THE IMAGE OF ALAN KURDI’S LIFELESS THREE-YEAR-OLD body washed up on a beach in Turkey on 2 September 2015 brought worldwide attention to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. Thousands of asylum seekers primarily from Syria and North Africa had already lost their lives making the same perilous journey, but it was this young boy’s tragic end that would force the world to take note of the scale of the human tragedy that was unfolding.
Migration thrust Sutherland back into the international spotlight after a long spell of relative obscurity. His chairmanships of BP and Goldman Sachs, as well as his board membership of the Royal Bank of Scotland, occasionally put him back in the public eye – sometimes for the wrong reasons – but overall he maintained a low profile. Migration would change all that.
Migration has always been politically sensitive, particularly for sovereign states. It has been one of the issues that has fuelled the rise of populism and caused the political axis in many developed countries to shift to the right, sometimes to the far right. The United Nations, from its foundation in the aftermath of the Second World War, has shied away from the subject of migration. It has been bandied around between different UN agencies like a political football.
Kofi Annan, secretary general of the UN between 1997 and 2006, tried to change that. Harvard-educated Irish-American Michael Doyle is currently a professor of international relations at Columbia University in New York, having served between 2001 and 2003 as assistant secretary general and special adviser to Annan. On migration, he says, ‘I had written a report for Kofi in 2002 on the challenge migration posed to the multilateral system of law and organisation and how the UN could respond to it. We have treaties for trade and bilateral investment, but migration tended to be unilateral.’
At that point, Annan was looking at ways of developing a framework that would provide for the better regulation of migration. Doyle’s report led to the establishment, on 9 December 2003, of a global commission on international migration. But, against the international backdrop of the second Iraq war, it was hardly a propitious moment for UN member states to discuss the matter, never mind reach agreement. It was a hugely divisive issue that bitterly cleaved developed countries. The commission gained very little traction.
In 2005 Annan had the idea that he needed a powerful personality to put migration on the international agenda. He consulted a number of people, including Ed Mortimer, his speechwriter and a former journalist with the Financial Times, as well as Doyle, who by then had returned to Columbia University. Both men say that Annan thought of Peter Sutherland, but as soon as his name was mentioned there was an immediate acceptance that he was the right candidate. ‘He had enormous credibility in the business community as well as in the EU, but at the same time Kofi knew him as a humanitarian, and that he cared deeply about the human face of globalisation,’ says Doyle.
Annan referred to Sutherland as a ‘romantic pragmatist’. ‘He [Sutherland] cared about the human dimension of globalisation but he was also practical and knew how to cut a deal. He had enormous influence,’ Doyle adds. By now, in the days before the financial crisis of 2008, Sutherland was closely associated with BP and Goldman Sachs. ‘One of the factors that led Kofi to want him to be a special representative was his business background. Previously he had human rights campaigners. The advantage of Sutherland is that he knew how the world operated. He was not a starry-eyed idealist. He had practical capability. Yet at the same time his heart was on the side of the vulnerable people, the refugees who were driven from their own countries or the very poor who were forced to seek work to feed their families. So he was deeply sympathetic.’
Mortimer agrees that Annan was aware of Sutherland’s general view on migration. ‘Kofi thought if he could get him to take the role then it would be taken seriously.’ Mortimer had encountered Sutherland a decade earlier when the Irishman was setting up the WTO. As a journalist with the Financial Times he had attended a conference where Sutherland was the headline speaker; Sutherland had told the audience half-jokingly that he would not let the UN near the WTO.
The UN’s reputation in the 1990s was not good. To many it had become an ineffective talking shop. ‘Technically the WTO is still outside the UN,’ said Doyle. ‘ Thanks to Kofi, the UN’s reputation had improved in those circles. Peter had taken a very tactical line of keeping it away from the UN when he was setting it up.’ Annan then went about persuading Sutherland to take a job with the UN. The big question was in what capacity.
A position had opened up unexpectedly in 2005, when Ruud Lubbers, head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), was forced to resign because of sexual misconduct allegations. Annan asked Sutherland if he would be interested in replacing the former Dutch prime minister. For the second time, Sutherland and Lubbers were being linked to the same position, although in very different circumstances from the occasion twelve years earlier when they had both gone for the presidency of the European Commission. Sutherland said he would be interested in becoming commissioner of the UNHCR, but he would not be able to disentangle himself from his corporate roles within the period of time needed to take up the position.
Determined to get Sutherland on board, Annan came up with the idea of a UN Special Representative for Migration. The role of special representative is created at the discretion of the secretary general; it has no executive functions within the UN. Sutherland agreed immediately to accept.
At the time it seemed like a Sisyphean endeavour. When Doyle finished his report at the end of 2002 Annan asked the UN membership if they were willing to take on the issue and create a better regulatory regime for migration. There was a very clear and unambiguous response: no. ‘There was so much scepticism about international co-operation on migration that we knew we would need a major campaign to educate the public about the value of orderly and safe migration,’ says Doyle. ‘Sutherland took on that role and set up the global forum on migration and development to think about migration problems and how they could be addressed.’
Interestingly, when the role was first created, it was called the UN Special Representative for Migration and Development. ‘It was a way to smuggle it into the UN agenda,’ says Mortimer. It was felt that if the focus was solely on migration, then member states would not accept the role, and so development was tacked on. Mortimer remembers a meeting in New York between Sutherland and Annan. ‘He approached me and said, I’m not going to be able to do this by myself. I need somebody. I will pay them.’ So Mortimer introduced him to Gregory Maniatis.
Maniatis had grown up in Boston and New York until his early teens, when his Greek parents returned home. He went to high school in Greece but returned to the US for university, studying European and International Affairs at Princeton before a stint at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences (familiarly known as Sciences Po). In his early twenties he founded a magazine called Odyssey in Greece, selling it a decade later. He went on to become an international journalist, coming into contact with Mortimer when he started writing about the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks for New York magazine at the turn of the century, focusing on the role of Kofi Annan and the UN, and subsequently became an expert on Europe at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-headquartered think tank. Maniatis flew to London to meet Sutherland in January 2006, and would serve as his number two at the UN for the next eleven years. Sutherland also relied throughout his tenure on the counsel of a former senior UNHCR official, François Fouinat, who was based in Geneva.
There has always been much speculation about why Sutherland took the role. Mary Robinson was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights between 1997 and 2002. ‘Peter saw his appointment as give-back time. Maybe it was to compensate for the fact that he had made a lot of money in ways that even he may have had a private judgement on at times,’ she claims, although admitting that he never said as much. ‘He was a Jesuit, so he could be a good capitalist when he wanted to be. He had a very strong moral conscience. What I felt about him in his passion for migration, it was in part driven by the need to give back for a life that he had lived very successfully.’
Such a view is not widely shared. Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh, who knew Sutherland during this period, says he was very committed to his corporate roles; he felt no shame or private reservations about his association with BP and Goldman Sachs. Maniatis, who developed a very close relationship with Sutherland over the decade they worked together, meanwhile bristles at the idea that Sutherland accepted the migration role as payback for his hugely successful career in the private sector. He says the role was consistent with Sutherland’s worldview. ‘He believed in global free trade, and the freer movement of people is part of that story.’
Mortimer says he gained the impression that migration was something Sutherland had felt passionately about for a long time: ‘This was bound up with his Irish identity and that Ireland was a country that survived for many decades by exporting people. During the Celtic Tiger it started receiving people. Ireland therefore had an obligation to get it right because of its history, he felt. He applied that at a broader level. It chimed with his WTO liberal philosophy. He was in favour of the free movement of goods and persons.’
Michael Doyle says that from the many conversations he had with Sutherland, he gained the impression that Sutherland’s business career ‘was never the essence of his life’; the EU, WTO and UN was what gave him satisfaction. ‘If it was just about the money he would not have taken on the migration role. It gave him a lot of grief. Peter thought that the WTO was a good thing. That doesn’t mean that all trade is good. But the world is better off with well-regulated trade because it produces prosperity.’ Sutherland felt, says Doyle, that the question of how that wealth was distributed was a matter for national authorities to deal with; it was their responsibility to make sure that the burdens of adjustment to trade were not borne by the poor or the lower skilled. He saw migration as one more aspect of globalisation that needed regulation if it was to deliver on its positive potential. ‘Migration is good if you are a refugee because it can save your life; it is good if you are a labour migrant because it allows you to become much more productive for you and your family. And if it is well regulated it has benefits for the host country.’
Annan used the role of special representative to get around the political and bureaucratic constraints of the UN. In other words, Sutherland had no budget and the position carried a $1-a-year salary. He knew, though, that if he was to achieve anything significant in the role, then he would need resources. One of his first acts as special representative in April 2006 was to meet the president of the philanthropic organisation the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan Fanton, for breakfast at the Ambassador’s Grill in New York, as a result of which he received a pledge of $250,000. Over the years he raised funds from other donors; Maniatis nevertheless estimates that Sutherland put well over $1 million of his own money into the office over a decade.
Sutherland’s initial brief was to ensure that migration did not turn into a source of conflict that pitted countries in the northern hemisphere against those in the south. When migration was discussed at the UN back then it was in archly political terms. While migration was already a sensitive issue in 2006, it was less contentious than it would become over the next decade. For the first few years, Sutherland’s role took up a modest amount of his time. He went to the UN in New York or Geneva roughly four or five times a year and would spend up to three days there, although he would get weekly updates from Maniatis and Fouinat. From 2009 onwards that would change.
From the moment he took the role, says Maniatis, Sutherland went about persuading Annan that migration would become one of the key issues ‘of our time’ and that the UN had to take a leadership role. According to his former colleagues, Sutherland could see a problem a mile in advance. He was certainly right on migration; his argument was that migration was transnational in nature, that the numbers involved were increasing, and that it was politically important. If the UN could not take a lead role with migration, it would be diminished overall. ‘He felt that strongly at the start. He thought it should be on the front burner. Kofi also felt that way,’ Maniatis adds. But Annan knew that it would be very hard to get political support.
Sutherland had two main objectives when he took the role. The first was to put migration on the international agenda in some sort of coherent framework. The second was to get the International Organisation for Migration into the UN. Set up in 1951 by European countries as an intergovernmental body to help with the resettlement of millions of refugees displaced by the Second World War, the IOM had expanded its international reach over the subsequent decades, but it remained an organisation that offered member states services and advice on migration.
Sutherland came up with the idea of a Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). In UN terms, a forum is relatively neutral; it has no institutional footing, so it is unlikely to arouse the suspicion of member states. According to Maniatis, this was Sutherland’s signature achievement in his early years at the UN, and it set the stage for all his later achievements. The aim of the forum was to establish common understanding and trust on migration among member states, as well as between states and civil society. ‘The GFMD was a total act of creation and will. Such a body hadn’t been proposed before and there was no similar institution in the UN system to serve as a template.’
According to a memorandum Sutherland sent to Annan in 2006, the GFMD had very specific goals:
The Global Forum on Migration and Development is:
1. Open to participation by all Member States of the United Nations, although participation is voluntary.
2. Non-decision-making, non-policymaking, operating under Chatham House rules, with no recordings, no written transcripts, no attribution of statements; it will never become a decision-making body; put another way, the UN will be a stage, not an actor.
3. Organized by and for governments; governments oversee the Forum and its support services through a Board; other stakeholders attend by invitation only.
4. A place where governments go to learn the state of the art in managing the many linkages between migration and development, and to engage with each other on possible ways to voluntarily cooperate on policies of mutual benefit.
5. Built at the global level on existing regional and other consultative processes, without duplicating them.
6. Focused on migration and development issues, not on migration issues writ large; and based on a shared commitment to practical learning and cooperation.[1]
The main aim was to create a space for discussions of migration to take place between member states in ways that were practical and not overtly political. Sutherland saw the forum as a year-long process that would engage senior policymakers, rather than as a one-day-a-year showcase for politicians. Until it was created, there had been little space at the UN to discuss migration. The problem was how to establish the forum. In the era of the George W. Bush presidency, the US opposed it and was rallying other countries to oppose it too.
Maniatis recalls that in the entire time he worked with Sutherland, he saw him ‘visibly shaken’ on just three occasions. The first of these was a 2006 meeting with John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN. An implacable opponent of multilateralism, Bolton would find a soulmate in Donald Trump, who took him from the political wilderness to appoint him his national security advisor in 2018. When Sutherland travelled to New York in the spring of 2006 to begin testing whether the GFMD could generate traction, one of his first meetings was with Bolton. It didn’t go well. Bolton ripped into the idea of a forum and declared that the US would go all out to oppose it, since it risked, in his words, becoming ‘the seed of a UN Migration Agency’. Sutherland knew that this was a setback but he moved on. In the months ahead he held dozens of bilateral meetings with member states. ‘His obvious closeness to Kofi certainly helped the cause,’ says Maniatis.
The second time Sutherland was visibly shaken was following a meeting at the Russian embassy in New York. The Russians displayed an equally resolute approach to migration as Bolton; in other words, they were implacably opposed to multilateral co-operation in the field.
Consultations that spring with member states, says Maniatis, gave Sutherland enough confidence to include the GFMD proposal in the UN secretary general’s report informing that year’s first ever High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development, scheduled to be held at UN headquarters in New York in September 2006. ‘This was released in June and we spent the summer continuing to define the GFMD and campaign with states and UN agencies, many if not most of which were wary of the endeavour,’ said Maniatis.
At the start of September 2006, Sutherland and Maniatis had a meeting with the assistant secretary general of the UN at his office in New York. The assistant general, Bob Orr, was a ‘staunch supporter’ of Peter’s work, according to Maniatis. The idea of the meeting was to put flesh on the bones of the GFMD. ‘We were trying to create a space around the forum. We were trying to create an institution that was state led. We had a constant incantation that it was state led, non-binding, and Peter was the only link to the UN. And the secretary general [of the UN] would attend the forum every year.’ If the GFMD was not included in the secretary general’s speech in September 2006, then it would be a huge setback. Even if it was included, it was necessary to get a critical mass of member states to back it.
‘The reality was what we were proposing was so inoffensive,’ Maniatis says. The GFMD would be outside the legislative architecture of the UN, its management run by member states. The idea was that three countries would have responsibility for the GFMD at any one time: the current host country, the country that ran it the previous year and the country that would host it in the following year. Alongside this so-called troika of member states, it would be governed by the ‘Friends of the Forum’ and a steering group, which between them would debate the GFMD’s objectives. The only link to the UN was Sutherland. The US was still opposed, and a number of other countries were initially reluctant, including Australia and South Africa. The UK were also reluctant but in the end, it supported Sutherland.
‘If you want to manage migration then it is a legitimate viewpoint that it should not be done on a unilateral basis. It is much better if countries develop a framework between them. However, from a country’s perspective it is also legitimate that you do not give up control of your border. For many people, who controls who comes into your country and becomes a citizen is the essence of sovereignty. If you want to blow up that fear about who is responsible for rescuing migrants at sea or migrants in crisis countries, and if you suspect that at some stage this leads to somebody telling you who comes into your country, then that is the basis for opposition. The spectre of losing control of sovereignty is what motivates people not to do the basic things that can be done to make migration safer,’ explains Maniatis.
The Refugee Convention of 1951 had established a right for persecuted people to cross borders to seek safety. That was the one category of people to whom UN member states were not permitted to refuse entry. But apart from this, there was little legislative framework setting out the rights of migrants outside of broad human rights frameworks.
A number of different agencies within the UN each had some responsibility for migration, and they were all initially suspicious of Sutherland and what he was trying to do. According to Maniatis, Brunson McKinley, then head of the IOM, was also resistant to the concept of a GFMD because it was not led by his organisation. In the early years, moreover, NGOs and civil society groups in the field of migration were deeply suspicious of Sutherland, partly because of his business background. He was seen as an outsider. That would change over time.
Over the summer months of 2006, Sutherland had met a number of governments about his idea for a forum on migration and development. He gained reasonably positive feedback, particularly among some EU member states, and secured a provisional agreement from the Belgian government that it would host the first forum. With the intention that by the time of that year’s High Level Dialogue the forum would be a fait accompli, Sutherland enlisted the help of Mortimer, who wrote it into Kofi Annan’s speech. But there was a last-minute hitch. On 12 September, two days before the dialogue, the Belgian government told Sutherland it was having second thoughts about hosting the forum. He rang the Belgian foreign minister from New York. ‘It was really late at night in Belgium. Peter sounded like an outraged red-faced Irishman on the phone. He told him it was unacceptable. All the time, he was sitting across from me smiling,’ recalls Maniatis.
UN member states turned up at the dialogue on 14 September expecting a debate about holding a forum. At 9.15 a.m., however, Annan announced that the first forum would be taking place in Belgium. ‘It was classic Peter,’ Maniatis says. It was the same playbook Sutherland had used on the Japanese in the final day of the Uruguay Round talks, when he announced they had been concluded and put it up to the Japanese government to publicly spoil the party. They didn’t, and neither did the Belgians.
The first GFMD was held in Belgium in 2007. It has grown in currency ever since, and the next meeting is scheduled to take place in Ecuador in November 2019. That initial forum was the first stake in the ground in terms of institutionalising migration in the UN. In some ways, John Bolton was right to be worried. Initially Sutherland in those early years had been focused on establishing the institution, finding countries to host it and figuring out how to fund it. Then he had to figure out its relationship with civil society groups.
The US did not show up in the forum’s first few years. Then Barack Obama won the presidential election in November 2008. That changed everything. In the person of assistant secretary of state Eric Schwartz, the US attended at a high level for the first time in 2010, when the forum was held in Mexico. Schwartz was succeeded by Anne Richard, who developed a close relationship with Sutherland that would be responsible for one of the big institutional shifts in migration.
Sutherland was insistent that the forum would have a practical focus, identifying a number of areas that it was necessary to address. For example, there was a very significant issue with remittances. In 2006, every $100 a migrant sent back to their home country could cost up to $15. If the forum could reach agreement on reducing the cost of remittances, then it would increase the overall amount of money migrants were able to send their dependants at home. Another area that needed addressing urgently was the regulation of recruitment. Migrants going from Asia to the Middle East were in some cases paying up to 40 per cent of their earnings to recruitment firms.
In 2011, when the Libyan civil war broke out,100,000 migrant workers were stuck in the country, including an estimated 60,000 Bangladeshis. There was no protocol at the UN or any other level to deal with migrants in these situations. When Sutherland raised it as an issue and went in search of a solution, he got help from the Obama administration. Migrants in Countries in Crisis (MICIC) is a government-led effort co-chaired by the United States and the Philippines, aimed at improving the protection of migrants when the countries in which they live, work, study, transit, or travel experience a conflict or natural disaster.
Sutherland and Maniatis went about identifying further crucial matters relating to migration that needed to be addressed. For example, what happens to migrants stranded at sea when their boat capsizes? Who is responsible for rescuing them? This would become one of the crux issues of the Mediterranean crisis, and it remains unresolved. Climate change, moreover, has the potential to make the Mediterranean crisis look like the mere prelude to a more intractable phase in the migration saga. If a village becomes uninhabitable as a result of climate change and 10,000 people are left without a home, they are not refugees under the UN Convention. But what happens to them? How can the UN go about co-ordinating an effective response? There are those like John Bolton, says Maniatis, who reject any proposal that impinges on sovereignty and don’t believe in multilateralism. How do they react if somebody tells them they have to take climate change refugees? ‘I think that was a big part of the backlash in Europe; the spectre of tens of millions of Africans being displaced because of climate change. That is an extremely politically sensitive issue.’
*
By 2009 the global financial crisis had erupted, and the world faced the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Migration had never been at the forefront of the international agenda, and never would be as long as countries grappled with existential issues such as national solvency. But the aftermath of the financial crisis would form a toxic backdrop to the migration debate. The Arab Spring in 2010 was the klaxon that heralded the subsequent migration crisis.
Migration started edging centre stage in 2012. Sutherland unintentionally played his part in fanning the flames of discontent when he appeared before a House of Lords EU home affairs sub-committee in June 2012. Even though he gave extensive testimony, news outlets reported just one line – that the EU should ‘do its best to undermine the homogeneity of its member states’. The line generated acres of coverage; although taken out of context, it would be used repeatedly against Sutherland for the rest of his life. The right-wing British press were the first to turn on him. A week after his appearance in the House of Lords, this withering profile appeared in the Daily Mail:
On 21 June Peter Sutherland, KCMG, SC, UN Special Representative on Migration, sat massively opposite a House of Lords EU affairs sub-committee, a soft-faced man who has done very well indeed out of the culture wars. His erstwhile rugby-playing physique may be collapsing in on itself, but still he faced forward, safe in an armature of absolute self-belief and the certainty that he is on the side of History. His has been the life of a man of parts, one who walks and talks with the great, reminiscent of one of Holbein’s Ambassadors, surrounded by measuring instruments and all the external signs of extreme cultivation, peering down on human affairs from a great height. Yet Mr. Sutherland’s manicured machinations could prove calamitous for what remains of the West – just as Holbein includes a distorted skull to remind the viewer that all rational hopes are in vain. That is why he was peering at the House of Lords sub-committee like some well-fed but still peckish bird of prey, looking at the parochial parliamentarians from their dusty old-fashioned legislature – perhaps contrasting them unfavourably with the big-picture bureaucrats of his Global Forum on Migration and Development. He was there to answer questions about the government’s immigration policies – and from the outset it was plain that he disapproved. And not just of the policy – but Britain’s whole political structure, culture and national identity – all now, he broadly hinted, overripe for replacement.[2]
This shrill and personalised attack on Sutherland was tame in comparison to his portrayal across the fledgling alt-right movement on social media. He was depicted as a Jewish banker intent on dismantling the nation state. The fact that Sutherland was a member of the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission was grist to the mill for the keyboard warriors. The Bilderberg Group, in particular, holds a special place for conspiracy theorists. It is an annual meeting, held in private, for top business people, politicians, academics and the media. Sutherland was on the steering committee for a number of years.
However, Sutherland’s House of Lords testimony was far more nuanced than the reports suggested. He said migration was a ‘crucial dynamic for economic growth in some EU nations, however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states’. An ageing or declining native population in countries like Germany or the southern EU states was the ‘key argument and, I hesitate to the use the word because people have attacked it, for the development of multicultural states … It’s impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them. Just as the United Kingdom has demonstrated. The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.’[3]
In other words, Sutherland believed that most EU member states were facing a demographic timebomb that threatened future economic growth, and migration formed part of the solution. These countries would therefore have to live with diversity. It was not a call to destroy English culture or the culture of any country. Sutherland did not believe in open borders. What he wanted was much greater co-operation among countries in order to manage migration. He wrote at the time:
Let me be clear: I am not making an argument for more or for less migration – although I do make the case for OECD countries to resettle more refugees. I am arguing for putting in place policies that will allow migration to occur in a safer, more orderly manner, and that also improve development outcomes. If we can achieve this, I am confident that the public will be on our side.