Human Rights, Migration The UNHCR Defends Its Global Compact on Refugees
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January 24, 2020
By
The Atlantic
In December, our Postdoctoral Fellow Lama Mourad and Kelsey P. Norman argued that the UN Global Compact on Refugees has failed. “The well-meaning document sought to recast refugees as an economic benefit to nations that receive them,” Mourad and Norman wrote. “But by furthering the premise that refugees should be accepted because of their potential for self-sufficiency—rather than out of a commitment to upholding international norms and the rights of refugees—the global compact may actually worsen their plight.” Below is an extract from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s official statement on the piece.
"It was surprising and disheartening to see Lama Mourad and Kelsey P. Norman get the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) so wrong. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) disagrees with the authors’ assertion that the GCR—adopted by the United Nations just over a year ago—has already failed. Such a verdict is, at best, premature in our view. More troubling, the authors claim that the GCR encourages countries to calibrate their response to refugees using economic, cost-benefit criteria. This notion describes almost precisely the opposite of what the GCR promotes and represents, as the compact itself makes clear. Section IB on “guiding principles” confirms our obligation to protect and assist all people fleeing war and persecution, whether those vulnerable individuals are in a position to boost a society’s economic bottom line or not.
The article also understates the scope of the GCR, which is to establish a foundation for a qualitatively new, whole-of-society approach—to address record refugee flows in the world today by involving not just the traditional humanitarian specialists, but also global development actors, the private sector, and multilateral institutions. "
Here is an extract from Lama Mourad and Kelsey P. Norman's response to this statement.
"We agree with Christopher Boian and the UNHCR’s assertion that it may be too soon for a final verdict on the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), but we maintain that the GCR as a whole moves us further in the wrong direction. While Section IB on “guiding principles” may affirm the UN’s commitment to protecting and assisting refugees, which we commend, the guidelines on implementation in Section III either do little to change the existing system of global refugee protection, or place too much emphasis on encouraging states to consider the economic benefits that refugees bring to hosting countries.
We also question whether the GCR, in its implementation, represents a “genuinely new way” to address the global refugee situation. Let us take, for instance, the 2019 Global Refugee Forum as a one-year benchmark on the status of the compact. The GCR established the forum to facilitate international cooperation, pledging to hold it a year after the adoption of the compact and subsequently every four years. In line with the broader goals of the GCR, the forum brought together a wider array of actors than is usually the case in conferences like this. However, reports from the event in Geneva portray the forum as a missed opportunity to take on issues of support, funding, and strategic action for the growing problem."
