Italy abandoning refugees to poverty and isolation, says report

Council of Europe says African migrants granted asylum in Italy are being relegated to the margins of society and face racism

Refugees arrive from Africa on the island of Lampedusa in Italy. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/EPA

 

Political refugees who risk their lives to sail from Africa to Italy are being abandoned to a life of poverty and isolation, according to a report.
The damning survey of Italy's human rights record, released on Tuesday by the Council of Europe, follows the outlawing by the European court of human rights this year of Italy's "push back" policy of intercepting migrants in the Mediterranean and handing them over to Libyan patrols.
Those migrants who do make it to Italy and qualify for refugee status – now 58,000 – are being relegated to the margins of society and are increasingly victims of racist violence, the report found.
Investigators focused on the so-called palace of shame, an abandoned eight-storey building on the outskirts of Rome where 800 refugees from war-torn countries in the Horn of Africa camp out, with one bathroom for every 100 residents.
"I was shocked," said the council's commissioner for human rights, Nils Muižnieks, after visiting the building. "Italy does a good job granting refugee status but is no help afterwards, while many other countries give access to housing, citizenship, job and language training and education."
Donatella D'Angelo, a doctor who gives volunteer assistance at the building said the refugees had been haphazardly granted residency permits for other neighbourhoods in Rome, "which means they cannot get access nearby to schools or medical care", she said.
"Some parts of the building are flooded, infectious illnesses are common and the illegal electricity hook-up is intermittent," she added.
Bihirddim Abdellah, 29, a Sudanese refugee who has lived in the building for five years, said he feared for the women and children's health as winter approached. "We have no rights, and apart from occasional manual labour there is no work," he said.
The report also said that despite the Italian government's intention to promote the social integration of Roma and Sinti families in Italy, forced evictions to newly built, segregated camps continue. Many such families have lived in Italy for years.
One camp isolated on the edge of Rome – which the city describes as an "equipped village" – hosts 1,100, is surrounded by a metal fence and video cameras and accessible through a controlled entrance.
"Putting ethnic minorities in segregated camps is not in line with human rights obligations," said Muižnieks. "The alternative was to ask if the families wanted social housing or legalised settlements."
The report states that staff at a nearby train station were told to count and report "possible passengers of Roma ethnicity", while buses stopping at the camp were labelled "N" for nomad on the side, added Muižnieks, "despite the fact most Roma are not nomadic".

Bron: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/18/italy-abandoning-refugees-poverty-isolation?CMP=twt_gu




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Israel confronts a flood of African refugees

TEL AVIV — Walk through Levinsky Park near the central bus station here and you might think you were in another country. African men, and some women, occupy every inch of a low stone bench in the brutal sun. Blankets are stashed in the branches of a eucalyptus tree, to be retrieved at nightfall. For block after block of this seedy South Tel Aviv neighborhood, with trash spilling out of dumpsters and peddlers hawking batteries and blue jeans from sidewalk mats, nearly every person is African, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan.

Israel, as government officials here like to point out, is the only first-world country that you can walk to from Africa. This geographic reality has produced a flood — 60,000 in the last seven years — of refugees who make their way first to Egypt and then through the Sinai desert to Israel’s southern border. Even as a share of the population in this country of nearly 8 million, that figure is low compared to the number of illegal immigrants in the United States.
But the velocity of the refugee flow — from under 3,000 in 2006 to 15,000 annually in 2010 and 2011 — and the concentrations of the African population in this city and just a few other areas have created a serious social problem for a country that already has more than its share of troubles.
Israel faces a demographic threat to the Jewish state from its fast-growing Arab population, even without a deluge of African refugees with no religious ties or political loyalties to the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that “60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and lead to the eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
Infiltrators is an unsettling word but mild compared to others’ rhetoric. Knesset member Miri Regev of Netanyahu’s Likud Party termed the Africans a “cancer in our body” — and, although she later apologized, a poll found 52 percent of Jewish Israelis agreeing with that ugly sentiment. After rapes blamed on Africans, riots broke out here in May, with firebombs thrown at buildings where migrants live, and shops vandalized.
An unacceptable response anywhere, but one that is particularly troubling in a country founded as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust. It is an uncomfortable irony that synagogues in the United States post “Save Darfur” banners to protest genocide in western Sudan while the Israeli government figures out how to deal with Sudanese “infiltrators,” including those from Darfur. It is unsettling to hear Israeli officials describe a massive detention facility in the Negev desert that, under a new amendment to the “Prevention of Infiltration” law, could hold those crossing the border illegally for three years.
One small slice of the problem, involving about 1,000 refugees from South Sudan, is being solved now that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has determined that it is safe to return them to the newly independent country.
Israel’s government contends that nearly all the remaining refugees are motivated by economics rather than fear of persecution, which would entitle them to asylum status. Yet it has failed to put in place an adequate mechanism for determining asylum claims.
The “temporary group protection” granted to Sudanese and Eritreans does not allow for such individual determinations. While the refugees cannot be deported as long as their countries are deemed unsafe for repatriation, they also cannot legally work. Meanwhile, the government is taking steps to make remaining as unattractive as possible, with a proposed law preventing refugees from sending money back home.
“I know that we have become like a burden because the country is very small,” Tekle Ghebvehiwot, a 31-year-old Eritrean who arrived here in 2007, told me in his small grocery shop, its shelves stocked with lentils and spices. “But we are real refugee people who need real help, and we are not looking for anything but this country to help us until the situation back home becomes less dangerous.”
Equally compelling is the plight of the original neighborhood residents, mostly poor immigrants themselves, Russian and North African Jews, who complain of refugees defecating in their yards and of being afraid to venture out after dark. “Basically, we feel like refugees in our own houses,” said Shlomo Maslawy, a Tel Aviv City Council member who represents the neighborhood.
“You shall love the stranger, for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt,” the Torah teaches. Israel cannot reasonably be expected to absorb every refugee. But it is also falling woefully short of observing that biblical command.
Ruth Marcus is a columnist and editorial writer for The Washington Post. Email her at ruthmarcus@washpost.com

Bron: http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20120730/OPINION03/120739994/israel-confronts-a-flood-of-african-refugees&pager=2


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