Would you give a home to a Syrian refugee?
The shadow home secretary said that within 24 hours of her asking councils in England, Scotland and Wales asking if they would be prepared to help in providing places for refugees, more than 40 had written back offering support.
“Given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of the people, today I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees“, he told reporters on a visit to Lisbon.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – all relatively close to war-ravaged Syria and said by commentators to have the capacity to quickly house refugees – are yet to take any of the four million Syrians fleeing the region.
“The whole system needs to be redesigned”, Merkel said, adding that tasks and burdens should be distributed more fairly.
When Iceland’s government said that it would accept just 50 refugees, over ten thousand of the country’s private citizens offered up their homes in addition.
Pressure mounted on the Prime Minister after a photo of a Syrian toddler, washed up on a beach in Turkey, hit the papers.
Public demand for action has prompted a rapid change of tone from the Prime Minister, who has announced that the United Kingdom will accept thousands more refugees.
Italy has been facing the crisis for longer than most other European countries, as the country is widely used as an entry port to Europe.
“Due to a lack of funds we had to suspend from the first of September assistance to 229,000 Syrians who live in Jordan, outside [UN] refugee camps“, World Food Programme spokeswoman Dina El-Kassaby said.
– The United Nations says the European Union must accept 200,000 refugees as part of a “common strategy” to replace its country-by-country response to the sudden surge of refugees from Syria, North Africa, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
Later in Madrid, Cameron said his government would spend another 100 million pounds ($152 million) on humanitarian aid, taking its total contribution to 1 billion pounds since 2012.
Legal routes for people to claim asylum in Europe must be made fairer and more reliable, so that desperate families are not driven into the arms of people traffickers. We did this with Iraq, where we won the war, but then we accepted 60,000 Iraqi refugees into our country, some of which wish us harm and tried to attack us.
There are two classes of refugees, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said Germany expects to take in up to 800,000 asylum seekers from around the world this year.
Paul Johnson, a company director from Farnham, Kent, has pledged his spare room to a Syrian refugee. Their accommodation will have been arranged before they arrive.