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Hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children on the Greek island of Lesbos are living in conditions that pose severe risks to their physical and mental well-being, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. The Greek government announced plans to resettle children on the mainland, but aid organizations on Lesbos see little improvement so far.

Unaccompanied minors on the Greek island of Lesbos are being exposed to degrading conditions and often left to "fend for themselves," according to areportthis week from Human Rights Watch.

The research draws on anonymized interviews with 22 children from October this year, some as young as 14, living on Lesbos. Severe overcrowding in Moria, the island's main camp, has led to a lack of age-appropriate accommodation for children traveling alone or separated from family. The majority of the children spoken to for the report were living either in areas alongside unrelated adults, or in a large informal area that has sprung up outside the camp.

The report calls for an urgent response to the dangerous and unsanitary conditions the children are living in. One 16-year-old interviewee reported sleeping on a cardboard carton on the floor.

Sharing tents with adult strangers

Lesbos, alongside other Greek island "hotspots" on Samos and Chios, has experienced the biggest increase of boat arrivals since 2016, when the EU-Turkey Deal was introduced in an attempt to stem the flow of refugees to the continent.

With over 18,000 people now in a camp with capacity for little over 2,000, thousands -- includingthose with complex health needs, pregnant women, and young children -- are sleeping in tents on the rough, sloping ground of an olive grove. The area is often referred to as the "jungle" by those living there.

There are currently 968 unaccompanied and separated children on Lesbos, according to the latest UN figures. With only 147 spots for age-appropriate accommodation outside the camp, and 210 spaces inside Moria, hundreds are being left vulnerable and exposed to insecure, and sometimes violent, conditions.

Interviewees in the Human Rights Watch report described having to share tents with adult strangers, or on the ground without shelter -- some for as long as three months.

One 16-year-old interviewee from Afghanistan said in the report that he couldnt sleep while in the large main tent in Moria camp, intended for new arrivals. "There is no control who will come and sleep in there," he said. "The most difficult [thing] is that there's no light in the tent at night because the lamps are broken. It's terrifying because you don't know who or what is moving inside the tent."

"Everything is dangerous here -- the cold, the place I sleep, the fights," said one 14-year-old interviewee, who stated they lived in a rat-infested tent with 50 other people.

Not enough shelters available

There has always been a fragmented child protection system for unaccompanied minors on the island, Elina Sarantou from legal service provider HIAS on Lesbos, pointed out. Problems have included lack of information, an inefficient guardianship system, poor quality asylum interviews and delays, and inhumane reception conditions.

"The numbers however have now increased and it is therefore difficult, or even impossible, to ignore anymore," said Sarantou, adding that the current situation is directly related to shelter.

"In order for a minor to be transferred, a space has to open up on the mainland," Sarantou told InfoMigrants. "And since there are only shelters for a quarter of the minors in Greece, there is an obvious bottleneck."

In November the Greek government announced plans to respond to the severe overcrowding of hotspot areas such as Lesbos on the Greek islands. Plans include moving 20,000 people to the mainland early next year, and shutting camps on Lesbos, Chios and Samos - replacing them with 'closed' facilities that human rights advocates have feared will constitute detention centers. While transfers from the islands to the mainland have increased in recent months, high numbers of boat arrivals have also continued.

Relocation to the mainland

At the end of last month the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also announcedNo Child Alone, a new scheme to respond to the situation of unaccompanied minors on the islands -- promising to quickly settle thousands of children on the mainland. HIAS however say they have seen little implementation on Lesbos so far.

At the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) pediatric clinic outside Moria, mental health activity manager Angela Modarelli says, since October, they have started to see unaccompanied minors accessing psychological support "because the situation is getting worse and worse."

"They are in an unknown place, an unknown world - not speaking the language - without any support," said Modarelli, adding they are treated like adults even though they are children. "Every night when it becomes dark, they have to find a way to keep themselves safe.''

"Mostly when they arrive to see us it's already a crisis moment," said Modarelli. She has seen cases of self-harm, depression, suicidal ideation and plans, sometimes attempts. "And we had kids of 16 and 17 having a plan to end their life. Because... this is too much. They dont see that they are welcome here."

Most of the unaccompanied minors interviewed in the recent Human Rights Watch report also reported experiencing psychological distress.

Although long term solutions are urgently needed now, Afshan Khan, UNICEF special coordinator for the migrant response in Europe, toldInfoMigrants,Greece could not be expected to provide this support alone.

"UNICEF is once again urging European Governments to increase pledges to relocate unaccompanied and separated refugee and migrant children, fast-track family reunifications for those who already have relatives in Europe and increase funds supporting response efforts," said Khan.

"Unaccompanied children are among the most vulnerable people on the Greek islands, and they need Greece and other European countries to take care of them," said Coss in the Human Rights Watch report. "The EU and its member states should demonstrate responsibility and care for kids who suffer there every day."

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A crisis within a crisis: Hundreds of unaccompanied minors left to 'fend for themselves' on Lesbos - InfoMigrants

Pope Francis has described indifference towards the migrant crisis as a sin and called detention centres in Libya as places of torture and despicable slavery.

The Pope, who has made defending refugees a key part of his time at the head of the Catholic Church, was speaking as he welcomed 33 migrants to the Vatican from a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.

He said all detention centres, which are overcrowded and a hot spot for human rights violations, should be closed and migrant traffickers punished.

Exact migrant figures in Libya are difficult to determine with many held in unofficial camps where abuse is particularly rife, but the figure is believed to be well over 600,000.

So far in 2019 just under 100,000 migrants arrived by sea to Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta, according the UNs refugee agency. Some 1,277 are dead or missing.

While the figures are a far cry from 2015 when over a million made the voyage by sea, the percentage of deaths to arrivals has risen sharply.

"How can we fail to hear the desperate cry of so many brothers and sisters who prefer to face a stormy sea rather than die slowly in Libyan detention camps, places of torture and ignoble slavery?", the Pope said.

"How can we remain indifferent to the abuses and violence of which they are innocent victims, leaving them at the mercy of unscrupulous traffickers? Our ignorance is a sin."

Pope Francis criticised the policy of preventing migrants from landing in Europe, which has repeatedly seen rescue ships stranded in the Mediterranean and unable to dock.

This approach has emboldened the Libyan coastguard to lead rescues, which typically sees the migrants returned to detention centres.

"Serious efforts must be made to empty the detention camps in Libya, evaluating and implementing all possible solutions," Pope Francis said.

"We must denounce and prosecute traffickers who exploit and abuse migrants,"

The Popes comments came as he unveiled a cross adorned with a life jacket, which had been worn by a migrant who died last year while crossing the Mediterranean.

I decided to expose here this life jacket, crucified on this cross, to remind us that we must keep our eyes open, keep our hearts open, to remind everyone of the absolute commitment to save every human life, a moral duty that unites believers and non-believers, he said.

In 2016 Pope Francis flew three Syrian families languishing in Lesbos to the Vatican and he has been highly critical of the mistreatment of migrants.

Updated: December 20, 2019 04:35 PM

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Pope Francis decries Libyan migrant camps as places of torture and slavery - The National

Twenty-nineteen was another powerful year for world cinema, if not an entirely compelling one for American filmshence the fact that six of my entries for the past year were international movies. But its a masterpiece from one of the dominant voices of American independent cinema in the aughts that claims the No. 1 spot.

Ash is Purest White, the master Chinese director JiaZhangkes existential spin on the gangster epic, follows Qiao, the fiercelyfaithful girlfriend to Bin, a middling mobster. After serving five years inprison for firing a gun to protect Bin, Qiao must forge a new life, griftingfrom one mark to another while searching for Bin, whose allegiances haveshifted. Zhangkes direction and narrative preoccupations drift much like hisunorthodox heroine, following her on boat and train, and culminating in afascinating reversal of fortune. Doubling as a metaphor for Chinas owncomplicated growth over the 21st century, Ash is Purest White is a pristinejewel of movie with stylistic associations ranging from Antonioni to Scorsese.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults stirring Waves is acombustible family drama of unusual enormity, and one that hits literally closeto home: It was filmed in Broward and Dade counties. When a shoulder injurythreatens to derail a star athletes plans for the future, it sets off a chainof tragic consequences presented with almost unbearable tension. A diptych of amovie, its second half, which follows his sister Emily through her firstbudding romance, is more contemplative, but no less profound. Set against thebackdrop of the brutal Darwinism of the college admissions process and thedouble standards society places on black Americans to excel, Waves is aguidebook for coping in the 21st century. Its emotionally draining, and worthevery minute.

This German import marries the harrowing solitude of asurvivalist drama with headline-ripped social commentary. During a characterssolo voyage to lush Ascension Island, she faces a brutal stormone renderedwith a camera that yaws from side to side along with her yacht, and anunnerving sound design that places us among the creaking infrastructure of theboat and the apocalyptic torrents of Mother Nature. But the movies darkestturn arrives later, when she happens upon a wrecked fishing trawler ofabandoned passengers, of whose plight the Coast Guard seems curiously unmoved.Examining the human capacity to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, itsmoral heft reverberates like an unanswered SOS call.

In director Christian Petzolds slippery adaptation of AnnaSegherss World War II-era novel, he transforms her story about an unnamedFrench narrator fleeing the German invasion into a temporal jumble ofhistorical rhymes and repeats. It could be 1944, 1984 or 2014, and maybe itsall three of these. Petzold wants us to feel unmoored; this is a story, afterall, about dislocation as a permanent state. Transitis propelledby enough bureaucratic cul-de-sacs and absurdist ironies that its as if aKafka story was filmed in the slick style of late 1960s Hitchcock, to saynothing of the looming influence of Samuel Beckett. Petzolds unspecifieddystopia has plenty to say about the Nazi regime, about third-worlddictatorships, about todays unfolding migrant crisis, all of them connected bya universal condition ofstuckness.

Quentin Tarantinos black comedy, set against the backdrop of the Manson Family/Sharon Tate murder 50 years ago, is a chronicle of inside-Hollywood metafiction. Its a layered love letter to the films Tarantino himself famously binged while working the register at Video Archives in Los Angeles in his 20s, and is thus a cinephiles heaven. Tarantinos trademark leisurely pacinghis propensity to let scenes play out past other filmmakers expiration timesworks to the movies loosely structured favor. There is very little plot to speak of but a great deal of insightful observations, witty asides, and generous dips into kidney-shaped pools of Hollywood nostalgia. Yet the movies revisionist history, boisterous humor and self-referentiality skate over its blunt assessment of a studio system in its death spasms and a generation losing its innocence.

Read the full review here

Celine Sciammas historical romance is a defiant erasure ofthe male gaze, a domineering fixture and a theoretical bugaboo since the dawnof cinema. The story is simple enough: A painter, Marianne, travels to a remoteisland in Brittany to paint a commissioned portrait of the aristocraticHeloise, an unwilling subject who is soon to be shipped off to Milan in anarranged marriage. The women end up falling in love, which is, of course,forbidden. What could have been the stuff of Merchant-Ivory prestige cinemainstead borrows its syntax from rigorous filmmakers such as Ophuls, and Powelland Pressburger, co-opting their rigorous melodrama as a shot across the bow topatriarchies everywhere. Distinctions between artist and model, mistress andservant, and form and content burn away in the movies crackling fireplace,while its symbolic send-off is at once subversive and heartbreaking.

Greta Gerwigs masterly follow-up to Lady Bird extends her affinities for young women who chafe againstsocietys strictures. She shuffles the source material into an ambitiousbifurcated narrative that oscillates between the characters young adulthood,after three of the sisters have left the March family home, and a formativeperiod seven years earlier, when they all lived together as the Civil War woundto its bloody close. This approach allows past and present to rhyme in waysthat are both richly ironic and devastating, so that its themes ofproto-feminism, gender roles, sacrifice and patriotism can ripple across thecanvas like leitmotifs. Though in some ways her movie is a modernist, playfuladaptation, she is in the best way a reverential classicist, with countlessimages that evoke John Ford. Every shot resembles the sort of painting youwould like to step into.

Pedro Almodvars tender memory filmabout a reclusive,physically hurting filmmaker whose latest festival invitation prompts his past tolap against his present like waves on a beachfrontis unlike anything yet made from this naughty provocateur ofcandy-colored melodrama. Yet as a remembrance of things past and a lucidreckoning with the directors own weaknesses and misgivings,Pain andGloryis a pinnacle of autofiction, in many ways representingeverything his oeuvre has been building toward. He saves the films mostself-reflexive masterstroke for the marvelous final sequencean act of bravuramagic that, once you unpeel its layers, speaks to the curative properties offilmmaking.

WithParasite, the South Korean mad genius Boon Joon-ho has crafted a satire so funny, so savage and so necessary in our present moment of global unrest and anxiety that it makes Luis Bunuels bourgeois vivisections look almost tame. Think pieces will be written about popular cultures response to this young centurys grift, class envy and income inequality; many will lead withParasite. But its his refusal to demonize or caricature either of the movies warring families that renders the films pathos so powerful.Parasitehas a great deal to say about a range of other topics, toolike globalization American cultural appropriationbut its the moments of casual malice, whether delivered from the bubble of privilege, in one familys case, or by the need to feel superior toanyoneelse, in the others case, that condemn both sides.

Read the full review here

The title is seemingly cynical, as no movie has betterexplored the brutality and absurdity of the soulless divorce industrythanMarriage Story. Yet writer-director Noah Baumbach, whosescreenplay drew partly from his own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, takesthe sober, cosmic view of marriages inextricable hold on people even whendocuments, and feelings, and life itself suggest otherwise. Marriage Storyischock full of lived-in insights that perhaps only a middle-aged person couldreliably write. And without much of a plot to propel the scenes forward, themovie assumes its power from its accretion of accurate details, its micro setpieces, its deadpan wit even in times of pain and sorrow. All of which is tosay thatMarriage Storyisdespite its achieved sublimity, thetears it will doubtlessly induce, and its characters (literal, in one case)open woundsan unlikely comedy.

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Top 10 Films of 2019 - Boca Raton

More than 160 migrants rescued from the Libyan coast have disembarked in Italy on the same day the EU urged warring sides in the North African country to cease fighting.

The NGO SOS Mediterranee on Tuesday said the group of migrants, which included 50 minors and five pregnant women, had been found during two rescue operations in international waters off the coast of Libya on Friday December 20.

The first operation rescued 112 people from a rubber dinghy that had deflated, the group said.

A second operation, conducted hours later, saved 50 more migrants from a wooden boat struggling in dangerous weather conditions shortly before midnight.

The migrants disembarked at the southern port of Taranto on Monday after permission was given by the Italian authorities.

So far in 2019 almost 100,000 migrants have arrived by sea to Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta, according the UNs refugee agency. Some 1,277 are dead or missing.

While the figures are a far cry from 2015, when over a million people made the voyage by sea, the ratio of deaths to arrivals has risen sharply.

Migrants arriving in Europe have said they risked the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean during the winter months to escape horrific conditions in Libya.

Violent clashes, which began earlier this year between forces loyal to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the UN-backed government in the Libyan capital, Tripoli have spilled over to areas where migrant centres are located.

Last week, Pope Francis said the detention centres in Libya were places of torture and despicable slavery.

The EUs foreign policy arm called on the two sides to cease military action and resume political dialogue.

"There is no military solution to the crisis in Libya," a spokesperson for the European External Action Service said on Monday.

"The only way to settle it must be a political one, negotiated on the basis of the proposals recently put forward by the United Nations."

Updated: December 24, 2019 07:29 PM

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More than 160 migrants rescued off Libyan coast disembark in Italy - The National

In Vathy, in the overcrowded migrant camp on the Greek island of Samos, news agencies are reporting that riots have broken out. Fires were started and the police were met with stones and protests when they arrived to break up the unrest.

Accordingto the German press agency dpa, local media reported that the Greek police setoff tear gas to try and calm the protests at the Greek island camp of Vathy onThursday morning.

Migrantsare reported to have started fires and thrown stones at the police in protest at the overcrowded conditions in the camp.Schools in a 600-meter radius from the camp were reportedly evacuated becauseof the smoke from the fires.

Dpa saysthat the protests are thought to have come this time from the African community in the camp who have beendemanding for days that they be transferred to the Greek mainland.

Similar clashes in October

InfoMigrants reported that similar clashes broke outin the same camp in October2019. At that point the trouble stemmed from a mass brawl between Afghan andSyrian residents, which forced police to use tear gas to disperse the crowd.

At thattime, the medical charity, Doctors without Borders (MSF) said that almost halfof the camps inhabitants were women and children. In November, the International Presidentof MSF Christos Christou tweeted after visiting Samos that he had seen a protractedstate of human tragedy.

Numbers keep increasing

Accordingto the UNHCRs latest data, more than 71,000 migrants have arrived in Greecethis year alone. Although the Greek government has been making efforts totransfer people from overcrowded accommodation on the islands to the Greekmainland, there are still some 40,500 refugees and migrants residing on theAegean islands. The majority of that population is from Afghanistan (around45%), Syria (20%) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (6%).

Theauthorities have been transferring around 1,000 people every week to themainland but more people continue to arrive. In the week 9-15 December almost2,000 people arrived with a little more than 1,000 on Lesbos and 208 on theisland of Samos.

On December10, MSF Germany posted pictures of a makeshift room in the Vathy camp. They tweeted in German: This is a bathroom.Difficult to believe dont you think? What is even more difficult to believe isthat this bathroom is where three small children have to shower, and thatthis bathroom is in Europe. This is the sad reality of life for around 2,500 childrenliving in the Vathy camp on Samos.

Tense situation

Samosmayor Georgios Stantzos has been speaking out for months about securityproblems related to the overcrowding in the camps, according to the Germanweekly newspaper Die Zeit. On December 18, an English language local websiteGreekReporter posted a video from Samos24.grin which Stantzos was filmed inthe town square chasing migrants and shouting Go the F**k Away. GreekReporter added that his intervention followed a police operation to dispersea demonstration on the square.

The mayorreportedly told Greek Reporter that he regretted using foul language but saidthat it was a knee-jerk response to an incident which could have turned veryviolent. It was a human response to a very tense situation. The mayor addedthat the migrants had been blocked from occupying the square and that on theway to their demonstration they had vandalized at least five cars.

Stantzossaid that his reactions and those of his fellow islanders were not racist andthat he was just against the few migrants who were intent on creating trouble.Stantzos told Greek reporter that the overcrowding had become a human rightsproblem [and] a law and order issue as severe delinquency problems arise.

ManosLogothetis, government commissioner for migration in Greece told the GermanFunke media group on Wednesday: The crisis is happening now, and it is serious.

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Riots in overcrowded Greek migrant camp on Samos - InfoMigrants