Asylum systems should be fixed, not scrapped, says the UN's refugee boss
T HE ASYLUM and migration debate is emotive, divisive and highly politicised. The many critics of modern asylum systems claim they are failing. Some call for scrapping asylum altogether and jettisoning the UN 's Refugee Convention, which guarantees the right to seek safety abroad.
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Daily Mirror
27 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
DARREN LEWIS: Angry mobs could do well to remember the facts about asylum-seekers
Social media has replaced Enoch Powell's racist scaremongering with shameful attempts to minimise the work of low-paid immigrants who rebuilt this country after the Second World War, writes Darren Lewis In the sequel to the legendary Die Hard movie, Bruce Willis wonders out loud: 'How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?' With Nigel Farage making infinitely more serious hay from the Epping asylum-seeker crisis, anything is possible. Because it has been quite something to watch the professional xenophobes and racist thugs on social media agitating to riot like it's 2024. Add the willingness of sections of the mainstream media to platform – and continue to drip-feed – bigotry and you can see why work is needed to dial down the temperature this summer. Caught in the cross-fire of the Epping situation are a number of homeless families, legitimate citizens of this country temporarily housed there long before this crisis, ahead of moves to more permanent accommodation. Friends living in the area report those families have been left terrified by the angry mobs targeting asylum seekers at a hotel. Deputy PM Angela Rayner's comments, suggesting tensions around immigration and falling living standards could lead to more riots, are just as concerning. What on earth is this government doing? Why would anyone in a position of political influence accentuate the negative and appear to provide the justification for groups to choose violence as an answer for their frustrations? The people whose businesses were trashed 12 months ago, dragged from the cars at intersections on the basis of their skin colour and singled out to be attacked in parks – they won't thank politicians for being so careless with their language. They matter. You expect it from Farage. He has been on TV crowing about the tensions in Epping reflecting the nation's mood. They don't – a small number of extremists have infiltrated social media to gain traction. They reflect the toxic atmosphere Farage remains desperate to cultivate here. The kind of climate where masked operatives pull up in people carriers and drag Black and Brown people off the street as they do in America. There can be little doubt that such a place is where the liars, thugs and those who wish to divide us want to take us. So, some facts for you. It isn't illegal to claim asylum. That right remains enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention. The majority of asylum seekers live in low or middle-income countries, most of them close to the places they fled. The asylum-seeker problem exists here because the government makes almost no safe and legal route available to any refugee other than someone from Ukraine. For everyone else, the Tories' Nationality and Borders Act 2022 means you need to be here to claim asylum. It was a deliberate act to frame everyone arriving here in need as an illegal. The current government – desperate to curry favour with the online Right – has no intention of changing things any time soon. Yet even that isn't enough for the xenophobes. 'Stop the boats' remains a cover for extremists to continue their quest to purge this country of Black and Brown people. The UK's underfunded welfare system has been broken for decades and remains nothing to do with immigration. And yet social media has replaced Enoch Powell's racist scaremongering with shameful attempts to minimise the work of low-paid immigrants who rebuilt this country after the Second World War. And, no, not every person targeted by the systematic, multi-platform disinformation campaign to frame migrants as an existential threat is racist. Many are simply reacting to the lies they are being fed. The racists are the ones doing what the likes of Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell, Nick Griffin, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage have done for years – injecting their divisive poison into the nation's bloodstream. That poison is threatening to take effect again this summer. It is incumbent on all forms of media to reject it in favour of preserving people's safety. We know what they did last summer. Let's stop them.
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
'Deliberate starvation' of women and girls in Gaza is 'war crime'
Nahla Haidar El Addal, chair of the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women (CEDAW) said that the 'act of seeking food has become a death sentence'. After the October 7 2023 attack by Hamas in Israel, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared a 'complete siege' of Gaza, with Israel cutting off the supply of food, water, fuel and electricity to [[Gaza]]. By December that year, Gazans accounted for 80% of the people in the world experiencing catastrophic hunger. Now, there is widespread starvation and malnutrition, primarily impacting women and girls. More than 20,000 children are reported to have been hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an initiative that provides data on hunger and famine to aid groups and the UN. READ MORE: Keith Brown: UK can't ignore independence demand with SNP majority And now, El Addal has criticised the 'man-made famine' imposed by Israel, particularly on women and girls in Gaza. 'It is a catastrophe that negates our shared humanity,' she said in a statement. 'We reiterate our demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. 'Their suffering and that of their families must end now. 'Over one million women and girls in Gaza are being deliberately starved. 'The entire population faces catastrophic hunger, when the simple act of seeking food has become a death sentence.' She added that there had been a 'total collapse' in basic conditions required to sustain human life, with women paying the 'heaviest price'. 'It is an assault on women's right to health, as mothers watch their infants starve. 'It destroys women's economic lives, erasing their ability to provide for their families. 'And it is a form of gendered coercion, forcing women to risk death in militarized aid lines just to find bread.' El Addal said Israel's 'systematic deprivation of food' amounts to a 'war crime of starvation', and a breach of legally binding orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). READ MORE: Kate Forbes to stand down from Holyrood next year 'This disregard for international law must not prevail,' she said. 'There must be an immediate and permanent ceasefire to end this devastating war. 'The siege on Gaza must be lifted to allow a massive, unhindered flow of aid through the relevant UN entities.' El Addal then urged countries to stop supplying arms to Israel that are fueling the crisis, and called on the UN Security Council to 'enforce the law'. 'The UN Security Council must, at last, enforce the law,' she added. 'The women and girls of Gaza are not collateral damage; they are the targets of this famine. "Accountability must be pursued. 'We will not be silent witnesses to the ultimate form of discrimination: the deliberate destruction of the right to exist.' It comes as a UN expert who previously warned Israel was orchestrating a campaign of deliberate mass starvation said that governments cannot claim to be surprised at what is now unfolding. Michael Fakhri, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told The Guardian: 'Israel has built the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine. 'So while it's always shocking to see people being starved, no one should act surprised. All the information has been out in the open since early 2024.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘No one should act surprised,' says UN expert who warned of starvation in Gaza last year
The UN expert who first warned that Israel was orchestrating a campaign of deliberate mass starvation in Gaza more than 500 days ago, has said that governments and corporations cannot claim to be surprised at the horror now unfolding. 'Israel has built the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine. So while it's always shocking to see people being starved, no one should act surprised. All the information has been out in the open since early 2024,' Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian. 'Israel is starving Gaza. It's genocide. It's a crime against humanity. It's a war crime. I have been repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, I feel like Cassandra,' said Fakhri, referring to the Greek mythological figure whose warnings and predictions were ignored. On 9 October 2023 – two days after the deadly Hamas attack – Israel's then defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a 'complete siege' of Gaza and said he would halt the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel. By December 2023, Gazans accounted for 80% of the people in the world experiencing catastrophic hunger, according to UN and international aid agency figures. Now, widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving the sharp rise in hunger-related deaths across Gaza, with more than 20,000 children hospitalized for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global initiative that provides real-time data on hunger and famine for the UN and aid groups. The 'worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out' across the Gaza Strip, the IPC warned in an alert earlier this week. Fakhri was among the first to warn about the impending famine – and the need for urgent action to stop Israel from starving 2 million people in Gaza. In an interview with the Guardian published on 28 February 2024, Fakhri said: 'We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts … Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian … this is now a situation of genocide.' The following month, the international court of justice recognized the risk of genocide in Gaza and drew attention to the 'spread of famine and starvation'. The ICJ said that Israel must immediately take all necessary and effective measures, in cooperation with the UN, to ensure unfettered access to humanitarian aid including food, water, shelter, fuel and medicines. In May, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Gallant became the first ever individuals to be formally accused by an international court of deliberate starvation, which is a war crime. In July 2024, a group of UN experts including Fakhri declared a famine after the first deaths from starvation were reported in Gaza. Fakhri also published a detailed report for the UN into Israel's decades-long control over food production and supplies to Palestinians, a stranglehold which meant 80% of people in Gaza were dependent on aid when Gallant announced the current siege in October 2023. Yet there has been little or no action to stop Israel starving Palestinians, which it has achieved by systematically destroying local food production (greenhouses, orchards, farmland) and blocking aid – in violation of international law. According to Fakhri, this is why famine has now taken hold in Gaza. 'Famine is always political, always predictable and always preventable. But there is no verb to famine. We don't famine people, we starve them – and that inevitably leads to famine if no political action is taken to avoid it. 'But to frame the mass starvation as a consequence of the most recent blockade, is a misunderstanding of how starvation works and what's going on in Gaza. People don't all of a sudden starve, children don't wither away that quickly. This is because they have been deliberately weakened for so long. The state of Israel itself has used food as a weapon since its creation. It can and does loosen and tighten its starvation machine in response to pressure; it has been fine-tuning this for 25 years.' Despite stark images of skeletal Palestinians, the Israeli government and some of its allies have continued to insist that the hunger is the result of logistical problems, not a state policy. Last week Netanyahu said: 'There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. There is no starvation in Gaza.' Unicef is among multiple aid agencies to confirm that malnutrition and starvation have escalated since early March 2025 – when Israel unilaterally violated a ceasefire agreed after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Israel reinstated a total blockade after allowing some aid trucks in during the ceasefire, though UN agencies and charities on the ground said it was never enough to fully meet the needs of the starved, sick and weakened population. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an opaque logistics group backed by Israel and the Trump administration, began operations in May, with armed security provided by private contractors and the Israeli military. It was authorized to replace 400 UN distribution hubs with just four across Gaza, in response to unproven claims that international aid was being diverted by Hamas. The UN and hundreds of aid groups condemned the move as a weaponization of aid that violated long-established humanitarian norms. On 1 June, Israeli soldiers killed 32 people at GHF sites, and since then more than 1,300 starving Palestinians have been killed trying to access food. Israel has long sought to discredit and weaken the UN and other international mechanisms including the courts, which it sees as hostile to its ongoing de facto annexation of Palestinian territories, accusing them of antisemitism. 'This is using aid not for humanitarian purposes, but to control populations, to move them, to humiliate and weaken people as part of their military tactics. The GHF is so frightening because it might be the new militarized dystopia of aid of the future,' Fakhri said. In a statement, GHF rejected the reports of Palestinian deaths as 'false and exaggerated statistics' and accused the UN of not doing enough. 'If the UN and other groups would collaborate with us, we could end the starvation, desperation and violent incidents almost overnight. We could scale up, add more distribution sites and ramp up direct-to-community delivery which GHF is piloting now,' a spokesperson said. The Israeli government did not respond to request for comment. The deaths from starvation and aid-hub massacres come on top of at least 60,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs and tanks. Studies have concluded that the real death toll is almost certainly much higher, and Israel has continued to deny international researchers and journalists entry into Gaza. Fakhri and other UN experts have repeatedly urged member states and corporations to act to stop the bombs and famine by cutting financial and military aid and trade with Israel, as well as broad-based economic and political sanctions. 'I see stronger political language, more condemnation, more plans proposed, but despite the change in rhetoric, we're still in the phase of inaction. The politicians and corporations have no excuse, they're really shameful. The fact that millions of people are mobilizing in growing numbers shows that everyone in the world understands how many different countries, corporations and individuals are culpable.' Fakhri argues that in light of the US persistent vetoing of ceasefire resolutions at the UN security council, it is incumbent on the UN general assembly to call for peacekeepers to accompany humanitarian convoys into Gaza. 'They have the majority of votes, and most importantly, millions of people are demanding this. Ordinary people are trying to break through an illegal blockade to deliver humanitarian aid, to implement international law their governments are failing to do. Why else do we have peacekeepers if not to end genocide and prevent starvation?'
