Anyone who missed the piece earlier on @BBCr4today about #refugees on #lesbos please know there are many thousands of people crammed in appalling conditions into a camp intended for 2000, violence, little sanitation, NGOs reporting conditions to authorities but nothing changes.
In Cox's Bazaar #refugee camp in Bangladesh for #Rohingya people who have fled Myanmar there are nearly a million people living in 26 Sq. Km. reliefweb.int/report/banglad…
One in four of the population of Lebanon is a Syrian #refugee. They are not in camps but living in limbo. 6 million people inside #Syria are Internally Displaced People (IDPs), forced to flee because of the conflict. 6 million more Syrians are refugees outside Syria
Turkey has over 3 million #refugees. Of the top ten host countries worldwide only one (Germany) is European. We in the UK are generous with aid to help people in the conflict regions directly but this can also leave people in limbo, often for years
The #refugee crisis has many aspects - and connects to migration crisis although these are not the same. For example, people fleeing Venezuela because of economic collapse probably don't come under the 1951 UN Convention and 1967 Protocol definition but they will need responses
Usually #refugees can only claim asylum in the first safe country they come to. This means vast majority of the world's refugees are in developing countries. Often very poor countries. This responsibility is not being fairly shared around the world
Meanwhile, #refugees often lose skills if they are not allowed to work, which makes it hard for them to contribute to host country or the rebuilding of their own country when peace comes. It also pushes many to desperation of many kinds
Added together, many people in desperate situations will feel they have nothing to lose and risk everything on dangerous journeys. Other countries then spend money either trying to keep them out or rescuing them without adequate provision for #refugees or for assessment
A fairer safer way of sharing responsibility for #refugees is #Resettlement - @unhcr assesses people for refugee status in their region, arranges travel& resettlement with 3rd countries, further away from the conflict zone, reducing impact on border states or points of arrival
The last act of global leadership of President #Obama was to bring all 192 states to sign an agreement in 2016 to change how the world responds to the global #refugee and migration crises, launching the #GlobalCompact and 2 years of developing better responses to both
The underlying principles of the Global Compact on refugees are about honouring the right to protection, sharing responsibility, building and maintaining #refugee self-reliance and supporting safe return post-conflict. There is an emphasis on increasing #refugeeresettlement
The UN General Assembly next month will hear a presentation by the @UNHCR Commissioner on Refugees about the final agreement. I will be tweeting, blogging and speaking about this as chair @APPGRefugees And working with refugees and refugee organisations on how we implement in UK
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