The Camp Network Group is an informal network of collectives, assemblies, grassroots associations and individuals working in solidarity with people forced to live in isolated refugee camps (Ελεγχόμενη Δομή Προσωρινής Φιλοξενίας Αιτούντων - Controlled Access Facility for Temporary Accommodation of Asylum Seekers) around Athens and all over Greece. We believe that refugee camps are inhumane and degrading. They violate people's human rights and freedom of movement by hindering access to basic services and enforcing control and isolation instead of inclusion and support. No one should be forced to live in these conditions!

Enforcing isolation has been a key policy of the Greek authorities in managing migrant populations through the camp system on the mainland and on the islands. For the residents of Ritsona camp, transportation to and from the nearest cities, and especially towards Athens, has always been a crucial issue. Ritsona camp is 19km (a 4.5 hour walk away) from Chalkida – which has the nearest hospital – 20km from Thiva and 75km from Athens.

Failing to provide consistent and free public transport to and from Athens and Chalkida turns the camp even more into a prison-like structure. Moreover, access to the city means access to basic and life-saving services, which are severely lacking within the camps as has been widely reported.

Lebanon-Syria

Current situation

Syria

This month the French Court sentenced by a historic ruling in absentia three high-ranking Syrian officers to life in prison for the arrest, disappearance, and torture of two French Syrian citizens in 2013. Prominent among those convicted is a well-known general who heads the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, one of the country's four major security branches. This sentence follows a former German conviction of a Syrian colonel in 2022. These verdicts are far from being enforced but represent milestones for the justice system against war crimes.
Nowadays hundreds of Syrians attempt to return or endure deportation. Several are the direct testimonies to what awaits them: compulsory conscription, enforced disappearances, torture in prison, property grabbing (if still existent), and assaults.
Regarding the regional scenario, Saudi Arabia has appointed the first ambassador to Syria since 2012. This is another piece of the puzzle showing the inevitable international normalization of the Syrian regime.
On the ground the situation remains unchanged and grave, making Syria a space of war between the actors involved in the conflict. After the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Israel struck the area of Qusayr (Homs) and Aleppo on the border with Lebanon, resulting in 40 deaths by one of its most lethal attacks against Syria.
Cells of the self-styled Islamic State continue to attack the desert area in the east of the country.
Moreover, in the north-west, around Idlib, which is not under the regime’s control, the riots keep going on against the armed groups who command the area and repress the dissent through targeted kidnappings and intimidation of the population.

Today there is a strange warm fog enveloping the sun and the village. The air is still, nothing seems to move, even the colors are somber. This is my photograph today and I would like to keep it this way. Although the air is heavy, the mood is not. For one day I slept, I did not run, I did not scan the horizon.
Thoughts these days gravitate to the images and photographs I carry within me and try to describe.
A few days ago I was trying to balance a cup of tea on the tire of a car while using the camera to frame yet another settler's car passing by the house where I had slept. Too close. I was in Umm Dhorit. To call it a village is to give it a flattering but inaccurate size.
There are two houses with tin roofs held down by tires and pieces of concrete, two tents, a structure to house animals, and a lush vegetable garden.
A Palestinian family lives there, and my unattractive description of it - garden aside - is because their houses were demolished a few months ago by an Israeli bulldozer.
That is the reason I was there.

One of the most surprising things I have observed in my time with the environmental and human rights defenders of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó is the way in which the concept of humanity develops.
We can find it in the speeches they make at community meetings, in the political choice to live nonviolent resistance in a conflict zone, in the grief of burying the comrades and companions killed.
We can find it a few weeks after the latest double murder, a few dozen metres from the site of the 2005 massacre, in a boy reading his son a fairy tale before bedtime.

Current Situation

We cannot introduce the main facts happened during the month of April, without mentioning the hard situation that the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó (CdP) is suffering after the murder of its members, Nayeli Sepúlveda and Edison David, occurred on March 19^th in Las Delicias, at La Esperanza village. For this reason, the Peace Community asked the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) for a monitoring visit on the ground in order to report the serious human rights violations that affect not only its members. The CIDH visit aimed at talking and gather information from various national, municipal and civil society representatives to better understand the violence impact on undermining human rights.
During the post-visit press conference, CIDH stressed that the Peace Community is protected by precautionary measures, recently extended due to the situation of violence in loco, and expressed concern, urging State authorities to safeguard the CdP from the armed groups. CIDH will closely monitor the implementation of the protective measures that the State should guarantee to the CdP.
On April 1st, Ever Albeiro Espí Hernández, social leader and President of the Municipal Action Council of Beisal in Arauca Department, has been killed, showing once again how the violence is still a painful issue for the country.