UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations continued on Wednesday to use the border crisis in Europe to blur the distinction between refugees legally entitled to asylum under international law and so-called “migrants” in search of jobs or welfare benefits.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon put war refugees and job seekers in the same category of “people in need” when he addressed the European border crisis at a press conference Wednesday.
“Men, women and children fleeing war and persecution deserve real support, including asylum. I ask those standing in the way of the rights of refugees to stand in their shoes. People facing barrel bombs and brutality in their country will continue to seek life in another. People with few prospects at home will continue to seek opportunity elsewhere. This is natural,” he said.
Announcing a Sept. 30 meeting of member states to “mobilize a humane, effective and rights-based response” to the refugee crisis, Ban Ki Moon called on all countries to “live up to their legal obligations” to accept refugees.
The “legal obligations” he cited refer to the 1951 U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees that requires nations to give refugees asylum with essentially the same rights as citizens.
But that treaty, significantly, does not mention war in its definition of a refugee.
Article One of the 1951 Convention says a refugee is someone forced to flee his home country “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
Under the U.N. treaty terms, Syrian Christians, Kurds and Yazidis are refugees entitled to asylum, because, unlike Muslim Syrians, they face persecution due to their religion or nationality.
Yet the U.N. criticized Poland and Slovakia for volunteering to accept Christian refugees, saying countries must accept everyone, regardless of religion.
One could say Syrian Muslims who oppose the Assad regime face persecution because of “political opinion,” though they could conceivably find safe haven in ISIS-controlled areas of the country, and those who oppose ISIS could seek refuge in regions under government control.
Simply put, those fleeing war are in need of humanitarian assistance, but nations are under no legal obligation under international law to grant them asylum with full rights of citizenship, analysts said.
They suggest the U.N. is deliberately trying to obscure this inconvenient fact.
Concerning “economic migrants” such as those streaming into Europe on foot or on boats crossing the Mediterranean, there is no international protocol that requires countries to accept them.
A 1990 U.N. Convention on the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Their Families stipulates that nations may set criteria “governing admission of migrant workers and members of their families.”
But the U.N. tries to create an obligation where none exists, all but insisting that countries admit anyone showing up on the doorstep.
As WND reported, a June 15 report on the refugee crisis in Europe by François Crépeau, United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, declares “sealing international borders is impossible” because migration “is a long-standing part of the human condition and, in the globalized and conflict-ridden world in which we live, it is inevitable.”
It says flatly, “Migration is here to stay.”
Instead of fences and walls, the U.N. experts say governments should construct “legal and safe mobility solutions” and “migration policies that facilitate mobility and celebrate diversity.”
The U.N. dismissed those with other opinions as xenophobes and racists. And it did not significantly address concerns about terrorists hiding among the refugees.
Peter Sutherland, the secretary general’s special representative on International Migration and former chairman of British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs International, has long advocated open borders on a global scale.
He says all “individuals should have a freedom of choice” about where to live and work, and looks positively on a “shift from states selecting migrants to migrants selecting states.”
In 2012, Sutherland told the House of Lords the European Union must “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states. He believes culturally distinct nations cannot survive and “have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them,” the BBC reported.
Sutherland served as the first director-general of the World Trade Organization and has been called the father of globalization.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/u-n-blurs-line-refugees-job-seekers-terrorists/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/u-n-blurs-line-refugees-job-seekers-terrorists/
No comments:
Post a Comment