Migrants living 'lives of quiet despair'
Many migrants are living lives of quiet despair, and failure to address their realities is not the solution, according to Jesuit Refugee Service director Katrine Camilleri.
It was extremely worrying that there had been at least three suicides in the last few months and it was very clear that these suicides were an indication of a problem that ran very deep, Dr Camilleri told this newspaper.
The situation was very complex and there was no one reason for committing suicide.
"But I think what it tells us is that in Malta, many migrants living among us, including those with protection, are living lives of quiet despair and eventually, when it becomes too much, they decide there's no point in living anymore.
"I think that this alone should spur us to ask why there are people driven to such extremes, in this small community," she said.
Criminal gangs pocketing billions from Europe migration crisis
Human traffickers have exploited Europe's refugee crisis to make £2-4 billion in the last year, according to European Union's law enforcement agency.
Human traffickers have exploited Europe's refugee crisis to make £2-4 billion in the last year, according to European Union's law enforcement agency.
Criminal gangs have made people smuggling a money-spinning industry fuelled by a "seismic" development in the trade in Europe, Europol's director Rob Wainwright said.
Europol arrived at the figures through debriefings with 1,500 asylum-seekers, refugees and economic migrants showed that 90% had paid a criminal gang to reach Europe.
Mr Wainwright told The Independent on Sunday: "We also know that, on average, each migrant is paying between 3,000 and 6,000 dollars to a criminal facilitator for their journey. So you do the simple math and you're up to a turnover in 2015 of between three and six billion dollars. They are big figures. It's running in to billions of dollars made by criminal networks in one year alone in Europe."
Europol identified 10,700 suspects last year from networks spanning from sub-Saharan Africa to Scandinavia.
Desperate migrants, fleeing in fear and from reported abuse in their homelands, are prepared to pay different gangs of traffickers as different stages to Europe. To add to their misery some of them are also stripped of their life savings, given seats on boats that are deliberately scuttled or they may face kidnapping or extortion.
The scale of the crisis means that smugglers, many of whom may also be involved in the drug trade, have found a new lucrative supply of victims and governments and law enforcement need to toughen up, according to Mr Wainwright.
Pressure grows on Theresa May to admit 3,000 lone refugee children to UK
Labour peer Alf Dubs, who escaped the Nazis in 1939, tables amendment to immigration bill to allow extra children as soon as possible
A Labour peer who was saved from the Nazis and brought to London in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport programme is calling on ministers to admit thousands of unaccompanied refugee children into Britain, as pressure grows for the UK to do more to help desperate and vulnerable young people who have arrived in Europe without their parents.
Alf Dubs, a former MP, who arrived from Prague at the age of six, believes he will win strong cross-party support after tabling an amendment to the immigration bill that, if accepted, would allow an extra 3,000 children to be taken in "as soon as possible". The bill enters its committee stage in the Lords this week.
Last year Dubs paid tribute to Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the "British Schindler", who was instrumental in rescuing him and 668 other Jewish children in the months before the outbreak of the second world war by organising eight trains to take them from Czechoslovakia to London.
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Dubs was reunited with his father, who had fled to London earlier, at London's Liverpool Street station. His mother joined them later, but other family members died in Auschwitz. Dubs says Winton almost certainly saved his life.
His amendment, tabled on Friday, makes clear that the 3,000 would be in addition to those taken in under the government's current programme for admitting 20,000 refugees from camps on the borders of Syria over the next five years.
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