Press release of the network “Choucha Protest Solidarity” (including Afrique-Europe-Interact): Choucha Refugee Camp at the Tunisian-Libyan border, hosting refugees fleeing the war in Libya, was officially closed on 30.06.2013. The eviction of the hundreds of remaining refugees is due to be carried out in the coming weeks.

Members of the network “Choucha Protest Solidarity” visited the Choucha refugee camp at the end of August 2013. There are still around 400 refugees – according to IOM and UNHCR, 262 rejected asylum seekers and 135 recognized refugees who do not have access to the previously closed resettlement program – living in extremely hard conditions, among them families, children and ill people. Access to food, water, medical care and electricity has been cut off by UNHCR, who was managing the camp.

By choucha protest solidarity

Forty-one sub-Saharan refugees from the Shousha camp knocked on the doors of the influential World Social Forum demanding human dignity. The lack of recognition and concrete solutions encouraged them to collectively start a hunger strike in front of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offices in Tunis on March 29th 2013, putting their health – already very fragile – in grave danger. The twelfth World Social Forum has just ended its Tunisian edition which was held from March 26th to March 30th 2013 with the blessing of the Tunisian authorities and numerous international NGOs. “Dignity” was the slogan of this gathering of NGOs, trade unions, along with Tunisian and international civil society. I would now like to draw your attention to the following urgent situation.

Pressrelease by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights

During the evening hours of February 27th about thirty refugees of Eritrean nationality, including six women and a child, went to the headquarters of the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Zarzis in the south of Tunisia. They are part of a group of “boat people” who arrived from Libya in September 2012. They were initially accommodated at a youth centre in Zarzis and entered an integration programme organised by the red crescent in Tunisia. Despite the fact that they were recognised as refugees by the UNHCR, they were denied access to the resettlement programme. It allows people to move to a country with a functioning asylum system and adequate safety. They were told that the resettlement programme which existed in Tunisia was terminated and not accessible to anybody who arrived after December 2011.

Afrique-Europe-Interact and the signatory organizations support the mobilization of the Choucha refugees and all their claims. The ordeal that these people have been suffering for two years of must stop immediately and the situation solved in the respect of their rights.

For two years, refugees from the Libyan crisis languish in the Shusha camp in the indifference of governments and international organizations. Tunisia lacking an asylum system, some of them were resettled in Western countries. Others returned to their country of nationality or have sailed for Europe, risking their lives, as many Tunisians do every day. Others have left to Libya, where the rights of migrants are seriously violated every day.

Press release on Choucha camp, Tunisia/Libya border

Around 3000 migrants and refugees who fled the war in Libya in 2011 are still living under inhuman conditions in the refugee camp at Choucha (Tunisia) near the Libyan border. Most come from Sub-Saharan Africa but there are also nationals of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Palestine and Iraq. Some in the camp have been accepted as refugees and are awaiting resettlement. Others are waiting for UNHCR’s decision on their case to be accepted. Hundreds are denied any status at all because their cases were not processed properly and they have not had access to lawyers or to good interpreters.