Excape

Lebanese bureaucracy, traumatized people, and little international support: There are numerous day-to-day problems in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. Majd Chourbaji helps to solve them.

With a backlog of more than 350,000 asylum applications, Germany is under pressure to speed up the asylum process. But efforts to quickly process Syrian refugees shortchange Afghanis and others.

Refugees in Southeast Asia live in legal limbo and are subject to harassment, arrest, and detention. Especially Rohingya refugees are in indefinite detention and have been forgotten by the international media.

What happens to refugees on their way to the European Union? Serbian novelist Vladimir Arsenijević has travelled the Balkan route and kept a diary of his journey.

It remains to be seen whether the majority decision on the redistribution of 120,000 refugees was a clever move. In Central Eastern Europe, the voices against the “dictate of the majority” cannot be ignored.

A special EU summit of heads of state and government will take place on 23 September. After years of neglect, however, a solidary EU refugee policy cannot be elaborated in summary proceedings and under pressure. A commentary by Eva van de Rakt.

For Europe, the current refugee crisis presents a two-fold challenge: Will we uphold our humanitarian values, that is, do we view the refugees as people in need and with a right to a safe haven? And will the EU act as one – or will national selfishness erode European togetherness?

After images of Budapest’s Keleti train station illustrating the need for a fast EU assistance programme for refugees: the governments of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia reaffirmed their vehement “no” to refugee quotas.

After Danish Jews fled to their neutral neighbours in 1943 and Sweden agreed to offer temporary refuge to some thirty thousand survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, a country deeply averse to foreigners transformed. So can Europe today. An article of the "Berlin Anthology".

From my hotel room in Budapest at the weekend, I followed the images of Germany’s Willkommenskultur, the country’s policy and manner of welcoming refugees and migrants. They have now been granted permission to travel via Austria to Germany.