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Germans Protest Against Return of Failed Asylum Seekers to Afghanistan

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(Last Updated On: October 24, 2022)

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Several thousand people have taken part in demonstrations across Germany in support of Afghan nationals who are being obliged to return home after their asylum requests failed. Nearly 12,000 have been asked to leave.

Several thousand people protested in cities across Germany on Saturday against the obligatory repatriation of failed Afghan refugees. In the western city of Dusseldorf, 2,000 demonstrators took to the streets. In Hamburg, police estimated there were about 1,500 protesters.

The demonstrators said Germany should not force people to move to dangerous countries, such as Afghanistan. “The people who are forced to return cannot live their lives in safety there. A life in dignity is inconceivable under these conditions,” demonstration organizers in Hamburg said of the situation in Afghanistan.

Of the 250,000 Afghans living in Germany, 11,900 were asked to leave the country from mid-December, according to the German Interior Ministry.

Understanding with Afghanistan

Germany then started to return Afghans in so-called “collective deportations” amid widespread protest. The moves were controversial in Germany as large parts of Afghanistan remain violent and it is not on Germany’s official list of “safe countries of origin.”

The “collective deportations” came after Germany signed a memorandum of understanding with Kabul following pressure from Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere to speed up procedures for people with little chance of being granted asylum.

In late January the second plane-load of rejected refugees left Germany. Among those deported were criminals, but also Afghans who had lived in Germany for years, as well as members of religious and ethnic minorities.

Protests across Germany

In Berlin, demonstrators marched from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz. Police said around 200 people took part, while the Berlin Refugee Council said there were up to 2,000. Protests took place in 13 German cities, including Nuremberg, Hamburg, Hanover, Schwerin and Erfurt.

The Refugee Council of the populous German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which organized the Dusseldorf demonstration, said that Afghanistan was an unsafe country, and that a report by the UN’s refugee agency showed the situation had deteriorated recently.

The Refugee Council said 2,562 civilians were killed and 5,835 were injured in Afghanistan between January and September 2016, more casualties than at any time since 2009. It said the whole country was affected by conflict.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Thursday that the federal and state governments had agreed to significantly speed up the return of rejected asylum applicants.

Merkel’s party, the CDU, expected that the push for more repatriations could discourage supporter defection to the populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, which had been critical of the chancellor’s open-door policy towards refugees.

Written by Deutsche Welle

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Russia says evidence links attackers to ‘Ukrainian nationalists’

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(Last Updated On: March 28, 2024)

Russian investigators said on Thursday they had uncovered evidence that the gunmen who killed more than 140 people in an attack on a concert hall near Moscow last week were linked to “Ukrainian nationalists”.

Russia has said from the outset that it is pursuing a Ukrainian link to the attack, even though Kyiv has denied it and the militant group Islamic State (Daesh) has claimed responsibility.

In a statement, the state Investigative Committee said for the first time that it had uncovered evidence of a Ukrainian link, Reuters reported.

“As a result of working with detained terrorists, studying the technical devices seized from them, and analyzing information about financial transactions, evidence was obtained of their connection with Ukrainian nationalists,” the statement said.

However, the White House has described Russia’s allegation that Ukraine was involved in the attack as “nonsense”.

National security spokesman John Kirby said it was clear that ISIS was “solely responsible.”

He added the US passed a written warning of an extremist attack to Russian security services, one of many provided in advance to Moscow.

Russia says however it is suspicious that Washington was able to name the alleged perpetrator of the attack so soon after it took place.

The head of Russia’s FSB security service said earlier this week, again without providing evidence, that he believed Ukraine, along with the U.S. and Britain, were involved.

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Spain air drops 26 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza

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(Last Updated On: March 28, 2024)

Spanish military planes air dropped 26 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip on Wednesday and Madrid called on Israel to open land border crossings to prevent a famine, the Foreign Ministry said.

The operation, carried out in coordination with Jordan and co-financed by the European Union, dropped more than 11,000 food rations to alleviate the “catastrophic levels of food insecurity” faced by up to 1.1 million people in Gaza, the ministry said in a statement.

“Spain insists on the opening of the land crossings as an indispensable measure to avoid a famine situation,” it added.

Other Western countries, including the United States, France and Germany, have also resorted to air drops to deliver aid to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza after nearly six months of war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants, Reuters reported.

Aid agencies say deliveries into Gaza, much of which has been laid to waste by Israeli bombardments, have been held up by bureaucratic obstacles and insecurity since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023.

Last week, a U.N.-backed report said a famine was imminent and likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July.

The Spanish foreign ministry also reaffirmed its commitment to supporting UNRWA, the United Nations humanitarian agency for Palestinians, and to its continued existence.

In January, major donors to UNRWA, including the U.S. and Germany, suspended funding following allegations that around 12 of its tens of thousands of Palestinian employees were suspected of involvement in the attacks on Israel by Hamas which triggered the war.

Israel says it puts no limit on the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza and blames problems in it reaching civilians there on U.N. agencies, which it says are inefficient, read the report.

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UN expert says Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, calls for arms embargo

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(Last Updated On: March 27, 2024)

A United Nations expert told the global body’s Human Rights Council on Tuesday that she believed that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since Oct. 7 amounted to genocide and called on countries to immediately impose sanctions and an arms embargo, Reuters reported.

Israel, which did not attend the session, rejected her findings.

“It is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of and to present my findings,” Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories, told the U.N. rights body in Geneva, presenting a report called “The Anatomy of a Genocide”.

“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met,” she said, citing more than 30,000 Palestinians killed among other acts.

“I implore member states to abide by their obligations, which start with imposing an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel and so ensure that the future does not continue to repeat itself,” she said, prompting a burst of applause.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said the use of the word genocide was “outrageous” and said the war was against Islamist group Hamas and not Palestinian civilians. It was triggered when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking 253 hostages, by Israeli tallies, read the report.

“Instead of seeking the truth, this Special Rapporteur tries to fit weak arguments to her distorted and obscene inversion of reality,” it said.

Gulf nations such as Qatar, as well as African countries including Algeria and Mauritania, voiced support for Albanese’s findings and alarm at the humanitarian situation, Reuters reported.

The seats for Israel’s ally the United States were left empty. Washington has previously accused the council of a chronic anti-Israel bias.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer, is one of dozens of independent human rights experts mandated by the United Nations to report and advise on specific themes and crises. Her views do not reflect those of the global body as a whole.

In the past, her comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict have drawn scrutiny, including from a U.S. ambassador in Geneva who said she has a history of using “antisemitic tropes”.

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