Excape

Between 2011 and 2013 alone 5,891 LGBT people left Armenia. This article will tell the first-hand story of lesbian, bisexual and transgender Armenian citizens who have moved to different EU countries.

What comes after the failed referendum in Hungary? Political scientist Bulcsú Hunyadi about Orbáns objectives and about Hungarians who are tired of the migration topic.

The number of refugees fled to Europe in 2015 revealed the EU's deficient common asylum policy, which disproportionately affected the southern member states. To overcome the EU crisis, there is more needed than an EU-Turkey deal.

Thousands of Syrians have sought shelter in Lebanon. But having such a precarious status there and no legal recognition many feel their best option is to try entering the EU via the Mediterranean.

Turkey is hosting some 2.7 million Syrian refugees. Only one tenth are in camps and the rest spread around urban areas. Local cultural and religious affinity with them has kept social friction low.

The EU needs a proper strategy that allows migrants a legal form of access. The current situation of the camps in and around the EU is unacceptable. The issue of clarifying immigration regulations for the EU must not be put off any longer.

Lebanese bureaucracy, traumatized people, and little international support: There are numerous day-to-day problems in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. Majd Chourbaji helps to solve them.

With a backlog of more than 350,000 asylum applications, Germany is under pressure to speed up the asylum process. But efforts to quickly process Syrian refugees shortchange Afghanis and others.

Refugees in Southeast Asia live in legal limbo and are subject to harassment, arrest, and detention. Especially Rohingya refugees are in indefinite detention and have been forgotten by the international media.

What happens to refugees on their way to the European Union? Serbian novelist Vladimir Arsenijević has travelled the Balkan route and kept a diary of his journey.

It remains to be seen whether the majority decision on the redistribution of 120,000 refugees was a clever move. In Central Eastern Europe, the voices against the “dictate of the majority” cannot be ignored.

A special EU summit of heads of state and government will take place on 23 September. After years of neglect, however, a solidary EU refugee policy cannot be elaborated in summary proceedings and under pressure. A commentary by Eva van de Rakt.

For Europe, the current refugee crisis presents a two-fold challenge: Will we uphold our humanitarian values, that is, do we view the refugees as people in need and with a right to a safe haven? And will the EU act as one – or will national selfishness erode European togetherness?

After images of Budapest’s Keleti train station illustrating the need for a fast EU assistance programme for refugees: the governments of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia reaffirmed their vehement “no” to refugee quotas.

After Danish Jews fled to their neutral neighbours in 1943 and Sweden agreed to offer temporary refuge to some thirty thousand survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, a country deeply averse to foreigners transformed. So can Europe today. An article of the "Berlin Anthology".

From my hotel room in Budapest at the weekend, I followed the images of Germany’s Willkommenskultur, the country’s policy and manner of welcoming refugees and migrants. They have now been granted permission to travel via Austria to Germany.

For four days now I have been in Budapest, a witness to a drama that I would have considered impossible in an EU capital not long ago.