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UNHCR-2011/05/05 1 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION UNHCR AT 60: A DISCUSSION WITH ANTONIO GUTERRES, THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES Washington, D.C. Thursday, May 5, 2011 PARTICIPANTS: Introduction and Moderator: TED PICCONE Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy The Brookings Institution Featured Speaker: ANTONIO GUTERRES United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 UNHCR-2011/05/05 2 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. PICCONE: Good morning and thanks for your patience. I'm Ted Piccone. I'm a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy Program here at Brookings. It is a real honor for us to be able to welcome Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, here to the Brookings Institution. I don't think he needs much of an introduction, but let me just say a couple of brief words. I first had the opportunity to meet him in the context of another activity that he's been involved in particularly before he took on this job which was the Club of Madrid, which is a group of former presidents and prime ministers and Antonio is one of the leading voices in that esteemed group who had a vision and a mission and a mandate and I think he's brought to everything he's done in politics and now at the U.N. in one of the most important jobs on the frontlines of helping people who are in really the most dire circumstances cope and resettle their lives. You all know his bio and his background as a former Prime Minister of Portugal for many years and a leading figure in Portugal's own transition to democracy. You're also familiar with the agency he heads and we're going to hear more about it today as UNHCR is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary at a time of tremendous challenge and growing demands being placed on this agency everywhere from Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Cote d'Ivoire, Libya, the list goes on and on and on, Colombia in this hemisphere, and yet the resources are falling way short with huge gaps in meeting the needs. So we're going to hear about what's going on with UNHCR in this particular moment of demand and crisis and then we'll have a chance to engage in a lively conversation back and forth and I think we'll have him speak right here from the chair. MR. GUTERRES: I think it's better to have a more friendly conversation ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 UNHCR-2011/05/05 3 without the podium. I always feel a little bit intimidated with podiums. I'd like to say that I'm very happy to be here with you. I've been following your Project on Internal Displacement which I think is to a large extent in the very center of your concerns. And I think that the Brookings Institution has given a fantastic contribution to the capacity of the international community to think about how to face challenges for which to be honest we were not well-prepared and I believe we are still not yet well-prepared. The main concern we have today in the run-up for the commemorations of our sixtieth anniversary of the 1951 Convention, the main concern is to try to see if the international community will be willing to consider the need to address the protection gaps in relation to the new forms of forced displacement that we have in today's world. The 1951 Convention is a remarkable instrument. I doubt that if it would be drafted today it would be as strong as it is. The rights that are emphasized and the way the international community has given UNHCR a strong mandate in relation to monitor the way those rights are respected by countries, by states, again I don't think these would be possible to replicate today. But the 1951 Convention addresses a limited number of the people on the move with protection needs in today's world. There have been a lot of developments in the interpretation of what persecution means. Today we recognize lots of nonstate agents of persecution, and courts have given a very important contribution, a very enlarged interpretation for instance of the concept of a particular social group as a source of persecution, and we see now that from family violence to the questions of LGBTI and to other cultural and religious aspects society linked more than even state linked. The Convention is being interpreted more and more as allowing for persecution to be invoked in a broader number of aspects, but even going as far as we ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 UNHCR-2011/05/05 4 can in the interpretation of the Convention we need to recognize that the Convention will never cover most of the people who today are in need of protection on the move in the world. First of all, by definition the Convention doesn't cover the people displaced within the borders of any country, and if we have 10.5 million refugees not counting the Palestinian refugees under UNHCR's mandate, we more than 27, 27.4 or 5 internally displaced people because of conflict and the number of internally displaced because of natural disasters changes very quickly but some estimates go up to 50 million and they are obviously not covered by the 1951 Convention. All of these people are under the authority of their own state and we know that those states are in many circumstances part of the problem and not part of the solution sometimes because they are failed states or very weak states, they have not the capacity to protect their own people, sometimes because they are strong states and this is the worst situation and they are not willing to protect their own people or are they the oppressors of their own people. We recently had situations as complex as Sri Lanka or as enduring Darfur in which this is very clear. And even in natural disasters when one sees what happened in Myanmar, it is not always clear that protection is properly granted to people by the states in charge. But then there are more and more people also on the move crossing borders who have protection needs that are not addressed by the international community and for whom it is not possible to invoke the 1951 Convention. If one looks at today's global trends or mega trends, population growth, it's an issue that has not been very much on the global agenda. There is I think a certain conspiracy to put the population growth question out of the global debate, but I think it is a main driver that we cannot forget. We are today almost 7 billion worldwide. The ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 UNHCR-2011/05/05 5 forecast for 2050 you know is 9 billion. But population growth is linked to another phenomenon that I think is crucial to analyze what's happening in today's world which is urbanization. We having more and more urban refugees, less and less refugees in camps, but more than half of the world's population today lives in cities and again the forecast for 2050 is 70 percent. This is a total change in relation to traditional patterns and the protection concerns in an urban environment are very different from the protection concerns in traditional encampment situations or in rural environments. Then climate change. I must say that in my opinion climate change is the biggest frustration for anyone who looks at the international community today, the inability to have a common front to address this problem, and it is clear that climate change has huge direct impacts and it's an enhancer of the impacts of many other trends in today's world. For instance, water scarcity, 1.5 billion people lack safe water. Food insecurity, 1 billion are hungry today and there is a clear linkage. We see lots of summits, summits on climate change, summits in food security but these things are never brought together. Indeed, what I feel is that all these mega trends are getting more and more interconnected and the world is becoming smaller and smaller. There are today physical limits to global growth. And they not only are more and more interconnected but they are also connected with concerns of security and of peace. They trigger conflict in many circumstances or they help trigger conflict. And at the same time all these factors combined are today a main cause of displacement. It is very difficult to distinguish when displacement is voluntary and when displacement is forced in these situations. We know for instance if there is a tornado, there is a natural disaster that is clear and that has an immediate impact. But the slow onset of certain aspects triggered by climate change, for instance, drought where drought ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 UNHCR-2011/05/05 6 makes slowly areas being totally not inhabitable. Of course more and more people will be living, at a certain moment there will be nobody there and is this economic migration, is this forced displacement? It is not clear.