

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