Amid a severe shortage of refugee resettlement around the world, foreign NGOs, charities and government agencies are calling on the EU to step in and welcome more people.
At the European Commission’s High Level Forum on Refugee Resettlement and Protection, immigration and resettlement officials from across the EU, as well as representatives of foreign migration agencies such as UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, outlined tactics they would like refugees to push. resettlement targets. Array employing new technologies and strategies dominated the pandemic, as well as greater cooperation between states.
It comes at a time when resettlement is at its lowest level: mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic, EU Member States resettled only 9,119 refugees in 2020, well below their target of 30,000. the 1. 44 million other people recently registered as refugees, the vast majority of whom live in low- and middle-income countries. Turkey, the world’s largest refugee host country, has more than 3,000,000 refugees within its borders lately, while Lebanon, with a population of less than 7,000,000, hosts 900,000 refugees.
Meanwhile, the number of refugees and other displaced persons continues to rise, and while the U. S. U. S. Still suffering from its former global resilience following the ravages of the Turmp administration, humanitarian organisations are calling on the EU to step up.
“Now that EU countries are recovering from COVID-19, it is perfectly imaginable that they will receive more of the world’s most vulnerable refugees,” said Imogen Sudbery, Director of Policy and Defence for Europe at the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
Sudbery said the resettlement forum will be a turning point and a possibility for EU member states to make up for lost progress and plan more ambitious goals for the future. “After a few lost years of refugee resettlement, they will have to take this opportunity to reassert their humanitarian leadership, or the threat that undermines hard-won years of progress. “
Irc recommends scaling up resettlement, with the aim of reaching the 2020 target of 30,000 by the end of 2021, and then expanding from there. UNHCR and recommends that EU member states accumulate up to 36,000 refugees in 2022 and then build the target in the next few years to 44,000 in 2024.
In the midst of these calls, the resettlement forum, organised through eu Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, has aroused a lot of optimism about long-term resettlement efforts.
“We want to renew the EU resettlement framework,” said Malin Björk, a Swedish MEP and member of the European Parliament’s Internal Affairs Committee. “It shows that we’re back in business, that we take it seriously. “
However, there were few concrete commitments. Home Affairs Commissioner Johansson promised that a declaration would soon reaffirm states’ commitments with mixed paintings on the subject.
That said, the forum has given NGOs some cowardly objectives for keeping the EU in combination in the future, and more concrete commitments may be made in the coming months.
There is also encouraging news from across the Atlantic.
Nancy Jackson, a senior refugee official at the U. S. Department of StateU. S. , He said that the U. S. , under President Biden, was making wonderful strides to restore the vital role that the U. S. U. S. He has historically been enthusiastic about hosting refugees in resettlement.
“Expansion is a big part of our program this year,” Jackson said.
“We have very ambitious targets for the programme: 62,500 (resettlements) this year and 125,000 next year. It will certainly take time to succeed at those levels. But we’re making an investment and rebuilding right now. “
I write about business, migration and how the two intersect. Follow me on twitter @FreyLindsayMCP, or write to me friederik. lindsay@gmail. com