The Global Response to Refugees and Migrants: Perspectives from UNGA 2016
On September 19, 2016 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) – the UN’s main deliberative and representative organ comprising all 193 Member States – hosted a High-Level Summit for Refugees and Migrants. This unprecedented Summit was a watershed effort to address the large-scale displacement of refugees and migrants that dominates the current humanitarian landscape. One year later, the need to continue working together towards finding global solutions to better manage human mobility was again underscored at the UNGA 2017, which ran from September 12-29.
I was fortunate to be invited to participate in several of the main migration and refugee-related events being held at UN Headquarters in New York. As a political and socio-legal anthropologist and human rights scholar and advocate with a focus on forced displacement, I have been following these developments with great professional and personal interest.
Here I briefly outline some of the key themes discussed at these events, focusing on the initial High-Level Summit held in 2016. Over the course of the next year, subsequent ISIM posts will report on further developments as the negotiation process of the Global Compacts unfolds.
The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants
The main outcome of the 2016 High-Level Summit was the unanimous adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. This document responds to the UN Secretary-General’s (SG) call for “collaborative global efforts to be guided by international refugee law, human rights and humanitarian law”. While not legally binding, the New York Declaration nonetheless represents a global consensus on the need to improve the way in which the international community responds to large movements of refugees and migrants, and manages protracted refugee situations. I believe that this declaration constitutes a promising development at the normative level, and has the potential to guide the response of the UN system, Member States, civil society and partners as they endeavor to provide day-to-day support to migrants and refugees. Further steps must be taken to translate these initial standards-setting efforts into actual implementation.
The New York Declaration includes provisions to start negotiations leading to an international conference, to be held in 2018, and the adoption of two Global Compacts: the Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the Global Compact for Refugees. The main areas identified as requiring focused attention include the following:
Protecting the human rights of all refugees and migrants, regardless of status. This includes the rights of women and girls whose full, equal and meaningful participation in finding solutions is to be promoted;
Preventing and responding to sexual and gender-based violence;
Ensuring that all refugee and migrant children start receiving education shortly upon arrival;
Working towards ending the practice of detaining children for the purposes of determining their migration status;
Supporting those countries receiving and hosting large numbers of refugees and migrants;
Finding new homes for all refugees identified by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as needing resettlement;
Expanding the opportunities for refugees to relocate to other countries through, for instance, labor mobility or education schemes; and
Strengthening the global migration governance by bringing the International Organization for Migration (IOM) into the UN system.
Overall, the 2016 New York Declaration reaffirms the importance of the international refugee regime, represents a commitment by Member States to strengthen the global governance of international migration, and constitutes a unique opportunity for creating a more responsible and predictable system for responding to large flows of people on the move
The 2017 High-Level Meeting on the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants – One Year On convened as part of UNGA 2017 that revisited these commitments will be discussed in my next ISIM post.
Marisa O. Ensor, PhD, LLM, is a GU Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining Georgetown she taught at several universities in the US and abroad, including the American University in Cairo’s Center for Migration and Refugee Studies.