Refugee crisis in Libya and Niger making slow headway, says UN

Countries are only "slowly" making headway in meeting promises to relocate stranded refugees and asylum-seekers in Libya and Niger, a senior UN official says.

Nearly 48,000 people are in Libya, some of whom are being held in detention camps, according to UN figures, while thousands of others have been evacuated to neighbouring Niger, where they are waiting in transit camps.

So far, 6,606 of them have received a promise of permanent relocation in a third country.

Pledges have been made by Belgium, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

But in an interview with AFP, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy for the central Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel, said only "close to half of these pledges have been met."

Cochetel was speaking this week on the sidelines of a meeting in the Malian capital Bamako which gathered international experts and African ministers on forced ...