By Meletus EZE
The Europe-bound migrants, who have recently been caught at sea and returned to Libya are trapped in hellish living conditions, Medical Charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Wednesday.
On Monday, Italy’s hardline Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, who has vowed to stop migrant inflows from North Africa, said 393 people had been intercepted and taken back to Libya, and claimed that all were fine.
According to MSF, they “are now locked up in overcrowded detention facilities.
“The facilities have been overwhelmed with the new arrivals and are struggling to cope, leading to a further deterioration of already dire detention conditions.”
“The people detained have virtually no access to open air space and little access to clean water and food.
Food is insufficient and totally inadequate to meet the nutritional needs of people with serious medical conditions, children and pregnant women,” MSF added.
Some “are suffering from malnutrition, hypothermia, or severe diarrhoea.
“Some report that before trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, they had been held captive by traffickers for weeks, sometimes months, and were deprived of food and systematically abused and tortured.”
MSF staff member was present when 106 migrants arrived in al-Khoms. “Our teams organised 10 medical referrals to a nearby hospital.
“In spite this response, a 15 year-old boy later died in hospital,” the organisation said.
MSF also said that among the 250 migrants, who disembarked in Misrata and Khoms there were “women, some of whom are pregnant, babies and young children under seven years old,” who were all placed in detention.
Similarly, the number of asylum applications filed in Germany fell by 16.5 per cent to a total of 185,853 applications in the year 2018, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) said on Wednesday.
Most applications came from asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The declining number of asylum applications in 2018 showed that “after the peak of the refugee situation in autumn 2015, a continuous decline in the number of asylum seekers could be observed”, stated German Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer.
Back in 2016, the German office for migration BAMF registered more than 700,000 applications from asylum seekers in Germany.
Many of the asylum seekers came to Germany during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, but did not submit their applications until the following year.
According to interior minister, net immigration would be “well below the corridor for immigration of 180,000 to 220,000 persons per year as agreed in the coalition agreement”.
This showed “that the many measures we have introduced are taking effect increasingly and sustainably,” Seehofer added.
A total of 34.7 per cent of asylum applications in Germany were rejected while 30.2 per cent were closed for reasons such as withdrawal of the applications or provisions under the Dublin procedure.
Seehofer said that the responsible member state would be the state through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU.
Notwithstanding the declining number of asylum applications, Seehofer called for an “ordering, controlling and limiting refugee policy”, as many people would continue to come to Germany asserting “a need for protection”.
