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Thursday, January 7, 2016
UN backlash against call to scale back Geneva convention on refugees
UN backlash against call to scale back Geneva convention on refugees
Senior officials warn against Danish prime minister’s proposal to
revise 1951 UN treaty, saying it risks the destruction of ‘a milestone
of humanity’
Syrian refugees at the Zaatari camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria.
Photograph: Ali Jarekji/Reuters
A high-level proposal to reduce western obligations to refugees risks
the destruction of “a milestone of humanity” and would “renounce
millennia” of human progress, two senior UN officials have said in
separate interviews.
The comments are in response to the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke
Rasmussen, who said last week that he wanted to “change the rules of
the game” by rolling back the 1951 refugee convention,
the UN treaty signed in Geneva in the aftermath of the second world war
that obliges its signatories to offer asylum to people fleeing danger.
Rasmussen mooted changing the treaty so that refugees can be sent
back to transit countries such as Turkey, the springboard for most
Syrian and Afghan refugees who attempt to reach Europe. Under the terms
of the convention, refugees cannot be returned to Turkey because it does not recognise the rights of refugees from the Middle East.
With more than a million asylum seekers
reaching Europe by sea last year, and with no legislative means of
rejecting many of their applications, Rasmussen now wants to scale back
Europe’s obligation to provide them with sanctuary.
The Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said he wanted to
‘change the rules of the game’ by rolling back the 1951 refugee
convention. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images
In a television interview, he was quoted as saying:
“If this continues or gets worse … we will get to the point where we’ll
have to talk – and Denmark won’t be able to do it alone – about
adjusting the rules of the game.”
In response, two UN officials have warned against dismantling a
treaty that rights watchdogs see as one of the crowning achievements of
the post-Holocaust era.
In an interview with the Guardian, François Crépeau,
UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said: “We
shouldn’t touch the Geneva convention … The refugee convention is the
embodiment of an age-old institution. In every civilisation, there has
always been [the concept of] asylum – in Greek tragedy, in the Bible –
[and] the refugee convention is an modern embodiment of this age-old
asylum tradition. Refugee protection is at the root of many
civilisations and to take that away would be to renounce millennia of a
tradition of hospitality.”
In separate comments, Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the UN refugee
agency, said: “The refugee convention has saved millions of lives and
is one of the greatest human rights instruments that has ever been put
into effect. It is a milestone of humanity developed in the wake of
massive population movements that exceeded even the magnitude of what we
see today. At its core the convention embodies fundamental humanitarian
values.
“The biggest challenge to refugee protection is most certainly not
the convention itself but rather ensuring states comply with it. The
real need is to find more effective ways to implement it in a spirit of
international cooperation and responsibility-sharing.”
Francois Crépeau, the UN special rapporteur on human rights of migrants,
said it was possible for nations to resettle 4 million Syrians.
Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Crépeau, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada,
argued that the refugee crisis need not place a particularly high burden
on western countries if they all play their part in resettling refugees
in a methodical fashion. He cites the aftermath of the Vietnam war as a
useful precedent, when the countries of the global north resettled millions of refugees from Indochina with no long-term negative effects.
Crépeau said: “If we decided collectively as global north countries –
the 28 EU countries plus US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
representing 900 million inhabitants – that we would resettle 4 million
Syrians over the next eight years at 500,000 per year, [which is] half
the number that Germany has received this year … divided between the 32
countries, it would be very small. For the UK it would be around 35,000.
It’s a very manageable number.”
If not, Crépeau warns that people will come anyway. “As long as
Europeans are not able to sit down and agree such a programme, well
it’ll [continue to] be chaos on the beaches … It’s shooting oneself in
the foot because there will be another 1 million more people coming this
year. If people are coming in the winter when it’s cold, imagine the
rate in the summer.”
He added: “It’s going to continue. It’s not going to stop.”
In an attempt to reduce the flow of refugees across Europe, several countries including Denmark have introduced border checks – upending the concept of free movement within most of the EU that was enshrined by the Schengen agreement in 1985, a treaty that is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of European integration.
Nevertheless, the flow of refugees to Greece, the main migrant
gateway to Europe, remains at record levels. Despite worsening weather,
an increasingly hostile welcome in Europe, and a crackdown on smugglers in Turkey, January’s daily arrival figures are about 11 times higher than this time last year.
The Danish prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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