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Many of the fugitives came to the UK illegally and claimed asylum before going on to set up their evil networks, a Sunday Express investigation found. At least 20 suspects, wanted for people smuggling across Continental borders, mainly into the UK, are awaiting extradition to the European nations. Others have recently been extradited for similar offences.

Home Secretary Priti Patel has vowed to dismantle networks bringing people illegally into the UK as the Channel migrants crisis grows with 11 boats carrying 164 people arriving on Wednesday.

A further 41 migrants were rescued from four boats and returned to France after they got into difficulty soon after leaving.

The dangers were exposed on Wednesday when Sudanese migrant Abdulfatah Hamdallah, 28, who attempted the crossing in a tiny dinghy, was found drowned on the French coast. Last October 39 Vietnamese people died in a locked refrigerated container which was brought across the channel on a freight ship.

As the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) seek to track down and disrupt the gangs, our probe shows many major players live in the UK.

Countries including France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia and Albania have all sought traffickers hiding in the UK this year.

On Thursday, Westminster Magistrates' Court heard the case of Afghan Narinder Singh Khatari, 48, from Hounslow, who was wanted by The Netherlands for facilitating unauthorised entry and residence.

His extradition proceedings were ended after the court heard he had died and a death certificate was filed. Hashem Saleh Bazlah appeared at the same court on Wednesday. The 32-year-old from Leamington Spa, had been arrested on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and remanded in custody.

He is wanted in France for the smuggling of migrants, human trafficking and money laundering and the case was adjourned.

Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch, said: "This is shocking, and another sign of how lax immigration control has become. "I shudder to think of how many dangerous criminals have taken, and will take, advantage of our ever looser asylum system.

"My question to the Government is, when will you take back control, as you promised?" Freddy Nika, 47, was arrested in Edgware, north London, in December on another EAW issued by France.

The Albanian came to the UK in 1999, claiming to be a refugee from the Kosovan War, and was granted asylum.

He was convicted of people smuggling offences in his absence in France in June 2019 and sentenced to five years in jail. Westminster Magistrates were told the French court found he was the head of an Albanian crime gang that got migrants into France before smuggling them into the UK in lorries at 8,000 to 9,000 per person.

The court heard between February and April 2016, Nika was in charge of at least 11 illegal crossings and attempts.

He denied being involved in people smuggling and claimed someone must have stolen his identity. District judge Nina Tempia said he should be extradited and could apply for a retrial in France.

Vietnamese crime head Chan Khan is also being sent to France to serve eight years for trafficking nationals from his homeland.

He entered the UK illegally in 2012, but failed to get asylum. However, he was given temporary leave to remain until 2021. He was arrested in January in Bexhill, East Sussex, and was also wanted by the NCA.

The trafficking allegedly took place from 2015 until May 2017 in Paris, Dunkirk and Grande Synthe, in France, the UK and Vietnam. Khan denied being the wanted person, giving another name.

In a judgement ordering his extradition, judge Michael Snow wrote: "The requested person was found to be one of the main organisers of a Vietnamese illegal immigration network.

"He was heard to order the reprimand of a migrant, he was also heard to discuss guards of the migrant storage places."

Many others are hoping extradition requests will be refused. Iraqi Saman Taha Ahmed, 30, is wanted in Belgium for allegedly heading a network smuggling people into the UK in HGVs.

He is remanded in custody ahead of an extradition hearing. He was arrested with British girlfriend Jemma Killoran, 36, in Slough, Berks, and she is also fighting extradition and has been bailed.

NCA head of organised immigration crime operations, Steve Reynolds, said: "The criminal networks involved in people smuggling are ruthless, treating migrants as a commodity to be profited from and exploiting their desperation.

"We are determined to do all we can to disrupt and dismantle these networks."

A spokesman for the Home Office, led by Priti Patel, said: "We are targeting the abhorrent criminals, people smugglers and organised crime gangs facilitating migrants travelling through Europe into the UK.

"This year we have jailed 24 people smugglers.

"We are working to dissolve their networks, by disrupting their operations and seizing their illicit assets which includes almost 400,000 last month."

More:
The ruthless leaders of human trafficking gangs wanted across Europe but living in UK - Express

More than 200 people travelling on unsafe boats were rescued in the Mediterranean Sea over the past two days while Athens and Rome remained embroiled in rows surrounding their handling of migration across Europes southern frontier.

Rescuers on board a vessel operated by German non-profit organisation Sea Watch plucked more than 100 people from a boat struggling in rough weather in the early hours of Monday morning.

Many of those rescued were reported to be in poor health and are being treated by MSF personnel.

On Sunday, the same team rescued 97 people, including 28 unaccompanied children, from a single dinghy.

And a day earlier, rescuers from the Sea Watch 4 picked up seven men from a stricken boat north of Libya. There are now more than 200 people on board the ship.

The rescue missions came days after a separate boat carrying dozens of migrants capsized off Libya.

After reported deaths fell as European states introduced tough lockdowns to fight coronavirus, the number of fatalities recorded on the Mediterranean routes has begun to rise again.

Forty-five people drowned or were missing and presumed to have died, according to the UN refugee agency.

The incident is the deadliest shipwreck reported so far this year and accounts for more than half of the fatalities recorded on the route in August.

As the death toll in the Mediterranean continued to climb, governments in Greece and Italy remained caught up in rows over their handling of the ongoing migration crisis.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Sunday said it was deeply concerned by credible reports that Greek authorities had towed migrant vessels back out to sea or left them adrift in so-called pushback incidents.

The UN body said it was "particularly concerned" about an increasing number of reports since March that some migrants who disembarked on Greek shores "have thereafter been towed back to sea".

The UNHCR said it had seen testimonies about "people being left adrift at sea for a long time, often on unseaworthy and overcrowded dinghies, waiting to be rescued".

Reports of migrants being informally returned to Turkey immediately after reaching Greek soil or territorial waters in recent months were a third area of concern for the UNHCR.

The UNHCR called for an investigation into the reports, without delay, "given the nature, content, frequency and consistency of these accounts" and urged Greece to refrain from "such practices".

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last week denied claims of illegal pushbacks of asylum-seekers, accusing Turkey of peddling "misinformation" about his country's "tough but fair" border management.

A report in the New York Times on August 14 alleged that Greece was "abandoning" migrants at sea for the Turkish coastguard to rescue.

It said it had interviewed survivors from five such episodes, and cited additional evidence from independent watchdogs, two academic researchers and the Turkish coastguard.

Based on its research, the newspaper said more than 1,000 asylum-seekers had been "dropped at sea" since March.

In Italy, Sicilys right-leaning President Nello Musumeci won praise from former interior minister Matteo Salvini when he clashed with Rome and ordered the islands migrant centres closed on Sunday.

Mr Musumeci justified the order as a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus.

Dozens of migrants housed in Sicilian centres have tested positive for the virus in the last few weeks, but interior ministry officials in Rome were quick to dismiss the decree as invalid.

Migrant arrivals on European shores have declined dramatically compared with last year, as this chart shows.

Migration has long been a major political issue in Italy. Sicily and its sister Island Lampedusa are often the first point of arrival for migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach Europe.

"Between now and midnight, all migrants in Sicily's 'hot spots' and reception centres will have to be transferred to facilities outside the island," the decree read.

The document also bans any migrant from "entering, transiting and stopping over on the Sicilian region's territory (which includes Lampedusa) with vessels big and small, including those belonging to charities," it said.

Mayors on the island have voiced fears the presence of migrants will discourage tourism.

"Sicily cannot be invaded while Europe is looking away and the government resorts to no deportations," Mr Musumeci said on social media.

Sicily has no real means to transfer migrants off of the island and interior ministry officials say migration is legally a central government prerogative.

Mr Salvini, as interior minister until a year ago, clashed with EU officials and refused to allow ships, including those run by charities, to land migrants on Italian shores.

Updated: August 24, 2020 07:42 PM

Read the original post:
Europe at odds over spike in migrant rescues in the Mediterranean - The National

The face of a Syrian refugee who arrived in Britain thanks to a people smuggler and now works in the NHS has been beamed on to the White Cliffs of Dover.

Hassan Akkad, an NHS cleaner, recalled his own "terrifying" journey to the UK in an emotional plea for compassion for migrants crossing the English Channel.

In a video projected on to the cliffs, he said: "Hello everyone. Apologies for taking over the cliff but I have a few words that I would love to share with you.

"My name is Hassan and five years ago I was on the other side of this Channel trying to cross here. These cliffs were actually visible from our makeshift camp and they represented hope."

Like many migrants arriving on the Kent coast in recent weeks, Mr Akkad said that he had to put his trust in a people smuggler because safe and legal asylum routes are unavailable.

He continued: "Crossing the sea in a rubber dinghy is terrifying and devastating.

"Devastating because it makes you feel so helpless and insignificant. And I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy."

Nearly 5,000 migrants have successfully crossed to the UK in small boats this year, according to the PA news agency, but Mr Akkad said Britain was "not facing a migrant crisis".

He accused ministers of exploiting the issue for their own ends, saying: "I will say it again - they are using us to distract you from how badly they have managed during this pandemic."

"The past few months have proved that the people who made Britain their home didn't hesitate to roll up their sleeves and keep this country running during the worst public health crisis in modern history," he added.

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The projection on to the landmark was organised by Led By Donkeys, a group of activists famed for billboards displaying politicians' tweets.

It came as French prosecutors continued to investigate the death of a Sudanese migrant whose body was found on a beach in Calais earlier this week.

He has now been identified as Abdulfatah Hamdallah, who is understood to have decided to try to reach the UK using shovels for oars after having his asylum claim rejected in France.

The 28-year-old's body was discovered on Wednesday morning after a walker found his friend suffering from hypothermia in the middle of the night. A major search took place before his body was found at 8am.

Link:
Syrian refugee who crossed Channel and now works in NHS recalls 'terrifying' journey in message projected on to White Cliffs of Dover - Sky News

The Covid-19 crisis has raised the stakes worldwide, plunging the global economy into recession and creating unanticipated fiscal pressures for many countries already struggling with domestic problems, geopolitics and global trade wars.

Consequently, analysts have downgraded Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, Romania and Turkey in Euromoneys risk survey.

Greece is the main exception, but lying 60th in the global rankings with a legacy of debt and another economic downturn to endure, it remains one of the riskier EU member states, worse off than Italy or Spain.

For some, such as Turkey, there are domestic risks to consider, which Euromoney has detailed previously.

The lira is on the backfoot again because of concerns about policymaking and institutional risks, two factors that have been consistently downgraded (among others) in the risk survey.

Meddling in the central banks independence is scaring investors, prompting both a current-account deficit, underpinned by increased lending, and portfolio outflows, with capital withdrawn, resulting in the central bank depleting its FX reserves to prop-up an ailing currency.

However, there are also three themes with cross-country indeed, region-wide implications putting southeastern Europe under the radar, and all three are interconnected.

Covid is clearly one. Economies are struggling, not least because of the lack of tourism.

In Romania, crashing 14 places in the global risk rankings this year, to 69th out of 174 countries, political risks are rising again ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for November, to be preceded by local elections in September.

The main opposition this week called a no-confidence vote that it is close to winning amid unwanted macro-fiscal strains and tensions created by the governments handling of the crisis.

Romania also has a migration crisis of its own, with around 3.5 to four million emigrants, accounting for around a quarter of the population. Many of them work seasonally in the agricultural and tourism sectors, and in healthcare in other parts of the EU.

Gheorghe Savoiu,University of Pitesti

Since April, return migration has brought back 1.3 million Romanians from abroad, of which around 350,000 will be looking for work, putting pressure on the labour market and unemployment rate, says Gheorghe Savoiu, a contributor to Euromoneys country risk survey and a professor at the University of Pitesti.

He also highlights the background political risks with the elections approaching and the fiscal deficit.

Real GDP is forecast to decline in Romania by more than 6% in real terms this year, the unemployment rate is seen scaling up to 9% and the fiscal deficit widening to 8% of GDP, causing a rise in public debt, according to the OECD.

The organization paints a bleaker picture under a double-hit scenario, factoring in a possible second wave of the virus.

There are similar downturns in other countries, with Bulgaria and Greece enduring an 8% real-terms decline in GDP. Greek debt (in gross terms, on a Maastricht basis) will rise again to 197% of GDP, and its unemployment rate to 20% by 2021. In Turkey, the unemployment rate is seen peaking at just over 15% this year.

With tourism and trade buckling, Cyprus and Malta are struggling, and analysts have downgraded in particular the GNP-economic outlook and employment/unemployment indicators for these countries in Euromoneys risk survey this year.

However, Covid is not the only source of anxiety. In a region troubled by doorstep instability, in Libya, Syria and now Lebanon, the Middle East and North African immigration crisis is also rearing again, driving a wedge between Turkey and Greece, on the one hand, and with other countries affected, too, by the flow of refugees, stretching all the way to France and the UK.

In late February, Turkey declared it would apply an open-border policy, no longer trying to stop migrants trying to reach Europe, creating tensions with Greece, says ECR survey contributor Monica Bertodatto, a public finance consultant.

-Monica Bertodatto

The migrant flows stopped when the Covid crisis erupted, with Greece suspending asylum applications and increasing border patrols, but the situation has reverted.

The first-entry countries are facing higher costs in terms of Covid-related sanitary controls and quarantines on top of regular healthcare and identification and screening of asylum applications, she says.

For small countries, like Cyprus or Malta, the risk of outbreaks of Covid due to sick migrants is an issue, as many test positive and the healthcare systems in such states are not sufficient to cope with such sanitary emergency.

However, immigrants rarely stay and are travelling vast distances to destination countries, which also shoulder the costs in terms of housing, language skills, workforce integration and social support.

The immigration crisis is complicated by the third factor: the gas exploration dispute driving a wedge between Greece and Turkey, which are Nato members and allies of the US.

The Turkish-Greek dispute over refugees has a complex backdrop, according to country risk expert and ECR survey contributor Owais Arshad.

While Athens has been recently criticised for its apparent deportation of thousands of asylum-seekers back into the Mediterranean, its dispute with Turkey is also arguably about the exact delineation of maritime economic zones and energy, he says.

Ankaras military might has helped secure the survival of Libyas UN-backed government. As a reward for its intervention, Tripoli has inked several agreements with Turkey delineating their maritime borders and agreeing to cooperate on energy exploration.

However, Arshad adds: Greece, Egypt, Libyas rebel factions, France and the Gulf states oppose these agreements and are eager to claim their own share of these prized resources.

The proxy war in Libya will continue to drive the population overseas, but Arshad sees the economic prizes taking priority over resolving the human crisis, with Greece doing little to assist Libyas government after Nato abandoned the country.

-Alexander Heneine

Another survey contributor and country risk analyst, Alexander Heneine, believes the depressed outlook for the Middle East will continue to present a distinct challenge for countries along the Mediterranean basin.

He says: As economies juggle between containing an acceleration of Covid cases and exercising financial limitation, existing social structures are increasingly prone to buckling under pressure.

The weaponization of immigration, as Heneine calls it, and the mounting economic and political disputes will expose countries to sovereign risks [and create a] more durable paradigm shift in managing the relationship between land and people.

The fact the Middle East is feeling the full force of the global recession and souring political relations, worsening already poor standards of living, threatens to reinforce the exodus towards southern and southeastern Europes major entry points, says Heneine.

On top of that, he notes the aggressive stance of Turkey towards Greece and Cyprus, and the EU more generally.

At face value, an altercation over the rights to offshore natural gas exploration embodies the geopolitical and even cultural tug of war that has truly intensified in recent months, says Heneine.

Economies across southern and southeastern Europe are railing from Covid-19 and its economic implications, but the region is also suffering from a lack of clarity on the part of the EU when it comes to immigration.

For Heneine, the answer is clear: the EU needs to have a conversation about immigration and it needs to control its borders more effectively.

The lack of consensus on this, and other issues, is the largest source of sovereign risk.

See the article here:
Immigration risk is troubling for the EU and southeastern Europe - Euromoney magazine

New Delhi | Updated: August 23, 2020 7:29:30 pm

The struggle of working urban women to strike a fine balance at home and work during the pandemic

Amrita Mahale was about five months pregnant when the first lockdown was announced on March 22. Overnight, her doctor shut her clinic, medicines became harder to find, and the bustling city of Mumbai, at the heart of her acclaimed debut novel, Milk Teeth (2018), became an unfamiliar place, haunted by a pandemic that had the world in its death grip. While she wrote on the weekends, it was her job as a product manager at a non-profit AI-for-social-good innovation lab that took up most of her time. Only a week ago, the lab had started a work-from-home trial. Her husband, who runs an education startup, too, had to move to online lessons, making a part of the house out of bounds for most of the day. Suddenly, Mahale, 35, found her world shrinking into her apartment in Bandra. I am not great at multitasking, and I find switching contexts frequently quite hard, so I need proper separation between work and writing. I found myself sinking into deep anxiety. I was checking the rising COVID numbers obsessively and closely following the migrant crisis with a growing sense of despondency. Its impossible to not question your decision to bring a new life into a world that seems to be falling apart. Pregnant women are a high-risk group for COVID, so I stopped leaving the house entirely, which wasnt great for my mental health, says Mahale, whose son was born a month ago. It was a surreal experience, she says; not even her parents were allowed to visit her in the hospital.

READ MORE

How different types of discrimination can overlap in our identities

COVID-19 has been a time of reckoning as we come face to face with the injustices that have created structural inequality at so many levels. It could be the plight of the urban labourers as they trudged back to their villages, traversing hundreds of miles, rejected by the very people who used them mercilessly while they could. Ours is the society that turned its eyes away from the predicament of millions of street children and women who were made more vulnerable in abusive homes. Globally, the #BlackLivesMatter movement became even more significant with the stark contrast of racial discrimination in the COVID-19 deaths. People are taking to the streets to protest as centuries of cruelty continues to be called out. The present times are like X-ray (a metaphor used by the activist Arundhati Roy) exposing the fault lines of a society built on indifference and injustice.

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What Pandit Jasraj taught us about becoming one with the divine

Marina Ahmad, one of the seven students of Pandit Jasraj whom he considered his fondest and closest of chelas (disciples), is a proud New Yorker. She also maintains homes in Mumbai and Dhaka. A nomad at heart, she travels the world without fear and at the drop of a hat. She brings India, Pandit Jasraj and his peerless, soul-stirring music with her wherever she lands. Music so pure and rich, it heals and inspires most deeply.

Marina was born to Faqueer Shahabuddin Ahmad and Ayesha Akhtar of Dhaka. Ahmad was the first attorney general of Bangladesh. Ayesha was his wife and mother of their seven children. Music was in their blood, but law was the ancestral vocation followed with pride. Even so, Marina was encouraged from a young age to explore and professionalise her singing.

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A wonderfully atmospheric Perry Mason reboot

Perry Mason regarded her with calm appraisal, as though considering just what sort of an impression she would make on the witness stand. Tell me more, Thelma, he said. I was out with a boyfriend, she told him. The mask of patient tranquillity dropped from Mason (1934, The Case Of The Lucky Legs by Erle Stanley Gardner). For those familiar with the pulpy, grungy universe of Gardner, the bestselling author whose fictional lawyer Perry Mason solved practically every case he took on, with a mix of sleuthing acumen and slick courtroom moves, these lines would evoke instant nostalgia. Each case (Gardner was prolific and wrote more than 80 novels and short stories) held out the promise of a juicy mystery full of dodgy characters, confusing red herrings and an end blazing with clarity, where Mason exonerated the innocent and got the guilty to confess.

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Raqs Media Collective: We have been questioning the boundaries of knowledge and art

The Yokohama Triennale is one of the first major art events to take place after a spate of cancellations due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the curatorialnote you mention how Afterglow (the title) lights up an awareness of what it means to keep making art in the twenty-first century. If you could please elaborate.

The Yokohama Triennale 2020 opened on July 17, with every precaution in place, and with protocols for how visitors can be within the exhibition so as to minimise chances of contact. The opening signals to the world that art is there to think with everyone in this moment, to invite all to activate the imagination, and to be with thought, desire, and insight into care and contagion.

The Yokohama Triennale Committee, along with us (Artistic Directors) and the curatorial and production teams, had arrived at an understanding that it was possible to install the exhibition and keep it open. It is also our understanding that, almost a decade ago, the Yokohama Triennale 2011, which had opened after the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident, had had an increased turnout. People had turned to art as a source of renewal and solidarity. This time too feels connected to something deeper. It has only been a week since the exhibition has opened, but the initial response from the public, press, and artists to the Triennale has been extremely heart-warming and exhilarating.

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Are software algorithms racist and sexist?

AI, Aint I a Woman?Today we pose this question to new powersas faces increment scars/ Old burns, new urns, collecting data, chronicling our past/ Often forgetting to deal with gender, race and class.

When Joy Buolamwini, a Ghanaian-American poet and research assistant at MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts, the US, chanted this spoken-word piece in 2018, inspired by African-American womens rights activist Sojourner Truths Aint I a Woman? speech from 1851, she was voicing her research findings for the masses. The piece (on YouTube) spoke of what she discovered racial bias in the facial-recognition software created by Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, among others. These either didnt recognise people of colour accurately or didnt register them at all. Or, acknowledged women as men even former US first lady Michelle Obama, actor Oprah Winfrey, tennis player Serena Williams were not spared. Buolamwini was baffled when on wearing a white theatre mask she cleared recognition. With Timnit Gebru of Microsoft Research, she put together a paper on the flaws of algorithms. Her organisation Algorithmic Justice Leagues efforts have now led cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Somerville to pass laws to ban government use of any controversial facial-recognition technology. Last month, the Massachusetts Senate approved a bill to halt law enforcements use of facial recognition.

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The ethical treatment of plants

Theres an increasing number of people who are hectoring the world about our abominable treatment of animals, especially those bred and farmed for food and they try very hard to make these people give up steaks and smoked ham and eat leaves instead. Many of their criticisms are valid and we ought to be more humane in our dealings with them (though doing so while killing something might seem paradoxical). Ah, yes, and now here comes the but!

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Read the original here:
Sunday Long Reads: The legacy of Pandit Jasraj, the struggle of working urban women in lockdown, and more - The Indian Express