News Highlights: new EU resettlement plan, torture in Libya, Sudan travel ban dropped

In this week’s news highlights: European Commission presented a migration plan which includes resettlement for at least 50,000 refugees from North Africa and the Horn of Africa; focus on reducing migration could destabilise countries and endanger human rights, says Saferworld; Eritrea refers to border situation in statement at UN General Assembly; Ethiopian ethnic clashes between Oromo and Somali investigated; UN refugee agency published a video on extortion and torture in Libya; German-based migrants charity states that it was fired at by Libyan coast guard.

The fragmentation of Libya and the response of the European Union

More than one month has passed since the series of European meetings with two rival Libyan representatives, Tripoli government’s prime minister al-Serraj and general Haftar, governor of the north-eastern regions, which saw French and Italian governments involved as peace seekers. What is Libya’s current situation and what does this mean for the migrants and refugees in Libya?

SAR operations by NGOs: new report inverts the relation of causality and clarifies role of NGOs

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.