Session 3: Issues on the horizon
Projecting into the next 10-15 years
What’s happening [economically, politically, etc] that will impact protection responses in the next 10-15 years? Are current protection mandates/systems adequate for these future challenges? The international system is premised on consensus of governments/nations; what if they are not in the driver seat any longer?
Dialogue Partners: Mark Schnellbaecher & Daisy Francis, Catholic Relief Services
Questions: Are there other things happening — economically, politically, etc. – that might impact protection responses? Are there new issues not addressed by the current protection system? (For example, climate induced flights across borders – submerged Pacific nations – don’t meet current definitions of a ‘refugee’; yet, they will necessarily cross a border. So, who is responsible for ensuring their protection as they seek refuge on some continent?)
1. Among phenomena affecting protection responses, the current economic crisis is entering a new phase, both with increased employment/admission/enforcement difficulties v. migrants and refugees and funding strains just starting to bite at international and transnational development aid and institutional funding.
2. At the same time, it is important to recognize that even within the current economic and jobs environment, there is still objective, demographic need for migrant labor in virtually all industrialized countries; in some, quite substantial amounts, lower skilled as well as high skilled. This market/labor need is extremely important not only for broad migrant mobility but also for refugee prospects, temporary as well as durable.
3. It seems time, as well as opportune to add to the menu one more way to look at refugees and possible solutions: carefully, but squarely in the context of the rise of international labor migration and linkages of migration and development. For example, given that resettlement has recently dropped closer to .05% than the oft-cited 1% of the durable solutions achieved with refugees (a trend that even the growing number of resettlement countries is barely denting), and that huge numbers of refugees have now been averaging some 17 years in limbo, is “refugee first” an approach worth considering in labor migration schemes? More thinking and voice is needed on this, among others from a national and international Catholic community already among the leading policy and program builders in these areas.
4. Separately, the security “crisis” is one not to over-indulge in these discussions, and it is helpful for us, among others, to resist in particular any over-securitization of refugee flows and solutions. With respect to resettlement as a solution, beyond the human, ethical considerations of so many refugees for resettlement, the resettlement process is loaded with practical security checks, etc., and resettlement is itself a tool that can be used strategically to unlock an array of solutions to situations that are either of enormous immediate sensitivity (including security pressures) as well as those more protracted.
To Daisy Francis and colleagues at CRS Protection Consultation,
I regret I cannot join you at the consultation, due to being in Nairobi to teach this term. I like the background paper very much. I do, however, have one brief comment.
The International Commission that drafted the initial Responsibility to Protect document in 2005 made the following statement in its summary of the core principles it was advocating: “Prevention is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect.” In my judgment, this is very true. Several examples illustrate this:
1. There is a grave possibility that a new war will break out in southern Sudan around the referendum scheduled for 2011 on southern Sudanese self-determiniation. Preventing this from happening is crucial to protecting Sudanese in the south and in Darfur from facing major new displacements and massive humanitarian crisis.
2. Similarly, in Kenya there is serious threat of new crisis like the one that occurred last year following the elections unless significant preventative steps are taken by the Kenyan government as the next elections approach, with the help or under pressure from the international community.
These sorts of preventative actions will necessarily involve political pressure of actors such as the governments in Sudan and Kenya. They might, in some tragic circumstances such as the Rwanda genocide, even call for peacekeeping actions through the use of military force.
So in my judgment, CRS in its advocacy role cannot avoid making political judgments. Thus I do not think the following statement from the background paper is on target:
“Insulate humanitarian activities more effectively from association with political, military and peacekeeping work.”
Rather, I think CRS needs to develop criteria for the kinds of political actions to PREVENT displacement and humanitarian crises it can and should support. This does NOT mean that CRS humanitarian assistance should become politicized or that all political actions are to be supported. For example I strongly oppose what the US has done in Iraq. But the Iraq approach is not the only possible way to take political action.
CRS needs carefully developed and explicitly articulated norms for the kind of political action it is ready to advocate in seeking to protect people from humanitarian crisis through preventive action. The only alternative to this is the pursuit of an illusory pure “neutrality.”
There are a lot of resources in both international law and in Catholic social ethics for the development of such criteria. I just wanted to suggest that we need to develop these resources much more fully if the prevention dimension of protection is to be adequately addressed, as it must be.
Thanks for considering these thoughts.
David