On the 19th of June the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its annual report on “Global Trends on forced displacement” for 2016. The report collects the yearly data on the different categories of people affected by forced displacement: refugees, returned refugees, asylum seekers, Internal Displaced People (IDPs), returned IDPs, stateless people and other persons of concern to UNHCR.
During the last months the NGOs that conduct the Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean have been at the centre of a political and media storm.The report by Forensic Oceanography assesses that a toxic rhetoric has been created where the only victims are the NGOs, and most importantly no concrete evidence has been found in this “criminalization campaign”.The report goes beyond, and addresses not only the accusation of collusion in smuggling per se, but rather it challenges the assumptions reinforcing this accusation.
In this week’s news highlights, the European Commission triggers procedures for sanctions against Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary on relocation quotas; a new report was published on human trafficking in the Horn of Africa; UN Special Rapporteur on Eritrea releases a new report and holds an interactive dialogue in the 35th session of the Human Rights Council; and South Sudanese president Kiir refused to attend a regional summit on South Sudanese security issues.