But Obama called to address the root factors behind displacement.
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He highlighted that in recent years, the USA has put in place intensive screening and security checks to take in refugees as well as ensure the nation’s security. “I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward and not back”.
“We’re making sure that the least of these, the most vulnerable among us, also have hope, also have opportunity”, he said. He said that would send the message that countries like the United States were “somehow opposed to Islam”.
“Powerful nations contest the constraints placed on them by worldwide law”.
Obama also warned that “the embers of extremism will continue to burn” in the world, but that “the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall” and prevent it from affecting society.
Turning elsewhere, Mr Ban accused South Sudan’s feuding leaders of betraying their people, and criticised the Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli and North Korean leadership.
President Obama on Tuesday urged world leaders to do more to help refugees, calling it “a crisis of epic proportions”.
Obama spoke for about 45 minutes.
Barack Obama greets Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and General Assembly president Peter Thomson after speaking at the 71st session of the UNGA.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced at the end of a special event that with 31 more countries handing over their official documents on Wednesday, there are now 60 parties that have ratified the deal representing over 47.5 percent of global emissions. He leaves office after a decade at the end of this year.
– Doctors Without Borders, which operates medical facilities in Syria and help refugees in neighboring countries including Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Rich nations have admitted few refugees for resettlement – a scant 107,000 in 2015 – and aid for those in sprawling camps has not kept up: previous year, the UN reported the widest-ever gap between the funding it needed and that which it received.
“Just when we think it can not get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower”, Ban said. In addition to the facilitation of humanitarian aid and joint military operations against terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State and Jabhat Fateh al Sham, formerly the Al-Nusra Front. The combined pledges amount to resettling 360,000 people – but they still fall short of the UNHCR’s estimated 1.2 million people who need resettlement by 2017.
Denouncing the “sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack” on an aid convoy in Syria, Ban said: “Just when you think it can not get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower”.
“A political transition is long overdue”.
During his address, Ban said all parties to the conflict in Syria have killed civilians, “but that none more so than the government of Syria”.
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He says while he has much to be proud of, he has expressed his regret for sexual abuse by United Nations peacekeepers in Central African Republic and the UN’s part in a cholera outbreak in Haiti.
