Global Displacement and the Implications for Refugees

Transcript

HIGH COMMISSIONER GUTERRES:   The 21^st Century is becoming more and more a century of people on the move. In a simplistic vision we would say that many move because they want, they want a better life, they want better opportunities for their children, they are economic migrants, they move because they are forced to move because of war or persecution, they are refugees. Now the problem is that more and more when one looks at what’s happening in the world, we see mixed flows of population. When a boat arrives in the Kennedy Islands or Lampedusa, when a boat is drowned in the Gulf of Aden, when people move into a island of the Caribbean probably the majority of them will be economic migrants in search of a better life but some of them are in need of protection because they are refugees or asylum seekers. Because they are women, victims of trafficking, because they are unaccompanied minors that require that protection.

And what it is becoming more and more difficult in today’s world is to distinguish among them. Traffickers and smugglers dominant these flows of population and so traffickers and smugglers it’s essential to mix things. It’s essential not to allow people to be distinguished. They tell everybody to destroy their documents. And it’s extremely difficult to detect those that are in need of protection according to international law and those that being economic migrants, have human rights to be respected, but of course, have not the same kind of commitment by the international community to grant them this kind of protection that the ’51 Convention for instance allows them to receive.

Now the truth is that these distinctions being more and more difficult, it’s important to analyze all we can preserve, protection or we can preserve asylum in these complex movements of population. And how we can make sure that those in fact in need of protection are granted access, physical access mainly to asylum procedures, fair treatment of their claims, and that responsible of bodies of managements that states have the right to do is done in a protection minded way allowing for those that require that protection to have access to it.

View Full Transcript »