CAMPAIGNS
HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AGAINST ERITREAN REFUGEES
Eritrean Refugees Mistreated in Kenya
In November 2023, we started receiving reports about the treatment of Eritrean refugees by state authorities in Kenya. These reports are coming from different locations in the country and are indicating that groups of Eritrean refugees are not only denied access to asylum procedures, but also that the detention centers in which they are held are overcrowded and in poor and unsanitary conditions. The health of several Eritrean refugees have rapidly deteriorating as a result of these conditions.
We launched a public campaign and extensive casework on behalf of the detained groups in close association with their family members and partner organisations. We published a press release based of interviews with the detained, their lawyers and local organisations who were involved. We launched a social media campaign encouraging our community to target the Department of Refugee Services (@DRSKenya) and Commissioner for Refugee Affairs (@burugu_ja). We instantly received a reply and we worked closed with the commissioners team to address the concerns.
In January 2024, one of the groups we represented was released. We continue to monitor the situation, advocate on behalf of the groups still detained and work to improve the overall treatment of Eritrean refugees.
Eritrean Refugees Trapped in the Sudan war
There were 75,000 Eritrean refugees living in Sudan’s capital Khartoum when war broke out in April 2023.
Many were been unable to afford the high cost of bus tickets out of Khartoum. They were stranded in a war zone, terrified for their lives and lacking the most basic necessities.But even those who were able to scrape together enough money to purchase bus tickets are struggling. Even after reaching the safety of neighbouring towns, the refugees still encountered a lack of food, housing and medical support. International organisations which are supposed to support refugees have completely abandoned Eritreans caught in the middle of the war. The UNHCR only provides support to those who present themselves at one of their camps — but these camps are notorious for terrible living conditions, poor sanitation, lack of food and clean water, as well as limited medical support.
We came together with Eritrean activists in Sudan and in the diaspora to launch a fundraiser to support Eritrean refugees who had been affected by the war. We ran the public GoFundMe (that so far has 9103 GBP) and raised awareness about the situation and that people could help by donating online. We published situation reports and personal testimonies and also spoke at online events. Other activists in our coalition dealt with larger private donations. We work with our members in Sudan to identify grantees and distribute the funds. A year later, this work is still on-going.
Legal case against harmful UK migration legislation (Nationality and Borders Act 2022)
Section 12 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which came into force on 28th June 2022 changes how the United Kingdom’s Home Office deal with asylum claims. Section 12 allows for ‘differential treatment’ of refugees, depending on how they came to the UK. When determining an asylum claim, the Home Office can deem someone a ‘Group 1’ or ‘Group 2’ refugee, depending on how they arrived into the UK. If, at the end of someone’s case, the Home Office consider that they have not travelled ‘directly’ to the UK – they will be a Group 2 refugee.
Under the Nationality and Borders Act, you cannot have ‘come directly’ to the UK if you travelled through another country outside the UK, unless you can show that you could not reasonably be expected to have sought protection under the Refugee Convention in that country. If their asylum claim is accepted by the Home Office, ‘Group 2’ refugees get 2 ½ years status instead of 5. They would have reduced rights to reunite with their families, and would have to make four applications to eventually get settlement in the UK, instead of one.
In 2023, we supported a legal case challenging this section and arguing that it is effectively impossible for the vast majority of Eritrean refugees to satisfy this criteria and this legislation is discriminatory because it will create a scenario whereby almost 100% of Eritrean refugees are ‘second-class’, because of the perhaps unique problems that Eritreans face when leaving their country.
The case was successful but the legislation was overturned by the more harmful Illegal Migrations Act 2023.
Eritrean Refugees Kidnapped For Ransom in Sudan
In early 2022, we started receiving reports about Sudanense security officials kidnapping refugees off the streets of Sudan’s capital Khartoum – sometimes even from their homes or workplaces. A vast majority of the affected refugees were Eritreans. We started documenting these cases - interviewing refugees who were still in detention and to refugees who had been freed.
Our research had found that the prisons are crowded, you don’t get enough to eat, there is no clean water and physical abuse and sexual violence are common. At first, in December 2021, kidnappings took place a few days a week – but since last July, they’re happening nearly every day. Most refugees find themselves confined to their homes in hiding – fearful of going out to work or doing simple errands. Many are also going to Libya in an attempt to reach Europe, despite knowing how dangerous the situation is there, because life has become unbearable in Sudan.
At the start, the authorities demanded $200 for the release of a refugee, but that’s increased to $1,100. If you pay the ransom there’s no guarantee of not getting kidnapped again, and many end up behind bars several times. Most of the refugees being kidnapped are Eritreans, but many Ethiopians have also been affected. Security officials claim they’re picking refugees up to check their documents. But this is being used as a cover to extort money from a vulnerable and unprotected population.
Once we had collected enough information, we worked with Eritrean refugees in Sudan to launched a public campaign raising awareness about the issue and calling on Sudanese authorities to immediately stop these kidnappings. We published our findings and launched a petition. We mobilised our community to raise awareness about the issue online and to sign and spread the petition.
#JusticeForAlemAndKibrom
Alem Tesfay Abraham and Kibrom Adhanom Okbazghi were Eritrean nationals had been arbitrarily detained without any legal basis or access to asylum procedures in Egypt since 2012 and 2013, respectively and were facing forcible return to Eritrea. In October 2021, they were informed that they were going to be deported to Eritrea. We joined Eritrean groups and Amnesty International to pressure Egyptian authorities to immediately halt any plans to forcibly return them to Eritrea, release them as they are detained arbitrarily without any legal basis and grant them access to asylum procedures. We pushed an email campaign targeting Egyptian authorities that we encouraged our respective communities to take part in, and used Amnesty’s Urgent Action letter as a basis. Amnesty International mobilised their urgent action community to push the calls. After many months of campaigning and hard work by Eritrean groups in North America, their deportation was halted and they were resettled to Canada.
Eritrean Refugees and the Tigray War
When the war in Tigray broke out, there were over 97,000 Eritrean refugees living in the refugee camps there. We immediately started calling for their protection and for the Ethiopian government to stop blocking humanitarian access to the region and depriving everyone there, including Eritrean refugees, from food and medicine. In February 2021, we joined Amnesty International and Tigrayan groups on #AllowAccessToTigray campaign calling on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to immediately allow full and unfettered humanitarian access to the Tigray region. We organised a Twitter storm to push our calls and had an email campaign where people simply could send an email directly to the PMs office with our demands. We organised a live event with Tigrayan group ‘Omna Tigray’ to push the campaign as well. A few days into the campaign, the PMs office started replying to the emails saying that had reinstated access, however, the access was very restricted and the situation remained dire.
We published an article about the situation for Eritrean refugees in Tigray in our magazine. The article was written by Ethiopian-Eritrean journalist Zeckarias Zelalem who has covered the war extensively for many publications, including Al Jazeera, The Telegraph and Addis Standard.
Many Eritrean refugees fled the region after the war broke out and ended up destitute in the Ethiopian capital city, Addis Ababa. They were not receiving any support from aid agencies there and were in a desperate need of help as they had no means to pay for their rent, buy food and medications. We worked together with Eritrean groups in the diaspora and communnity leaders in Addis Ababa to start a fundraiser that we pushed on social media. We also organised a live-event to push the fundraiser.
When Eritrean refugees in Addis Ababa were protesting, we stood in solidarity with them by amplifying their calls online and mobilised our community to support them as well.
COVID-19’s Impact on Eritrean Refugees
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, we ran a social media campaign highlighting how the pandemic was impacting Eritrean refugees in different countries.
#ProtectEritreanFootballers
In October 2019, 4 footballers from the Eritrean team defected whilst at a tournament in Uganda. Since then, Ugandan authorities and individuals loyal to the Eritrean regime have been looking for them and the UNHCR has failed to act on their behalf and protect them. The defected players are currently in hiding, unable to leave the house and living in constant fear.
We started the campaign #ProtectEritreanFootballers to pressure the UNHCR to immediately protect the players and bring them to safety. We mobilised people to pressure the UNHCR online, including by doing a 24h Twitter storm and brought the case to the media. The footballers were eventually relocated to a safe house but the beds did not even have mattresses and there was very scarce access to food. We continued pressuring the UNHCR to offer better housing and to resettle them out of the country.
#EvacuateRefugeesFromLibya
The EU is funding the torture and killings of African refugees in Libya to prevent them from coming to Europe. We are fighting for their freedom.
According to international law, people have the right to seek asylum in any country that they want. To apply for asylum in Europe, you have to actually be on the continent and in order to escape this responsibility, the European Union has made it as difficult as possible for refugees to reach Europe.
If an African refugee wants to reach Europe, they have to get smugglers to take them from their countries of origin to Libya and from there, take boats over the Mediterranean Sea to Europe's coast. The EU has done everything in their power to make sure that this journey is as dangerous and deadly as possible. They have funded, trained and equipped Libyan groups to keep African refugees in Libya and to stop their boats from reaching Europe.
The UNHCR resettlement scheme is the only safe and legal route to Europe. People apply for asylum at refugee camps and if their application is successful, they wait to safely get resettled to a safe country. The problem is that the amount of spaces available depend on how many resettlement each country has pledged. Unfortunately, safe countries do not pledge enough spaces. To save the refugees in Libya, we need to pressure European countries to pledge more resettlements and evacuate the refugees from the hell that they have funded and created.
We launched our campaign and started the hashtag #EvacuateRefugeesFromLibya in 2018. Our overall mission will always be that the EU stops funding Libya to prevent migrants from coming and instead establish safe and legal routes to Europe, but in the meantime, evacuations and resettlements are the best option to save the people there and those who try to cross the Mediterranean and drown.
We launched the campaign with a statement (see below) and a social media campaign. We organised a panel discussion in London that brought together experts on the issue and clearly outlined the causes behind the crisis, the actual conditions and the possible solutions. The event was live-streamed to reach a wider audience. We sent around a sign up list to the audience for more information about upcoming meetings and campaign activities. We organised several campaigns meetings in London but started focusing our campaigning online. In 2019, we started a weekly action for the campaign, where we mobilised supporters of the cause to post about the campaign on social media every Thursday.
#TheyAreNotCriminals - Israel, Stop Deporting and Detaining Eritrean Refugees!
On January 1, 2018, the Israeli government announced plans to deport African asylum seekers, a majority of which are Eritreans, to unspecified third party countries and detain those who refuse to leave by March 31st. This policy would directly affect the 39,000 African asylum seekers in the country. Netanyahu has called the migrants’ presence a threat to Israel’s social fabric and Jewish identity and some of his supporters have referred to them as “a cancer”. According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, everyone has the right to seek asylum in any country, and all signatories of the convention (which Israel is) have a legal obligation to process asylum seeking claims, and if the person is considered a refugee according to the requirements specified under the convention they have to offer them protection in their countries. The problem in Israel is that they are delaying this process as much as possible for African asylum seekers, leaving them with few rights and opportunities, and little desire to want to stay in Israel, which is the purpose of the delay. In 2018, Israel had only recognised fewer than 1% of asylum applicants as refugees, compared with 90% for Eritreans and 60% percent for Sudanese refugees in the EU.
Our campaign #TheyAreNotCriminals called on the Israeli government to immediately stop their plans to deport and detain African asylum seekers, and instead process their asylum applications in accordance to their obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. We called them to stop treating the African asylum seekers as people who have committed a crime, and instead grant them their legal rights to seek asylum and get protection. We worked alongside groups in Israel and in different countries to push our calls. We ran a social media campaign and mobilised people in London. We produced informative content to raise awareness about the issue and called on people to join the campaign. We organised a panel discussion in London that was live-streamed online that brought together experts discussing the policy and its legality. We organised a documentary screening to raise further awareness. We also organised a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London.
The plans were paused by a High Court challenge that gave the Israeli government until March 26 to prove the legality of the policy. We pushed an email campaign during this period mobilising people to send emails to the Attorney Generals office with our demands. The government asked for an extension of the deadline and had until April 9 to prove that their policy is not violating national and international law.
On April 2, the policy was cancelled after the Israeli government reached a historic deal with the United Nations to resettle the refugees to Western countries.
Our campaign activities were covered by BBC World Services twice - once before the High Court challenge and another time after.
Stop Mos Maiorum, the European Union’s Operation To Crackdown on Migration
In October 2014, the Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union launched a two week joint police operation with the police forces of 25 member states to detect, detain and possibly deport irregular migrants. This operation is lead to random identity checks at train and bus stations, on highways and in public spaces, and anyone looking ‘foreign’ was being targeted. The European Parliament was never informed about the operation before it was announced and was not supported by the European Commission. The states voluntarily signed up to take part. We joined several organisations in Sweden calling on the Swedish government to withdraw from this operation and instead establish safe and legal routes to Europe. Our executive director wrote op-eds for major Swedish newspapers, did media interviews and spoke at a protest outside the Swedish government’s office.
Stop kidnappings in Sinai
Roughly between 2009-2014, refugees in the Horn of Africa were kidnapped and brought to the Sinai desert for ransom. A majority of these refugees were Eritreans. The hostages were subjected to severe torture and mistreatment, and were forced to call their family members to make them listen to them getting tortured to “incentivise” them to pay the ransom. The ones who could not get the ransom got killed. The area was known to be “lawless” and the operations of the kidnappings were completely undisturbed. When Eritrean-Swedish journalist Meron Estefanos found about the situation, she started raising awareness about it on her radio show and quickly started dedicating all her time and energy into improving the situation. She helped raise money for many of the hostages whilst actively campaigning for the world to take action to stop the kidnappings. We have had the honour of working with Meron in different ways since we were founded, and did advocacy at the Vatican onn her behalf to raise awareness about the situation and get support from the delegates from different countries who were present. The kidnappings only stopped in the area when the Sinai desert became too unstable to bring hostages to following the overthrow of President Mursi. But that was not the end - instead, the kidnappings started happening in new areas in Northern Africa. More about this in the Evacuate Refugees From Libya section on this page.
Remembering Lampedusa
On October 3rd 2013, a boat carrying refugees caught on fire and sank half a mile from the Italian coast, by the island Lampedusa. Over 359 people drowned. A majority of the people on the boat were Eritreans. Their deaths were not an unpreventable tragedy, but the result of a deliberate strategy by the European Union to stop refugees from reaching Europe. These dangerous boat routes are the only way refugees have of reaching Europe from Africa and the EU has made the journeys even more dangerous by funding, equipping and training the Libyan coastguard. We want to ensure that this day is never forgotten by continuously highlighting it with vigils, in the media and on social media. We honour their memory by actively campaigning for safe and legal routes for refugees to Europe, and to end the conditions that forced them to flee in the first place through our various other campaigns and advocacy.
