Friday June 3, 2022
According to reports with this evacuation the UNCHR has helped 8,296 vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers on flights out of Libya since 2017 [UNCHR Twitter image]
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
has said it has evacuated a group of 132 vulnerable asylum seekers out of Libya
to Rwanda.
“The group includes children and survivors of violence and
torture,” the agency said in a statement released on social media on Wednesday.
“They’ll stay at UNHCR’s Emergency Transit Mechanism
facility in Gashora while durable solutions are sought for them,” it added.
According to local reports, the asylum seekers were from a
variety of African countries, including 74 Eritreans, 5 Ethiopians, 4 Somalis,
4 South Sudanese and 45 Sudanese.
The Ministry in Charge of Emergency Management in Rwanda
said the evacuees were safely received.
According to local media reports, this latest evacuation
raised the number of vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers helped on to
flights out of Libya since 2017 to 8,296.
In 2019, Rwanda agreed to take in hundreds of African
refugees and asylum seekers held in detention centres in Libya under an
agreement reached with the UN refugee agency and the African Union.
The agreement signed in September 2019 came after repeated
allegations of dire conditions for refugees and asylum seekers in Libya’s
detention centres, including routine abuse, lack of medical care and
insufficient food.
“We have been desperately searching for solutions for those
people,” said Cosmas Chanda, UNHCR’s representative to the AU, at a news
conference in Addis Ababa, the seat of the pan-African body.
The Rwandan government had said it was prepared to take in
as many as 30,000 Africans from Libya. The plan is for the process to unfold in
batches of 500 people to prevent the country from becoming overwhelmed.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES