BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th December, 2019) The UN agency responsible for protecting refugees is hosting a forum this week in a bid to change the way the world responds to this challenge after a decade that saw the number of refugees globally double to 25 million.
The three-day Global Refugee Forum kicked off in the Swiss city of Geneva on Monday. It has welcomed high-ranking officials from Turkey, Germany and Pakistan, which have experienced the problem firsthand.
"We are emerging from a decade of displacement during which the numbers of people fleeing war, persecution and conflict have surged," Maeve Patterson, the agency's Regional Communications Coordinator for EU Affairs, told Sputnik.
The number of people that have been forcibly displaced by war and poverty in their home countries has topped 70 million, double the level seen two decades ago.
"But it doesn't have to be this way. The forum represents a unique opportunity to work towards finding solutions for refugees, internally displaced people, as well as those who are stateless, through increased international cooperation," Patterson said.
She noted an improvement in Europe, where the number of arrivals via the Mediterranean in the first 11 months of this year dropped 14 percent to 114,758 people. That is a sharp decline from almost a million that came ashore in EU's frontier countries at the peak of the 2015 migrant crisis.
"With a truly common response, EU countries can securely and humanely manage arrivals of and welcome people in a way that works for both refugees and the communities that host them," Patterson argued.
But it was the sharing of responsibility for those migrants that prompted 16 EU countries and nations like the United States to reject the UN's historic Global Compact on Refugees, which provided a blueprint for joint response to refugee situations, including equal responsibility for them.
This year, the UN wants to pick up where it left off last year when it adopted the pact in Marrakesh, Morocco. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called it the guiding strategy for the forum and urged participants to come together to implement their vision.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was one of the leaders who backed the deal, saying it was worth fighting for. But others in Germany were less excited about the prospect of taking in more migrants, after accusing Merkel of triggering the migrant crisis by opening the borders in 2015.
"In the long term, millions of additional migrants will be channeled into our social systems, while German retirees will have to collect bottles ... after a full working life," Beatrix von Storch, a senior lawmaker at the Alternative for Germany party, told Sputnik.
She said her party, the third-largest group in parliament, demanded that German borders be shut to what she called economic migrants. Rejected asylum seekers should be deported, she suggested, while tens of billions of Euros used for their upkeep be redistributed among pensioners and low-income households.
