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.
The European Union started this week with a Foreign Affairs Council centered on the relations between the EU and Africa. More specifically, the 28 EU foreign affairs ministers discussed the relations with the African Union and the future of this partnership, as well as the core issues on which this cooperation will focus.