DUBAI: A Syrian family with an epileptic son has been in limbo since February 2020 and has not yet relocated to the UK despite being accepted for resettlement.
The family had an application to resettle in the UK accepted by the government in December 2019, and received the final approval in February 2020 under the UK Resettlement Scheme, but has not yet been able to relocate, The Independent reported on Friday.
The UKRS is a relocation program for vulnerable refugees who have been referred by the UN.
Medication for the 7-year-old epileptic boy has been costing the family a fortune during the wait for relocation. The report added that the family had not been able to obtain proper medication or receive hospital care for the ill child in Iraq, where they currently live.
Yawar, 40, the boy’s father who left Syria with his wife following a Daesh attack on hometown Kobani in 2014, told The Independent: “My eldest son needs special drugs because of his epilepsy, and it is a struggle to get this medication, but I would do anything I can for my child.
“The medication is not controlling his epileptic bouts completely and for the past two days we haven’t got any sleep, neither he nor us. The last time we saw the doctor he increased my son’s dosage to the highest possible and said that if that doesn’t work then there is nothing else for him. His epilepsy is still not controlled.”
The boy is not able to communicate with other children and also suffers from hydrocephalus, a condition in which fluid accumulates in the brain and causes delayed development.
Yawar’s 4-year-old son has developmental issues and suffers from social isolation, lawyers assisting the family have said. Yawar’s children were born after the couple fled to Iraq.
The International Organization for Migration has assessed the family’s needs and told the UK government that a home without stairs and with wheelchair access is required. The Home Office has told the family there is no suitable accommodation for them to live in the UK.
NHS England assessed the family’s case in June 2021 and told the government that the eldest son would need treatment at a regional pediatric neurosciences and surgery center.
Lawyers supporting the family have told the Home Office that Iraq’s state-run hospitals are “deeply inadequate and the only proper support available is at private hospitals, which (our client) cannot afford.” They added that even private hospitals in Iraq cannot treat hydrocephalus.
Iran sent missiles into Irbil, Iraq, this week, close to where the family is living.
Yawar told The Independent: “It was very scary in the middle of the night for children to live in this fear.”
He added: “When I first received the news that my application was accepted I was over the moon because I just wanted my children to have a better life, but now with the delays I am gradually feeling frustrated as the process is prolonged.
“I just want my children to get the treatment they need, for them to go to school, and for them to live a normal life like other children.
“When we go out, people look at us in a strange way. It just makes us feel very bad. They look at our children because of how they behave. There is not much acceptance of disability.”
The Home Office told the family’s lawyers in October 2022 that it was “aware of the urgent nature of this case” and that it would “continue to take steps to source suitable accommodation.”
Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at charity Refugee Council, said: “This family’s case is a clear illustration of the urgent need to improve resettlement.”
Fionnuala Gregan, solicitor at Duncan Lewis, which has been supporting the family’s case, said: “We are concerned that while the family experiences ongoing delay in their being resettled to the UK, they face food scarcity, growing debt, and are unable to access adequate health care for their children’s disabilities.”
Syrian family with epileptic son remains in limbo despite being accepted for UK resettlement
https://arab.news/9v7af
Syrian family with epileptic son remains in limbo despite being accepted for UK resettlement
- Medication has been costing a fortune during wait of nearly 4 years for relocation
- Parents fled Syria in 2014 after Daesh attacked their hometown Kobani
Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence
- Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students
- “Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,”
NEW YORK: A Palestinian student arrested as he was about to finalize his US citizenship accused Columbia University on Thursday of eroding democracy with its handling of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who led anti-war protests at the Ivy League school in New York in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in a Vermont prison before a judge ordered him released on April 30.
On Friday, an appeals court in New York denied the government’s request to halt that order, saying the Trump administration’s jurisdictional arguments were unlikely to succeed and that it hadn’t shown that Mahdawi’s release has caused irreparable harm.
“Individual liberty substantially outweighs the government’s weak assertions of administrative and logistical costs,” wrote the three-judge panel at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Trump administration has said Mahdawi should be deported because his activism threatens its foreign policy goals, but the judge who released him on bail ruled that he has raised a “substantial claim” that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.
Mahdawi spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday, a day after pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with campus security guards inside the university’s main library. At least 80 people were taken into custody, police said.
Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students.
“Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,” Mahdawi said in the interview. “They are supporting the initiatives and the agenda of the Trump administration, and they are punishing and torturing their students.”
A spokesperson for Columbia University, which in March announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding, declined to comment Thursday beyond the response of the school’s acting president to Wednesday’s protests.
The acting president, Claire Shipman, said the protesters who had holed up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused. The school then asked police in “to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community,” she said in a statement Wednesday evening, calling the protest actions “outrageous” and a disruption to students for final exams.
Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014.
At Columbia, he organized campus protests and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the US and graduate student who was arrested in March.
On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered verbal questions and signed a document about the pledge of allegiance at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the room. Masked and armed agents then entered and arrested him, he said. Though he had suspected a trap, the moment was still shocking, he said, triggering a cascade of contrasting emotions.
“Light and darkness, cold and hot. Having rights or not having rights at all,” he said.
Immigration authorities have detained college students from around the country since the first days of the Trump administration, many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Mahdawi was among the first to win release from custody after challenging his arrest.
In another case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, upholding an order to transfer her from a Louisiana detention center back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and if she should be released.
Mahdawi said his message to the Turkish student and others was “stay positive and don’t let this injustice shake your belief in the inevitability of justice.”
“People are working hard. Communities are mobilizing,” he said. “The justice system has signaled to America with my case, and with Rumeysa’s yesterday with the Second Circuit, that justice is functioning and checks and balances is still in function.”
Mahdawi’s release, which is being challenged by the government, allows him to travel outside of his home state of Vermont and attend his graduation from Columbia in New York later this month. He said he plans to do so, though he believes the administration has turned its back on him and rejected the work of a student diplomacy council he served on alongside Jewish, Israeli and Lebanese students.
“I plan to attend the graduation because it is a message,” he said. “This is a message that education is hope, education is light, and there is no power in the world that should take that away from us.”
Migrants told of Libya deportation waited hours on tarmac, attorney says
- A Vietnamese worker was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center
- He was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya
WASHINGTON: Migrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men told Reuters.
The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.
After several hours, they were bused back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters was first to report that US President Donald Trump’s administration was poised to deport migrants to Libya, a move that would escalate his immigration crackdown which has already drawn legal backlash.
Officials earlier this week told Reuters the US military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.
A US official told Reuters the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan migrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.
Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who does not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with four or five other men, the attorney said.
The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.
“They said, ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year during a regular check-in.
Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the US to send deportees there.
Activists hold ‘die-in’ protest at Soviet monument in Warsaw
- They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland made his way to the monument
- A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests
WARSAW: Pro-Ukrainian activists held a protest at a Soviet memorial in Warsaw where Moscow’s ambassador placed a wreath on Friday, as Russia celebrates World War II Victory Day.
Some two dozen protesters wrapped in white sheets, their clothes and faces splattered with a red substance imitating blood, lay at the foot of a monument at the cemetery for Soviet soldiers in Poland’s capital.
They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreyev, made his way to the monument with a wreath to commemorate the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
“The idea was that the path the ambassador would take to reach the monument would be lined with the graves of people who died innocently during the war” in Ukraine, Miroslaw Petryga, 70, who participated in the lie-in, told AFP.
Poland is a staunch ally of Kyiv, supporting Ukraine with military and political aid as it fends off a Russian invasion that is grinding through its fourth year.
“It was the gait of a man pretending not to see anything, with tunnel vision,” Petryga, a Ukrainian engineer who has lived in Poland for decades, said of Andreyev.
The ambassador walked past the protesters amid a heavy police presence and with a handful of supporters and security guards around him.
The activists also scattered children’s toys at the entrance to the cemetery. The teddy bears, balls and other items were also splattered with a blood-like liquid to symbolize child victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Some were wearing t-shirts with the slogan “Make Russia small again” and were collecting signatures under a petition to expel the Russian ambassador from Poland.
At the site, around a dozen people also gathered at a counter protest, wearing the St. George ribbon, a historical symbol of Russian and Soviet military successes.
Minor scuffles and verbal altercations broke out between the groups.
A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests.
“We should honor the memory of those soldiers who died in the World War,” said Natalia, a 67-year-old who held a black-and-white photo that she said showed her father who had fought in the war.
The Russian citizen and longtime Polish resident declined to give her full name.
In 2022, the year Russia launched the full-scale war, protesters at the Soviet mausoleum threw a red substance at Moscow’s envoy.
A year later Andreyev was blocked by activists from laying flowers at the monument.
The Kremlin is using its annual Victory Day parade in Moscow — marking 80 years since the end of World War II — to whip up patriotism at home and project strength abroad as its troops fight in Ukraine.
But for Natalia Panchenko from the pro-Ukrainian organization Euromaidan, the day should serve as a reminder of Russia’s ongoing war.
“It is important to us that today, when people remember that there is a country called Russia, they do not remember Russia through Russian propaganda, but remember the real Russia,” Panchenko told AFP.
“And Russia is a terrorist state,” she said.
Cyprus court jails Hungarians brokering property sales in Turkish-held north
- The two women were convicted of advertising and finding buyers for coastal properties
- Friday’s verdict highlights the complexity and sensitivity over territory in Cyprus
NICOSIA: A court in Cyprus sentenced two Hungarian nationals to prison on Friday for brokering sales of properties in the Turkish-held north of the island seized from fleeing Greek Cypriots in a 1974 war.
The two women were convicted of advertising and finding buyers for coastal properties without the consent of the registered owners in the territory, which is a Turkish Cypriot state recognized only by Turkiye.
Friday’s verdict, likely to draw the ire of Turkish Cypriots, highlights the complexity and sensitivity over territory in Cyprus, where thousands of people lost property and homes from internal displacement and a 1974 Turkish invasion triggered by a brief Greek-inspired coup.
Those properties have since been re-distributed, and bought and sold many times. The territory has recently seen a surge in high-end investment.
Cyprus’s Criminal Court passed down sentencing of 2.5 years and 15 months jail to the two women, the semi-official Cyprus News Agency (CNA) reported. They had pleaded guilty to a number of charges, and prosecutors suspended others.
The court is based in the southern part of Cyprus run by its internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government. The women were arrested late last year after arriving in the south.
Greek Cypriot authorities have increasingly pursued legal action against foreign nationals investing in disputed properties in north Cyprus in recent years, and the issue is known to have caused friction in attempts to relaunch peace talks.
Two other cases are pending before the courts.
Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister highlights importance of ties with Japan
- Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi stated that Japan is committed to continuing its efforts toward a two-state solution for Palestine
- Iwaya stated that Jordan is playing an important role amid the fluid international situation
TOKYO: Jordanian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Al Safadi met with Japanese Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa in Tokyo on Friday and highlighted the importance of the partnership between Jordan and Japan, Japan’s Foreign Ministry reported.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi stated that Japan is committed to continuing its efforts toward a two-state solution for Palestine and establishing peace and prosperity in the region in coordination with Jordan, which, he said, was a vital part of stability in the region.
Iwaya welcomed his Jordanian counterpart and appreciated the visit to Japan and the Osaka-Kansai Expo of Crown Prince Hussein, who had “fruitful discussions” with Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru on Thursday.
Iwaya stated that Jordan is playing an important role amid the fluid international situation and added that he hopes to work closely with Jordan toward achieving a “two-state solution” for Palestine and establishing long-term peace and stability in the region.
The two foreign ministers met previously in Munich and Iwaya said the high-level visits and meetings “symbolize the strategic partnership between our two countries.”
He also offered condolences for those affected by the flooding in Petra.
Foreign Minister Safadi said he appreciated support from Japan in various fields, including economic reforms. He also congratulated Japan on the success of the Osaka-Kansai Expo.
He explained the latest regional situation and Jordan’s diplomatic efforts and stated that Jordan attaches great importance to cooperation with “close partner” Japan. He also expressed his gratitude for the assistance Japan has extended to Jordan thus far.
He added that he was looking forward to “in-depth discussions about the challenges we face in the region, particularly efforts to stop the Israeli aggression in Gaza and to confront the massive humanitarian disaster it is suffering, in addition to discussing the situation in Syria and the situation in the region in general.”
“We emphasize the importance of Japan’s role,” he said. “Japan is highly respected in our region, and Japan’s policies are aimed at achieving security, stability, peace and development. These are also the goals of our policies in Jordan.”
Discussions centered on bilateral cooperation and various issues in the Middle East.
