Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

The race is on to succeed Ban Ki-moon as UN Secretary-General when he vacates office at the end of this year. The corridors of the UN General Assembly have been abuzz this week with heated speculation about who will take charge of the most important international body, charged with maintaining peace and security.

What is particularly disappointing is that none of the declared candidates vying for the post consider Africa a priority. This is despite the fact that many of the refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe come from Africa, and the highest number of civil conflicts are taking place on the African continent.

Africa is the promise of tomorrow, where bulging youth populations will set the trajectory of our future, and where abundant resources will supply the world with strategic raw materials. But while Africa has enormous potential and a lot to offer, it is also in dire need of assistance from the UN in terms of peacekeeping, peace building, humanitarian aid, protection for increasing numbers of refugees, and assistance in attaining the Millennium Development Goals.

No other continent is more in need of the UN and its agencies, and so it is inexplicable that Africa hardly featured in the answers the candidates for UN Secretary-General gave to questions UN member states posed to them in open hearings recently. The hearings were held over three days, with 800 questions being posed to the candidates over 18 hours.

This is the first time that the UN has engaged in an open process in an attempt to bring a measure of transparency to the vetting of secretary general candidates. Previously the process of choosing one was shrouded in secrecy among the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, which alone would decide on the leadership of the world body. Often the identities of the candidates were not widely known.

It is progress that the political positions of the various candidates are now laid bare, but the choice of who will succeed Ban Ki-moon still lies entirely up to the permanent five. According to the UN Charter, the secretary-general is to be chosen by the assembly on the recommendation of the five. In practice, however, the Security Council chooses the secretary-general in private, and the General Assembly merely rubber-stamps their choice. Despite this year's efforts at transparency, the victors of World War II will still be the ones to determine who will steer the helm of the world body.

The big powers have already intimated their preferences, but of concern to us should be the fact that the issue of the African agenda does not seem to feature on anyone's priority list.

Knowing that the AU exists to deal with African conflicts and development needs is heartening, except for the fact that the the body has not managed to resolve or prevent many conflicts to date, and in some cases has turned a blind eye to human rights abuses. It also lacks the resources to mobilise peace-enforcement missions in a timely manner, although it is hoped this can be achieved in the coming years.

For as long as the AU lacks the necessary capacity to fulfil its dreams of African solutions to African problems, it is imperative that the continent can rely on the commitment of the UN, and the perspective of the UN Secretary-General towards the continent is particularly important.

The declared candidates to date are primarily from Eastern Europe, which has not had a turn in terms of the informal tradition of geographic rotation. There have so far been eight secretaries-general, three from Western Europe, one from Latin America, two from Africa, and two from Asia. There has never been a woman secretary-
general, and one of the leading candidates is Bulgaria's Irina Bokova, the Unesco director-general, who is Russia's candidate of choice.

The UK has been against her candidature, while Germany supports Bulgaria's Kristalina Georgieva, vice-president of the European Commission. The US has supported Susanna Makorra, the former foreign minister of Argentina, and Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff.

The candidate who topped the UN Security Council's fifth straw poll on Monday was António Guterres, the former Portuguese PM who headed UNHCR from 2005 to 2015, and who is considered charismatic and liked by many on the UN Security Council.

The council's final vote on Wednesday may see Guterres securing the job.

All the politicking may be high stakes for the Europeans, but for Africa it has underlined the continent will have to strive harder to be self-reliant as its challenges are likely to take a back seat to that of refugees and migrants flocking to Europe.

Ebrahim is group foreign editor.
 

From the Middle East to the heart of Europe, countries are struggling to deal with a massive surge of desperate people crossing their borders, some fleeing for their lives, others escaping poverty and in search of jobs.

The number of people forced to flee their homes is staggering. According to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), there are 65.3 million people forcibly displaced, including 21.3 million registered refugees who have fled their home countries to escape conflict or persecution. "In addition to the refugees, there are 244 million international migrants—probably an underestimate—and if you add to them the 750 million domestic migrants, you have 1 billion people; that is 1 billion in our 7 billion world," says William Lacy Swing, director general of the International Organization of Migration (IOM). "One out of every seven people on the planet is in a migratory status."

The U.N. and the United States convened two international summits in September to deal with what Swing calls the "mega-trend in the 21st century...more people on the move than at any other time in recorded history."

While the U.N.'s record on resolving conflicts has not been impressive in recent years (think Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan and more), it has generally been an important force in taking care of refugees—a task shared by agencies including the UNHCR, the children's nonprofit UNICEF and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

But from the beaches of Lesbos to refugee camps in Kenya, Turkey and Jordan, the U.N. agencies are now overwhelmed. At the same time, there is a backlash against the newcomers in the United States and Europe, the latter of which in the midst of an economic downturn has found its basic services severely taxed.

Immigration and refugees have been a major issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Republican candidate Donald Trump vowing to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico to stop immigrants from entering the country illegally and to deny entry to Syrian refugees and other Muslims. "The migration narrative right now is highly toxic," says Swing. "It is the cruel irony that people fleeing terror are then accused of being terrorists themselves."

Convincing 193 nations to agree on how best to handle the twin problems of migrants and refugees was not easy—while refugees already have legal protection and rights under international conventions, there is no such consensus on economic migrants, and many richer countries are resistant to changing that.

The key negotiators of the U.N.'s New York Declaration on Migrants and Refugees were Jordanian Ambassador Dina Kawar—concerned with millions of refugees pouring into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa—and Irish Ambassador David Donoghue, whose primary focus is the influx of people to the European Union.

Donoghue concedes there was less commitment in the final U.N. agreement than he had hoped. "Inevitably, in a negotiation like this, among 193 member states, you're not going to be able to stay at the high point of moral fervor," he says. "You're going to have to acknowledge that some member states have concerns, and it got diluted a little bit."

Among the main breakthroughs, the negotiators say, was that they brought migrants, not just refugees, into the U.N.'s purview.

The 22-page outcome document, which forms the basis for this new agreement, is composed of 12 pages plus two annexes—one for refugees and one for migrants—and sets out a two-year timetable to negotiate specific actions. "Negotiations would begin in early 2017 and would run up until an intergovernmental conference in 2018," Donoghue says, "but we've already done a fair amount of the groundwork for that global compact on migration because the annex we're talking about sets out a number of key elements."

Among those elements: programs for countries to absorb migrants and protections for them; provisions to educate migrant children; and burden sharing of existing migrant populations. What's more, the document makes a case that migrants can have a positive effect on society.

That language was resisted by some countries, Donoghue says (he declined to say which), but others were determined to include it. "Let me put it this way: The champions of migration in the broader sense, over many years at the U.N., have included Bangladesh, Mexico, Sweden and a number of others.

"Migration up till now has never been addressed at the U.N. because it was seen as an issue for national sovereignty," he adds.

The agreement also focuses attention on refugees and reminds nations that they cannot, under international law, send people back to a country if they fear persecution and stresses that refugees should be given work and their children educated. It also urges countries to take back nationals if they do not meet the requirements of asylum.

Another contentious issue was how to handle internally displaced persons. "IDPs deal with sovereignty," says Leonard Doyle, spokesman for the IOM, "a very tough nut to crack when dealing with the U.N. system because, by definition, they happen within a nation's territory."

The attitude from some countries' representatives, he s ays, was the equivalent of "Don't even think about parking in that spot," so the document simply noted that other development goals of the U.N. recognize the need to care for IDPs and mentioned the need for "reflection" in order to protect IDPs and prevent the root causes of the problem.

Which countries changed what during the negotiations reflects the deep divides on the subject. Kawar and Donoghue say the discussions were intense: Every single word was debated, and some things were just off-limits.

When the negotiations began, there were plans to have concrete proposals to resettle refugees and share the burden of new ones around the globe, since 86 percent of refugees are in the developing world. Many migration and refugee advocates wanted specific pledges to resettle one-tenth of refugees, but that met resistance from several countries, including Russia. The final agreement simply has a vague commitment to "cooperation."

Human rights language was also watered down. "You're always going to have a tension in a negotiation like that between the global north, which has a strong view of human rights," Donoghue says, and countries that have issues with human rights abuses.

The U.S. wasn't very pleased, the organizers say, that some of the commitments would be diluted and at first planned a summit on refugees on the same day as the U.N. summit. After much back and forth, the U.S. moved the date of its meeting back a day, so that the conferences complemented each other. The U.S. would bring together countries that agreed in advance to make a contribution to one of the areas of reform.

The U.S.-led Leaders' Summit on Refugees was co-hosted by Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, Mexico, Sweden and the United States. According to the White House, 52 countries and international organizations attended and pledged to increase their current financial contributions to U.N. appeals and international humanitarian organizations by $4.5 billion over the past year, double the number of refugees they resettle or admit legally in 2016 to 360,000, improve access to education for 1 million refugee children globally and give legal aid to 1 million refugees globally.

The fate of children was a particular concern at the two summits, and while the United States likes to be seen as a leader on refugee issues, human rights groups criticized the country over its position in one area: the detention of child migrants, many of them unaccompanied children fleeing violence in Central America.

An early draft of the U.N. document said detention of minors, either because they're unaccompanied or based on their parents' migration status, is never in the best interests of the children. That was changed to seldom by the U.S., to the chagrin of 35 nongovernmental organizations, including Oxfam America, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA.

"The starting point," says Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense, "is that detention is not in the best interests of children."

Young, who co-hosted a "shadow summit" on children on the sidelines of the U.N. summit, says the U.S. has made some progress in handling children, but it still considers those coming from Central America as migrants rather than refugees, and it needs to acknowledge that "the violence in Central America is generating a forcible displacement situation." While she praises President Barack Obama for calling the refugee summit, she says: "While you are talking the talk, you also have to walk the walk."

"We have a refugee crisis happening on our own back doorstep," she says, and the U.S. has been responding with "mixed signals."
 

New York, US (PANA) – A United Nations-backed inter-agency committee on Thursday launched two guides to assist aid workers worldwide in setting up sexual exploitation and abuse prevention and response systems in humanitarian settings.

The reason we need these tools is because we are still having too many violations," said William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), at a panel discussion on protection from sexual exploitation and abuse at UN Headquarters in New York, during which the guides were officially released.

While we are all committed on the issue, we realized that we really didn't have the tools with which to help people, particularly in the field," he added, according to a UN statement.

The two guides – the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Best Practice Guide on Inter-Agency Complaint Mechanisms and the Global Standard Operating Procedures – stem from lessons learned as a result of a pilot project coordinated by IOM that established community-based complaint mechanisms in Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The documents were endorsed by IASC principals this past June.

The statement said IOM coordinated the pilot project in cooperation with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Save the Children, and with the support of the IASC Task Team on Accountability to Affected Populations and Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.

Mr. Swing noted that in recent years, the humanitarian community has taken positive steps to prevent and address sexual exploitation and abuse, although the need for guidance on creating inter-agency complaint mechanisms in humanitarian settings that are safe, efficient and sustainable was clearly evident.

He said that the tools include experiences, lessons learned and best practices arising from the two pilot projects. They represent the result of long-standing efforts" and much collaboration on the part of all of the agencies involved, both at global and field levels, he added.

It's going to continue to be an uphill struggle, keeping this issue on the table. We want to make sure we keep this before everyone," the Director General said, expressing hope that the guides will assist victims of sexual exploitation and abuse in coming forward, as well as dealing with community rejection and feelings of embarrassment.

The panel discussion also included presentations from senior-level representatives from the European Union (EU), UNHCR and Save the Children. Panel members discussed the importance of collective action on sexual exploitation and abuse, particularly the need for active and meaningful participation in community-based complaints mechanisms.

Panellists included Eduardo Fernandez-Zincke, EU Counsellor and Head of Section of Humanitarian Affairs, who presented the EU perspective on the importance of establishing sexual exploitation and abuse prevention and response systems in all humanitarian settings.

Debra Jones, Director and UN Representative, Save the Children, spoke on lessons learned from using the guidelines for child protection and peacekeeping operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In addition, Andrew Painter, Senior Policy Adviser at UNHCR, discussed global standard operating procedures, operationalizing initiatives relating to protection from sexual exploitation and abuse, and setting up an inter-agency complaint mechanism in a refugee context.

The event was moderated by Luc Ferran, Director of the Ethics and Compliance Unit at the International Rescue Committee.

Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented to the Security Council a report that detailed special measures aimed at ending impunity, helping and supporting victims, and strengthening accountability as part of a more effective collective response to sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel.