As violence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Africa pushes a wave of refugees to seek shelter in Europe, the United Nations refugee agency reports a growing number of children have been forced into sex to pay for the continuation of their journey. Now the United Nations is accusing the Czech Republic of systematic human rights violations over its treatment of refugees. The U.N. said the Czech government is committing the abuses in an effort to deter refugees from entering the Czech Republic or staying there.
Germany alone says it expects to take in between 800,000 and 1 million refugees this year. Sweden has already taken in over 100,000 refugees this year, including 10,000 in the past week. With winter looming, authorities across Europe are scrambling to find warm places for refugees. Refugees from Iraq and Syria are suffering in near-freezing temperatures in Croatia.
Nils Muižnieks talking:
This is not a new crisis. Anybody who’s been following what’s going on in Syria knows that countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have been faced with huge—with a huge arrival of refugees from Syria. And the inadequacies of many national systems for asylum and refugee have been plain to anybody on the ground. Greece’s asylum system collapsed a number of years ago. Italy has been saving hundreds of thousands of people in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s only when it went further into Europe that the rest of the countries began to take notice.
The responsibility is to provide access to asylum for those who need protection, to not detain them, as we just heard—seeking asylum is not a crime, and people should not be detained for doing so—and to get fair hearing. And those who need protection should be given it. The problem is that this was very predictable that people would move, and what we need is to ramp up resettlements from the areas in and around the conflict, so that people don’t have to make these dangerous journeys, don’t have to endure the suffering. If we’re going to give them protection, why not help them move immediately to a safe place?
the United States can do much, much more. When I hear that the United States has taken several thousand Syrians, this is shameful. This is a pitifully small number. When you hear that a country like Armenia, a very small, poor country, has received 10,000 Syrian refugees, when you hear that various countries in Europe are taking hundreds of thousands of people, to learn that America is taking several thousand from Syria, I don’t think it’s worthy of America. I think America also has a special responsibility to politically help arrive at a solution in Syria to end the conflict, because until that happens, we’re going to see a continued outflow of people.
it’s clear that these people are fleeing terrorism, conflict, barrel bombs, beheadings. And insofar as America is politically implicated in one side or the other, militarily implicated in one side or the other, America has a special responsibility towards the people who afterwards are uprooted and flee for their lives. My job is to look at what’s going on in 47 countries, so I cannot really speak to questions of what’s going on in Libya or Syria. But we see the consequences in Europe of political and military decisions made in those countries.
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Nils Muižnieks
Council of Europe commissioner for human rights.
— source democracynow.org