Forced Displacement: Responding to a global crisis
Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom
Founded in 1945, the United Nations Association UK (UNA-UK) is a charity devoted to building support for the UN among policymakers, social influencers and the public. Each year, UNA-UK in Canterbury holds a service for world peace at Canterbury Cathedral in support of promoting peace and understanding throughout the world.
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I am honoured to speak at this annual United Nations Peace Service at Canterbury Cathedral on ‘Forced Displacement: Responding to a global crisis’. I am delighted that the proceeds of tonight’s collection will go to UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, which works so hard on behalf of us all and with its partners to meet the needs of people fleeing from war and persecution.
We live in times of unprecedented forced displacement—by the end of last year, 22.5 million people were refugees, 40.3 million were internally displaced and 2.8 million were asylum seekers. That adds up to a total of 65.6 million people forced from their homes by circumstances beyond their control, and dependent on whatever solidarity the international community can muster.
The countries generating displacement are to be found from the Sahel to Central Africa and the Horn. They are to be found from the Maghreb to the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Myanmar in Asia. They are to be found in Europe itself—most notably currently in Ukraine. They are to be found fleeing from autocratic rule and repression in an even wider range of countries.
This is a crisis with global implications—and one to which the international organisations leading the response are struggling to respond, despite great generosity from a number of governments and from citizens around the world.
There is no end in sight to a number of the crises which have generated the forced displacement, and high levels of response will be required for the foreseeable future. Sadly, some of the crises have gone on so long, or are of such little geopolitical importance, that the suffering of the displaced is scarcely reported.
In my eight years leading the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), working with the UN’s humanitarian and development agencies and with governments committed to supporting our efforts, I saw the response to displacement expand beyond the provision of relief to embrace enhancing the resilience of the many millions of people affected. Each of the displaced people is a human being just like us—any one of us could have been born into the circumstances the displaced face. We need to look beyond the numbers to the human face of this crisis.
The provision of shelter, food, water and sanitation is vital, but displaced people have many more needs which must be met to uphold human dignity. For example, there are children and adults seeking to continue their education—access to a wide range of health services is vital. And people want work. Most households displaced have been self-sufficient in the past, with skills and livelihoods. To face a future in a camp without a home of one’s own or a livelihood is bleak. People may be displaced for years—if not for generations as Palestinians and others have been.
So, the quest has been to find sustainable solutions for displaced people, acknowledging that their predicament may be a long-term one. That means going beyond relief to using the tools of development to create opportunities for work and livelihoods for refugees and the internally displaced. I have seen countless heart-warming examples of how this is done by UNDP and other agencies: supporting microenterprise to start up, supporting skills training, with a focus on displaced women and youth, and ensuring that people with disabilities are included.
This work is supported day in, day out in, for example, Syria, among the internally displaced and their host communities, and in the countries neighbouring Syria which have borne the brunt of the refugee crisis arising from that deadly conflict. Turkey led the way in enabling refugees to work in designated sectors. Jordan and others are also making that possible. If refugees can contribute to growing the economy of their host country, everybody wins.
As well, if the displaced can stay economically active, they are better equipped for the day they all dream for—the day they can go home.
I am pleased to say that the United Kingdom has been at the forefront of those who recognise the worth of the ‘beyond relief’ approach, and the need to support the creation of work opportunities. It has also recognised that host communities and countries need support too. Great as the refugee flow into Europe has been in recent years, it is but a small fraction of the flow into countries neighbouring those in crisis in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
The UN refugee agency has the major challenge not only of providing protection for refugees, but also of endeavouring to find more permanent homes for many. The numbers of developed countries accepting annual quotas of refugees is not great, and the numbers seeking resettlement vastly outnumber the places offered.
That being the case, it is vital that sufficient support is given to host countries which are neighbours to the countries in crisis and are the place of refuge of first resort. Lebanon, for example, has, for some years now, hosted a refugee population equivalent to around one-quarter of its population. It cannot do that alone. That has increasingly been recognised by donor countries and the international financial institutions.
But that same level of support needs to extend to countries like Uganda, which has received more than a million refugees from South Sudan since July last year, and to those neighbouring Central African Republic which are accommodating 450,000 people who have fled the violence there in the past four years.
The factors contributing to forced displacement are obvious, lying variously in injustice, absence of the rule of law and denial of rights, autocratic governance, and an inability or unwillingness to mediate conflict which results in the spillover of tensions into outright conflict. All these causes are preventable—if ruling elites have the will to develop inclusive governance based on the rule of law and fostering cohesive societies, and if conflict between nation states can be averted.
It is no accident therefore that the new global agenda for sustainable development, the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), places emphasis on the importance of inclusive, fair and just societies based on the rule of law. As the agenda says, there can be no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development.
The United Nations was founded as World War Two came to an end. An imperative for its founders was to build an organisation capable of succeeding where its predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed—in maintaining peace and averting war. The UN is struggling to respond to today’s conflicts, which are very different in nature to those which preceded its formation. Its effectiveness now and in the future will depend on how it steps up to these challenges. The big question is—will its structure and ways of working mandated by its 1945 charter enable it to do that?
Meanwhile the UN’s humanitarian and development agencies will keep on doing their best to respond to circumstances on the ground, and to bring hope to people caught up in conflict and repression, and to those seeking to rise out of poverty. Those organisations need our sustained support, and UNHCR will greatly value the solidarity of the congregation here tonight.