“To go back is not easy, to go to Europe is not easy, to stay here is not easy,” says ‘Biggy’, a 31-year-old Nigerian migrant who has been in Morocco for four years. Neatly dreadlocked and nearly two metres tall, he carries the scars of the beatings he’s received from Moroccan and Spanish border guards. He has tried and failed umpteen times to scale the fence or cross by rowboat into Spain.
Ukraine's frontline cuts across the country like a jagged scar. Despite a February ceasefire, the fighting hasn't stopped. In March and April, Kristina Jovanovski had rare access to rebel-held areas to investigate the humanitarian disaster that has unfolded on Europe's doorstep. Here is her exclusive report on why aid isn't getting through.
When they fled the town of Tawergha during Libya's revolution, they thought it would be just for a few weeks until the violence died down. Four years later, families remain stuck in limbo, surviving in a under-served makeshift camp, not knowing when or if they may ever be able to return home.
On 5 May, 194 migrants and asylum seekers survived a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily and were brought to the port of Catania by the cargo ship that rescued them. IRIN spoke to some of the survivors.
Last year in 2014, the numbers of migrants using the Western Balkan route into the EU reached unprecedented levels. According to Europe’s border agency, Frontex, the Serbian-Hungarian frontier has become the third most popular route into the EU for irregular migrants and asylum-seekers, after Greece and Italy.
Thousands of asylum seekers, many of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are being denied entry to the European Union via Turkey’s border with Bulgaria. According to testimonies from asylum seekers, they are not only denied the opportunity to apply for asylum, but turned back by Bulgarian border police and, in many cases, beaten.
