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/ 19 January 2006

Egypt frees more than 230 Sudanese refugees

The Egyptian authorities freed more than 230 Sudanese who had been detained and threatened with expulsion after police brutally broke up a protest in Cairo, the United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday. Thousands of riot police wielding batons and water canons broke up a three-month sit-in in central Cairo on December 30, killing at least 28 Sudanese refugees.

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/ 18 January 2006

German ‘tax refugees’ taking billions to Austria

German ”tax refugees” dodging tough new banking laws at home are taking billions of euros across the border and depositing them in Austrian banks, said the newspaper Die Presse on Wednesday. The Banking Cooperative Federation in Germany’s Bavaria state estimated that last year alone, two billion euros (,4-billion) had flowed from its member-banks to Austria.

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/ 11 November 2005

Police break up protest by quake refugees

Pakistani police using canes and rifle butts broke up a march on Friday by earthquake survivors protesting what they said were orders to evict them from a makeshift refugee camp. Police denied they were forcing people to leave. Meanwhile, international lenders estimated the economic cost of the quake at more than -billion.

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/ 31 October 2005

Hundreds of refugees ‘disappear’ in Zimbabwe

Three hundred Somali and Ethiopian nationals who entered Zimbabwe as refugees over the past two months have slipped out of holding centres and disappeared, the state-controlled Herald reported on Monday. ”When we made a check on them [at the holding centres], they were nowhere to be found,” Chief Immigration Officer Elasto Mugwadi told the paper.

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/ 12 October 2005

50m environmental refugees by end of decade

Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50-million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warn on Wednesday. Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10-million people a year.

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/ 16 September 2005

Refugees’ right to work goes to court

The right of refugees to work in South Africa’s private security industry — and by extension, in all fields regulated by trade or professional bodies — are crunch issues in an upcoming battle in the Pretoria High Court. The case has a crucial bearing on whether regulatory bodies can implement their own legislation — ironically, also a constitutional right.

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/ 7 September 2005

Angola clears plane to airlift refugees from Zambia

Angola’s government has given the green light for a chartered plane to bring home more than 700 refugees from Zambia who have been awaiting return for the past three weeks, a UN official said Wednesday. About 724 Angolan refugees were being kept at a makeshift camp in Mongu, about 700km west of the Zambian capital Lusaka, as UN officials awaited clearance from Luanda for the airlift.

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/ 5 September 2005

Smugglers force refugees into the sea

About 75 Ethiopian and Somali boat refugees are feared to have drowned when smugglers taking them to Yemen forced them to jump into the sea, with scores more missing. Forty-five bodies have been recovered on the shores of Shabwa province, said an official with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.