Terrible things are happening across our continent. On just the other side of the Channel people are living in destitution, scraping together an existence as they wait and hope to come to Britain. In the Czech Republic people are being rounded up on trains, their forearms marked with felt tips before they are held in detention. In Hungary the police are stopping people with tickets from boarding trains to Germany. In the Mediterranean people are floating through night and day on vessels that are barely seaworthy. Many of those vessels sink, and the people on them, like the child washed up dead on Turkey’s shores this week, never make it to the other side alive. These are people – treated differently from me only because of the country in which they were born.
UN calls on European Union to take 200,000 more refugees
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The majority of those who have crossed the Mediterranean are from Syria (according to figures from the arrival countries that have published them). It’s impossible to imagine what it must be like to flee the dangers of that country and arrive on a continent where you’re herded like cattle, left to rot in camps on borders and denied access to transport because of the country in which you were born. And that’s those who even make it to Europe: the number of people who have died on Mediterranean migration routes so far this year is more than 400 higher than the figure for the same period in 2014.
This continent – so scarred itself from the blood spilt in conflicts of the past – is utterly failing to extend solidarity to the victims of the violence ripping through countries on the other side of the Mediterranean. Britain has been one of the worst offenders. It has taken enormous public pressure for ministers to finally commit to taking in more refugees – but it seems likely that this number won’t even reach the tens of thousands. I can’t help but wonder how the prime minister can have seen the pictures of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach, yet take so long to commit to doing the one thing that would immediately help people like him to safety. His bowing to public pressure is a positive first step – but his initial reluctance to do what’s right is deeply worrying.
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