Kicking the Can Down the Road:

UN Summit Won't Resolve Syrian Refugee Crisis

Rasa - On Monday, September 19, leaders from around the globe converged on the United Nations General Assembly to discuss what to do about the world’s 65.3 million displaced people.

News ID: 423715

Date: 20 September 2016 - 04:00

RNA - During the first-ever Summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, leaders and diplomats approved a document aimed at unifying the UN’s 193 member states behind a more coordinated approach that protects the human rights of refugees and migrants.

The problem is, the document is not legally binding and comes at a time that refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, particularly from Syria, have become a divisive issue in Europe and the United States.

For obvious reasons, however, the summit was all talk and no action. The agreement is also an uphill struggle, indeed a missed opportunity:

-The “landmark” summit was supposed to help resettle one in ten refugees, instead UN member states have settled for vague gestures, including a campaign to end xenophobia and racism. The outcome agreement is not a binding, comprehensive framework to protect migrants and refugees.

-The United States and a number of EU member states are not willing to resettle 10 percent of the refugee population each year. They also objected to language in the original draft that said children should never be detained, so the agreement now says children should seldom, if ever, be detained.

-The United States and its European allies sabotaged the summit. They acted in self-interest, leaving hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in dire situations in places like Turkey, Greece, and Eastern Europe. These desperate souls are on the edge of precipice and the West refuses to share responsibility. Syrian refugees are only a symptom of the root cause of the US-led, US-backed war and terror.

-The agreement calls for separate global compacts for refugees and migrants to be adopted within two years. This is silly. Instead, it should immediately require member states, Western states in particular, to make pledges that are in line with UN goals of increasing humanitarian aid, doubling resettlement, and increasing access to education and employment for millions of refugees.

-The agreement doesn't introduce an action plan. So member states are not required to do more, to give more, to take on a greater share of the resettlement challenge. This is important, because according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an unprecedented  65.3 million people are still displaced, an increase of more than 5 million from 2015. They include some five million Syrians, forced to flee due to the foreign-backed war and terror.

All said, the non-binding UN resolution is a race to the bottom, where there is very little to be optimistic. It has some nice language but is lacking in concrete commitments. It's also a half-hearted beginning, laced with conditions, that fails to make any real difference to the lives of those fleeing the US-led, US-backed wars of aggression and deceit in the heartlands of the Muslim world.

What else can you expect from a resolution that doesn't recall humanity: It allows Western states to actively block efforts to resettle more refugees and move in the direction of securitisation – seeing the movement of people as a security issue, and not that refugees will make their societies more diverse and actually stronger.

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