UN official urges worldwide action to solve Europe’s refugee crisis
Print Edition
THE refugee crisis rocking Europe needs a global response, the United Nations official in charge of migration said yesterday. Countries worldwide must be asked to do their share, he said.
“We should have a European response as part of a global response,” UN Special Representative for Migration and Development Peter Sutherland told reporters in Geneva, hinting at the need for an international conference “where every country is held up to the spotlight and asked what they are doing.”
Europe is dealing with hundreds of thousands of refugees — many of them fleeing violence in places like Syria — pouring across the Mediterranean and taking a land route up through the continent.
Syria’s neighbors are meanwhile struggling to host more than four million refugees from the war-ravaged country.
Sutherland said that geographical proximity to a crisis should not determine who takes in refugees, pointing out that during the Vietnam War, refugees were welcomed into countries around the globe.
The same, he said, was true following the Hungarian revolution in 1956, when an international conference was held to help distribute around 200,000 people who had fled the Soviet crackdown.
“I believe that we, in the United Nations have to drive ... a much more proactive response by the international community,” he said.
“We have to find a method, perhaps as we did in 1956 in the conference that took place then, to get specific commitments from every state in regard to taking refugees and financially contributing to dealing with the crisis which we now face,” he added.
He also said that there needed to be a system to evaluate who constitutes a refugee that is consistent across all nations, noting that different countries are using different criteria at present.
In the current crisis, the assessment of whether a person has a right to refugee status should be made before they cross the Mediterranean to Europe, he said.
Sutherland also said that sending aid money to help Syrians at home or in the region should not be seen as a substitute to taking in a fair share of refugees.
“Buying your way out of this is not satisfactory,” he said, pointing out that a number of the wealthy Gulf states had been very generous in their contributions, but had taken in very few refugees.
The same, he said, is true of the United States and Britain.
Sutherland called for a much fairer distribution of the refugee burden within Europe, pointing out that only five European countries have taken 72 percent of all refugees, while others take “virtually none.”
“History will judge this as a defining moment for Europe, a Europe that proclaimed itself to be created on the principle of values,” he said.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
