Migrations Programme - [06/21/2007]

Increase in number of refugees in the world

Pablo Zapata, a representative from ACNUR (United Nations High Commission on Refugees) in Spain, announced that the commemoration of World Refugee Day this year coincided with “growing concern over the increase of the number of refugees in the world in the past five years”. Zapata was speaking at The challenges of international protection, a seminar jointly organised by the CIDOB Foundation, the Catalan ACNUR Committee and the ACSAR Foundation.

In the first part of the seminar, the participants considered the current challenges of asylum and refuge. Continuing in the same line, Zapata mentioned some of the challenges that ACNUR will have to face in the future, such as having to seek new public and private donors to finance humanitarian operations, the instruments to guarantee security in refugee flows, the process of asylum regionalisation in accordance with the principles of international protection and the management of irregular mixed flows.

Continuing the debate on current challenges of asylum and refugees, Oriol Casanovas, Professor in Public International Law at Pompeu Fabra University, pointed out that guaranteeing the entry of foreign nationals comes under the authority of the different States,and that even though everyone has the right to leave their own country, the right to enter any other country is not guaranteed. The Professor claimed that the most important challenges to be faced in the future are a consequence of factors that were not foreseen by the 1951 Geneva Convention, such as internal displacementsand irregular immigration flows.

On examining the case of the applicants for asylum and refuge in Spain, Bartolomé José Martínez García, from the Spanish Ombudsman’s Office, highlighted the growing discordance between the legal paradigm on international protection and the use of the concept of asylum. Martínez García also criticised the fallacy that is used to justify the toughening of asylum regulations to prevent a supposed uncontrolled flow of irregular immigrants.

Meanwhile, Irene Claro, coordinator of the Refugee and Migration Department of Spain’s Amnesty International, highlighted the problems that have been detected in border areas, especially in the interregnumthat separates Spanish territory from that of Morocco in Ceuta and Melilla. The lack of legal aid and of any clear information that possible asylum applicants receive in the Canary Islands was another of the subjects tackled by the Amnesty International representative.

Later on, Anna Terrón, secretary for the European Union at the Catalan Government, explained the process followed for drafting a common policy on a silent in the EU. Terrón pointed out that this issue has been dealt with from the perspective of immigration and the control of flows. TheCatalan Government’s Secretary for the EU also explained that the process of harmonising asylum standards and conditions in the EU began at the European Council meeting in Tamperede 1999. However, the role of the Council and the need to draft proposals unanimously explained the difficulties that have hampered the construction of an asylum system that goes beyond the shared common minimums. Terrón believes that the European Commission helped to promote debate on the issue when it presented its Green Book on a future common European asylum system; she added that the European Union should seek a formula for dealing with the challenge of leaving the right to asylum unregulated and avoiding externalising the responsibilities for asylum.

After the debate, Eduardo J. Ruiz Vieytez, the director of the Human Rights Institute at Deusto University, who championed the idea of bearing in mind refugees’ cultural and identity dimension, said that in addition to legal protection and social and economic integration, refugees should also be afforded protection for their cultural and religious diversity. For Ruiz Vieytez, it is not a matter of establishing new legal texts, but of encouraging new interpretations that more in agreement with the new realities of same.

The day of commemoration closed with a round table, moderated by the also-exiled Eulogio Dávalos, in which different refugees spoke about their personal experiences. While Montserrat Abelló, Carmen Piqueras and Salomé Roset spoke of their exile in Chile, Modika Bah, Serguey Nikishckenkov, Bashkim Shehu and Salem Zenia (also an author, and who receives support from PEN Català) told of their experiences as refugees in Catalonia.

Finally, another refugee, José Luís Nvumba declared that “the existence of a refugee proves that the protection of Human Rights has failed in some part of the world”.

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