EU imposes visa restrictions on Somali citizens

The European Union has imposed visa restrictions on Somali citizens, escalating a dispute with Mogadishu over the return of Somalis living in Europe illegally, reports Al Jazeera. The bloc’s member states approved the measures on Thursday, acting on a report that Somalia was not doing enough to take back nationals who had been refused the right to stay. Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud pushed back, saying his government would readmit its citizens, but said that many returnees were not Somali nationals. ‘We haven’t rejected our people; they own this country. And we cannot reject them,’ the President said on Thursday, adding that Somalia had ‘questions about how those people would be returned’. People across the Horn of Africa share a similar appearance, he said, and some present themselves as Somali to claim asylum in Europe. He pointed to past cases in which individuals sent back as Somalis turned out not to be, including some who ‘don’t know the Somali language’. The pressures driving people to leave are rooted in decades of upheaval. Somalia is still rebuilding after the collapse of its central government in 1991 and the long civil war that followed. Recovery efforts have been stifled by the ongoing armed rebellion of al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked armed group that has waged deadly attacks since 2006.

Full Al Jazeera report