It is time to fix the failing global protection system for refugees

This year is likely to be the most momentous for refugee protection and migration since the signing of the Geneva Convention in 1951. Depending on the choices we make, we will either help create more open societies or we will abet authoritarian governments and their nationalist agendas.

The refugee and migration crises in the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, and Central America have led to widespread and appalling human suffering. The significance of this can hardly be overstated, for the world’s failure to help its most vulnerable people reflects an extraordinary breakdown of morality.

When we refuse to protect those facing persecution, we not only endanger them, we subvert our principles of civil liberty and put our own freedom at risk.

Last year, we were offered literally a million reminders that the system of refugee protection was failing. Each asylum-seeker bravely crossing the Mediterranean was telling us that something was wrong in countries of first asylum.

How could we have allowed Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to bear the burden of hosting almost five million refugees with negligible backing from the rest of the world? When the cracks in the protection system became gaping holes, refugees voted with their feet.

Then, in a panicked effort to deter arrivals, the European Union jeopardised its tradition of human rights and the basic standards of asylum law. The signal this sends to frontline countries — that they need not fully respect the rules of protection — could be devastating.

In the misguided belief that safeguarding sovereignty means acting unilaterally, governments have resisted an international approach to migration. But as events in the Mediterranean have starkly demonstrated, this approach is self-defeating. It leads to paper-tiger sovereignty, undermines the credibility of democratic governments and the multilateral system, and empowers smugglers and authoritarian populists.

A systemic global crisis demands a systemic global response. By the time world leaders meet in September at the United Nations Summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, the global community must acknowledge what went wrong — and agree on how to fix it.

Rather than shifting the burden, we need to start sharing responsibility. The smartest way to safeguard national sovereignty is to minimise the risks migrants face when trying to reach safety and to maximise the means at their disposal to build productive lives.

Accomplishing this requires three things. First, we must use the political momentum around the refugee issue to generate commitments to specific improvements in the international protection system.

It is simply unacceptable that just 10 countries are forced to bear the lion’s share of the burden, that 86 per cent of refugees reside in the developing world, and that fewer than 100,000 are resettled every year. Supporting refugees is not optional, and we cannot allow responsibility to be defined merely by proximity to a crisis.

We must no longer go from year to year, crisis to crisis, begging for pledges (which all too often go unfulfilled). We should calculate what it costs to support forced migrants and the countries that host them, and then collectively contribute the necessary funding.

We also must expand our capacity to host refugees through resettlement and other legal pathways.

Second, strengthening the international protection system requires us to rethink the very idea of our responsibility toward refugees. We can no longer afford to treat them as dead weight in permanent camps.

Instead, we must help them become active, contributing members of our communities. And we must vow never to hold children in detention.

Finally, the UN system must develop greater capacity to address migration and provide migrants with a stronger voice at the global level. The degree of public and political attention that refugees and migration are receiving this year is not likely to be repeated any time soon. The condition of many humans will improve or worsen depending on how we use this opportunity.

Mr Sutherland is the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration and Development. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2016.