ISLAMABAD – A new United Nations plan to tackle the worst refugee crisis since World War II would aim to resettle at least 10 percent of refugees annually, piling pressure on countries to open up their doors to those fleeing wars and disasters.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outlined the proposal for a new global compact on responsibility-sharing to address the crisis from the 60 million refugees and displaced people worldwide.The United Nations hopes that new deal will lift some of the burden ondeveloping countries in the refugee crisis, which has been fueled by the five-year war in Syria and other conflicts.
The proposal calls for resettling at least 10 percent of the globalrefugee population of 19.6 million annually under a scheme that would benegotiated at the United Nations, UNDPI.org website reported.The global compact on refugees is expected to be adopted at a UN summiton September 19 that will be followed on September 20 by a US pledgingconference.
US President Barack Obama will host that conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting to ask countries to come forward and announce the number of refugees they are willing to take in along with any other support they can offer.Amnesty International applauded the proposal, saying it could lay downarrangements for burden-sharing that would reduce overcrowding in refugeecamps and could see fewer asylum-seekers making perilous journeys at sea.
The UN plan could be a game-changer, said SherifElsayed-Ali, deputydirector of global issues at Amnesty International.World leaders cannot go on lurching from crisis to crisis, hagglingover numbers and fiddling while parts of the world burn, leaving developingcountries to host 86 percent of the world’s refugees, he said.A comprehensive system that clearly sets out the responsibility of each country before the crisis becomes acute could fix that.
A handful of countries are currently bearing the brunt of the globalrefugee crisis, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.Eight countries host more than half of the world’s refugees Turkey,Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda.Nine countries plus the European Union pay for 75 percent of the UN’sbudget to support refugees the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany,Kuwait, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Netherlands.
Ban is also calling for a new global compact on migration, but has set a two-year deadline to negotiate the terms of those arrangements on regulating migration flows.The report calls for a UN-led campaign against xenophobia and for abeefing up the UN refugee agency’s response plan to better deal with the flow of asylum-seekers.
