Latest blog articles

On Saturday 16 of April an earthquake struck Ecuador. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, it levelled various towns of the province of Manabí, in particular Pedernales, Manta and Portoviejo. At current estimates, it has killed more than 500 persons. Many of them died a slow death, after days of being...

It took quite a while before the European countries realized and recognized that the influx from asylum-seekers via the Mediterranean Sea and Turkey into the European Union is not just a matter of controlling the outside borders of the Union, but also a humanitarian and human rights issue. Some...

Refugee crisis and migration may obviously have a lot of different sources. The current refugee crisis in Europe is obviously strongly related to the war in Syria. However, quite often migration and hence a stream of refugees, can also be caused by natural disasters, even by climate change. Some...

This year we have witnessed an extraordinary and tragic series of events. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. The UN estimates that over 2,500 people have lost their lives in the process. In the last few weeks, the focus has shifted to the EU’s...

In a short memo, published on 22 March, the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD) expressed its view on how to handle the increasing number of asylum claims in the Netherlands, and more broadly in the EU, as well as the continuously tragic events concerning refugees that occur at the external borders of the EU...