http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/un-united-nations-refugees-migrants-agreement.html?_r=0
U.N. Drafts Agreement on Refugees and Migrants
By SOMINI SENGUPTA AUG. 3, 2016
More people are forcibly displaced from their homes today than at any time since the end of the Second World War.
But the plight of these people is so politically contentious that after days of intense negotiations over an international agreement, the nations of the world on Tuesday adopted a draft that contained virtually no concrete commitments to make their journeys better or safer. Nor does it have any force of law.
Western European countries, along with Russia, resisted what many had hoped would be a pledge to resettle one-tenth of all the people fleeing war and persecution. And the United States balked at language that would have committed all countries to not detain undocumented children who arrive at their borders.
What emerged late Tuesday was a 22-page draft “outcome document” that all 193 countries of the United Nations could abide. The document will serve as the basis for a meeting at the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly next month.
Decisions on specific commitments on what countries should do to protect refugees and migrants were deferred until 2018.
The draft agreement comes at a time when refugees and migrants have become a divisive issue in European and American politics. In the presidential campaign in the United States, Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has proposed barring Muslims from entering the country.
Refugees and migrants will be the biggest issue at the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations next month. President Obama plans to lead a meeting at the General Assembly in an effort to nudge countries to take in more refugees and contribute to countries that have taken them in for years.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, also plans to hold a meeting on the plight of refugees and migrants. The document under negotiation will be the centerpiece of his meeting.
While the draft text has no force of international law, every sentence has been negotiated. The resulting language is sometimes so vague that it is likely to bring little comfort to the millions who are seeking safety and opportunity abroad.
Eritrea, for instance, recently complained that the many references to human rights in the document were “redundant.” (A United Nations committee earlier this year accused Eritrea of atrocities against its own citizens.)
Russia resisted a sentence that called for countries to share in the “burden” of taking in refugees. (Russia takes in very few, except lately from parts of Ukraine.)
The United States suggested a phrase asserting that detention is “seldom” good for children. Activists for immigrants and refugees found that suggestion so appalling that they fired off a letter on Friday to President Obama. They argued that any international agreement should make clear that detention is “never in the best interests of children” and should commit to ending the practice. (The United States detains children who arrive from Mexico without legal papers.)
The Center for Migration Studies said in a statement that the draft “falls short of creating a new framework for the protection of refugees and migrants around the world. Instead, it reaffirms the status quo, and, in some areas, weakens current protections for these vulnerable populations.’’
According to the United Nations, 24 million people worldwide left their home countries because of war or persecution in 2015. More than 10 times that number — 244 million — were considered migrants, living somewhere other than the country of their birth.
This draft agreement sets out a long list of principles, most already enshrined in existing laws. It says refugees deserve protection and should not be sent back to places where they could face war or persecution. It urges countries to allow refugees to work and to let their children attend school, though it stops short of saying refugees have a right to either jobs or schools.
It asserts that migration can be good for the world, which is wording that migrant-sending countries wanted. It also calls for countries to take back their citizens if they travel illegally and fail to get asylum, which is what migrant-receiving countries, especially in Europe, wanted.
An early draft had proposed a global compact to allocate where refugees could be permanently resettled, but that proposal failed. African and Latin American countries wanted to know why the compact was on refugees alone, according to diplomats involved in the negotiations. Why not also have a compact on the rights of migrants?
The latest draft sets a 2018 deadline for two compacts: one for refugees, a second for migrants.
The draft text also says nothing about the rights of the 40 million people who are displaced in their own countries, or about those who are leaving their homes because of climate change.
“This is a document very much about the present,” said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a former official at the United Nations refugee agency who is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “This is not a document that prepares us for the future.”
Received on Wed Aug 03 2016 - 05:11:10 EDT