President Barack Obama called on wealthier nations Tuesday to do more to help millions of refugees find new homes and asked all leaders to imagine what it would be like “if the unspeakable happened to us”. Of those, 21.3-million are refugees, and 10-million stateless.
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Borders have been sealed and asylum seekers denied and deported.
That may prove an uphill struggle, however, as the document is not legally binding and comes at a time that refugees and migrants have become a divisive issue in Europe and the United States.
An estimated 65 million people worldwide are considered refugees and migrants. This will also be the last time U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea attends in his current capacity.
As well as speaking at the United Nations event, chaired by secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, Mrs May will also take part in a summit on refugees hosted by USA president Barack Obama on Tuesday.
The worst refugee crisis in 70 years is also among the challenges that the session hopes to tackle. “But it is wrong to characterize immigrant and refugee communities as radical and risky; in our experience, militant violence is vanishingly rare”, they wrote.
Meanwhile, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein offered sobering comments urging world leaders to avoid reducing the deal to self-congratulation.
The Hungarian-American billionaire said Tuesday he will invest $500 million into companies and startups founded by migrants and refugees, as well as businesses and initiatives that address the needs of refugees and their host communities.
“It is shameful the victims of abominable crimes should be made to suffer further by our failures to give them protection”.
Previewing the speech in a conference call with reporters, White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the speech will be an opportunity for the president to both “review some of the progress that’s been made over the last eight years”, while also addressing the “great deal of unease about a range of issues” remaining before the global community Tuesday. Gang violence and narco-cartels are driving people from countries such as Honduras and Guatemala north to the United States.
Advocacy groups anxious that the New York Declaration on Migrants and Refugees – an outcome document which contains no concrete commitments and is not legally binding – falls short of what is needed.
HRW issued a statement calling the declaration a “missed opportunity”.
Refugee rights activists were quick to criticize the declaration for being all talk and no action.
Civil society groups remain unimpressed by the language of the declaration.
Half of the people displaced by conflict are children, he said. May stressed that uncontrolled migration was not in the best interest of the migrants.
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President Mugabe also said the responses to an influx of refugees had seen certain countries, within the context of supposedly combatting terrorism, treating displaced people and migrants as terrorists. As Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai noted, “the declaration does not include any new, substantive commitments for refugees”-and if the first day of its existence is anything to go by, not only will it not change the facts, it will fail to change attitudes, too”.
