Around 48,000 Births Expected in Rohingya Camps in 2018
Save the Children estimates that 48,000 babies will be born in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2018.
“The camps have poor sanitation and are a breeding ground for diseases like diphtheria, measles and cholera, to which newborn babies are particularly vulnerable,” said the aid group’s Rachael Cummings. “This is no place for a child to be born.”
The figure is based on Save the Children’s estimate of the number of pregnant women in the camps, which shelter 868,000 refugees – of whom more than 650,000 fled Myanmar’s military crackdown in the last four months of 2017.
Around 60 percent of the newly arrived refugees are children. Bangladeshi officials told Associated Press they had identified more than 36,000 orphans among the displaced persons.
Egypt Rounds up Human Trafficking Suspects
Egypt ordered the arrest of 75 people, including government officials, as part of an investigation into human trafficking.
Authorities conducted raids across Egypt, including in Cairo and Alexandria, Al Ahram newspaper reported. The detainees included public officials, foreign nationals and Egyptian citizens.
The country’s anti-corruption authority said the arrests followed a 14-month probe that uncovered “bribery, profiting from public office, forging official documents and human trafficking.”
Egypt passed anti-trafficking legislation in 2016, imposing jail terms from three to 15 years. The crackdown has left some refugees, including many Eritreans, stuck in the country with few rights.
U.S. Refugee Resettlement Hits Historic Lows
Refugee resettlement to the United States plummeted during Donald Trump’s first year in office, government figures show.
Some 29,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S. between his January inauguration and the end of 2017, according to the State Department. This is the lowest number since records began in 2002, USA Today reported.
Over the past decade, around 60,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S. annually – the largest number of any country in the world. In Barack Obama’s final year in office, more than 94,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S.
The Trump administration has set a refugee resettlement cap of 45,000 in 2018 and is currently battling to uphold its suspension of resettlement from 11 countries in the courts.
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- Quartz: Denmark Is So Inhospitable to Refugees That Asylum Requests Dropped 84 Percent in Two Years