REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Ahmad Fawzi, Director a.i. of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing, which was also attended by spokespersons for the United Nations Refugee Agency, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, International Organization for Migration, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

United Nations Secretary-General

The United Nations Secretary-General had just returned to New York from the G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey. At a press conference at the G-20 he had stressed that terrorism was a threat to all humankind, and that the response must be robust, but in respect of human rights and the rule of law, otherwise “we would all fan the fire we were trying to put out”, he said.

Answering questions, Mr. Fawzi said he could not confirm whether the United Nations Secretary-General was travelling to North Korea. On Yemen, Mr. Fawzi confirmed that the Secretary-General had recently said that Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, his Special Envoy for Yemen, was meeting with the parties, but it was not known when or where the meeting would take place. In answer to a question on Syria, Mr. Fawzi said that Staffan de Mistura, the Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Syria, was in Vienna during the recent round of meeting. You know that he has already done a lot of preparatory work on forming the Working Groups. The Secretary-General had asked his Special Envoy to speed up the work for the preparation of a Conference, but no dates were available as yet.

Geneva Activities

The Committee against Torture was examining reports by China and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao this morning, and the report of Denmark this afternoon, said Mr. Fawzi. The last country to present a report, Jordan, would do so on Friday 20 November.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women was meeting in private until the closing meeting on the afternoon of Friday, 20 November. During this session, the Committee had considered reports by eleven countries: Russia, Portugal, Liberia, Slovenia, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, United Arab Emirates, Malawi, Madagascar, Timor-Leste, and Slovakia.

The last Committee meeting for 2015, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, was scheduled to start a two-week session on Monday, 23 November, in which it would consider reports by six States Parties: Holy See, Lithuania, Egypt, Slovenia, Mongolia, and Turkey. A background release would be issued on Thursday,
19 November.

Friday, 20 November was Universal Children's Day, celebrated since 1954. It marked both the adoption of the United Nations 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child, and the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. To commemorate this important day, UNOG and UNICEF were bringing 300 schoolchildren from Geneva to the Palais, for an educative and informative event which will include discussions on the rights of the child and on human rights, a visit to the UNOG Library and Archives, a visit to the UNICEF Permanent Exhibition, and the guided visit of the Palais. Winners of a drawing competition would be announced and would receive their awards from Director-General Michael Møller.

Today, 17 November, at 2.30 p.m. in Press Room 1, the World Health Organization would brief the media on how climate change impacted health and what actions countries could take to improve public health. It would present 15 new Climate and Health Country Profiles, produced in collaboration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC).

Matthew Brown, for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said that Debt Management Conference would take place from 23 to 25 November, and a press conference was scheduled on Monday, 23 November, at 12 noon with the President of Ireland, Michael Higgins, and UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi.

Also on Monday, 23 November, at a press conference at 3.30 p.m. in Room III, UNCTAD would launch The Least Developed Countries Report 2015: Transforming Rural Economies, in the presence of the Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi.

After Paris attacks, refugees should not be turned into scapegoats, warns UNHCR

(Near verbatim transcript)

MF (Melissa Fleming, for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR): UNHCR expresses its shock and horror at the attacks in Paris and the killing of so many innocent people. The High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, has conveyed his solidarity with the government and people of France as he also did with the government of Lebanon following the recent deadly attacks in Beirut. We’d like to emphasize that the overwhelming majority of those coming to Europe are fleeing persecution or the life-threatening effects of conflict and are unable to reach safety in Europe by alternative avenues. Also, precarious situations in countries of first asylum, the neighbouring countries to Syria, are also driving many to leave for Europe.

Many are fleeing extremism and terrorism - from the very people associated with the Paris attacks.

UNHCR is deeply concerned by the yet unconfirmed news that one of the attackers in Paris might have entered Europe as part of the current influx. We strongly believe in the importance of preserving the integrity of the asylum system. Asylum and terrorism are not compatible with each other. The 1951 Refugee Convention is clear about that and in fact excludes from its scope people who have committed serious crimes. From the beginning, we have been urging States to immediately to put in place an effective reception, registration and screening mechanism immediately upon arrival in Greece and in Italy. For those screened in those centres and determined to be refugees, protection should be provided and eligible asylum-seekers should be relocated under the EU plan. As you know it is starting to move, but very slowly. Relocation and other agreed measures can improve the management and stabilisation of current flows of people. These include security measures and the proper registration of all those on the move.

We are concerned about reactions from some States to end the very programs put in place to manage the flow of people, backtracking from commitments made or proposing the erection of more barriers. As we have seen, that just moves the flow to other countries and causes more misery for refuges and more chaos in management. We are deeply disturbed by language that demonizes refugees as a group. This is dangerous as it will contribute to xenophobia and fear. The security problems Europe faces are highly complex. Refugees, we believe, should not be turned into scapegoats and must not become the secondary victims of these most tragic events. Again, we would like to repeat as we have time and time again that this tragedy points to the urgent need to significantly expand legal avenues, notably resettlement and humanitarian admission programs, as alternatives to the dangerous and irregular journeys while cracking down on smugglers.

Q: I would like to have your reaction and also some details on the affirmative tone media is using regarding the fact that one of the terrorists sneaked into Europe through the refugee channel. Have you had any contact with any authority in order to confirm that not only the IDs are real and the connection between what is considered by certain media as someone who used the refugee channel to enter Europe?

MF: As I said in the press release, we would be deeply concerned if this was the case. We are following this very closely with the authorities in Greece and also in Paris and Serbia. The authorities there are in charge of the registration. But as you know, the registration there is done very quickly, it is not the same registration that we are proposing that would take place if those so-called hotspots and big registration centres were established in Greece, where the screening and registration would be much more thorough. As of now, those, as you see, there is registration, they were able to trace this passport. So in any case, we are waiting for the conclusion of the investigation. We are not privy to any more information than the officials in Greece and France have.

Q: They said it was through the fingerprint?

MF: They are doing fingerprints, I have seen the process on the Greek islands. They are doing a registration and a finger printing, which is then entered into a system called EURODAC and that is how they were able to trace this particular case.

Q: Quelles sont les garanties que vous pouvez donner aux Etats récalcitrants en Europe pour que les réfugiés puissent être accueillis normalement au-delà de la peur ?

MF: We would love to give refugees the guarantee that they will still be able to seek asylum everywhere, as under international law it is their right. We, time and time again, have been calling for legal avenues. It’s the irregularity of this movement that is causing all the chaos. When refugees are resettled, they go through a thorough screening. First of all, they are registered as refugees by UNHCR in their first country of asylum. There is a screening process and people who have any military involvement in their history are excluded already. Then there is another screening process that we undertake before submitting the resettlement family, or person, to the participating country, and then that country conducts another screening. So I don't think that there is any individual or family or person more scrutinised arriving in a country than a resettled refugee.

Q: I would like to know your reaction to the decision of a number of states in the US, which already decided to stop their relocation of migrants that they already accepted.

MF: I think it is clear that a world that welcomes Syrians can actually defeat extremism. A world that rejects Syrians, and in particular Muslims, will feed into the propaganda that is strengthening extremist groups such as ISIS. That’s why we ask to really reflect on the implications of implicating Syrian people who are fleeing the very terrorists that have conducted those attacks and who need protection.

Q: Is there a risk that people from ISIS can come by sea?

MF: We’ve said from the beginning, we need to have this situation managed. There are all kinds of implications, if people are not registered and screened the moment they arrive in Europe. So, this needs to be implemented tomorrow so that the people who deserve it can be protected in Europe and those who are coming here for various reasons can be identified and immediately arrested.
Q: In case the news about the passport is confirmed, it is because the registration is not proper. The registration centres are not working. Is this the reason, because they are failing?

MF: You could say that they are working. These are Greek islands, they are registering thousands of people every day. Frankly, the whole responsibility of managing the people arriving on the shores of Europe has fallen to Greek authorities with the help of UNHCR, other NGOs and volunteers. We need a huge, stepped-up effort to assist Greece in this huge responsibility at its shores.

Q: What is the mechanism in UNHCR to exchange information about rejected refugees with security authorities of countries where they arrived?

MF: We share all the information with the governments. In Turkey, it's the Turkish government who registers refugees. We support them. But in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, UNHCR does the registration and the information is shared with the government.

Q: Did you receive any information from the authorities of any of the European or Arabic countries telling you that this person, specifically, is not allowed because of some security issues?

MF: No. And I would caution everybody also to wait for the investigation. Every day I read something new about this passport. There is a report today, coming out of Serbia, that there is a man arrested with the same passport, with the exact same name. So it looks like this passport might have been produced multiple times. I think there is still a lot of investigation to be done before we have all the facts on the table to draw conclusions.

Q: Had the kind of registration system that you believe is necessary been put in place, do you believe it could have detected this person or somebody else who is a criminal and who should not be allowed in? Or is there no such thing as a fool-proof system but it would have made it a lot better in terms of detecting the person?

MF: Certainly things would have been made much more difficult and also, there are obviously a lot of fake passports circulating, which is also part of the criminal network. And these sophisticated system would detect these better. I am not a security expert, this is all I am going to say about that.

Q: Some countries do not want the relocation of the refugees that the EU has decided upon to go through. So if this happens, it’s moving very very slowly, it was practically dead anyhow; but if it is dropped as a method of moving the refugees around from country to country, what happens to the refugees, do they all stay in Greece, which seems an impossible situation?

MF: We are very concerned that any moves to back-track the very system that has been put in place to manage the inflow of that many people and also to do proper registration and screening could face a set-back which actually could perpetuate the problem. Also, if countries erect more fences, we are going to have bottlenecks and we are going to have the issue of managing the people arriving in Europe relegated to the countries that are least prepared and least able to handle it. So, we really hope the reactions are well thought-through and not knee-jerk because otherwise it will perpetuate the chaos.

Q: Could you just elaborate a bit more on the consequences of this notion of back-tracking ? If a single albeit horrific event gives states a pretext to undo agreements, that they have previously signed up to, what kind of precedence does this set-up for humanitarian work worldwide?

MF: What’s being threatened is an EU plan to manage the arrival of so many people to Greece and Italy in a collective way. We believe if this had been done from the beginning, we would have never seen all these images: the marches through Europe, the streams of people at borders. We need all the countries in Europe to be on board, at least most of them. It was heartening that there was quite a large number of participating European countries, not all of them, unfortunately. But now, if we hear, the countries that have reluctantly signed up to this, now back-tracking, it’s disturbing. Because this is the very system that was put in place to manage the European refugee crisis; it would not have solved it but it would have gone a long way to manage it and we are still hopeful that it will move forward, but we are concerned.

Q: I wonder, do you know if in the course of discussions with the European governments or the Commission, was this danger specifically raised by UNHCR, that there could be, if they didn’t manage and process people correctly, than there could be, you know, a danger, whether or not it’s actually, I know you said unconfirmed, but have you flagged this as a risk?

MF: I know in general terms we said it was really important for obvious reasons to have proper registration and screening as soon as people arrived to Europe.

Q: if you can remind me, how, the European Union, they accepted 120,000 refugees to relocate.

MF: 160,000.

Q: Sorry, 160,000. Those refuges, I think have already been screened and everything. How many have been relocated so far?

MF: I don’t know the exact number, but it is very small.

Q: Very small, like 1,000?

MF: No, I think it is fewer than that. So, the programme was just getting under way. I mean, the part of the problem is to convince refugees themselves because they don’t really trust the system yet. So, the centres haven’t really, really been established. There have been some successful relocations from Italy and Greece. The system has to start, it has to be tested and we have to have some success stories and you know, the word needs to spread. Also, for the refugees, they are much better off doing it this way, and also, you know, this idea that everybody goes to Germany, everybody goes to Sweden, the news that you hear from Germany and Sweden is that, even though they are very wealthy and capable countries, they are overwhelmed. And you will probably face a wait of up to one year before you can have your asylum application heard, etc., etc. So there has to be more and better information for the refugees, the first countries that people. One of the new relocation countries has been Luxembourg. So I am sure they will get a very fast registration and treatment because they are not dealing with such influx and they are able to take people.

AF: And as we said time and time again, your High Commissioner, Director-General Michael Møller and the Secretary-General, this is a global problem, this is not an Euro-centric problem, and we need a global solution.

MF: Exactly, and we are very pleased to hear also the words of President Obama who said yesterday in the context of G-20, he was warning against turning the backs, turning the back on Syrian refugees. We’ve heard the new government in Canada is committed to resettle 25,000 Syrians by the end of the year, and these are very important gestures that again will also send the message that these are the victims of the conflict in Syria and these people deserve to be protected.

Q: You said that on this issue of registration and screening, you said that in the Greek islands the authorities do what they can in view of the situation. And you say that you are proposing those hot-spots. Could you please be precise on what is the difference between the system that is being applied now to register and screen the refugees, and the system you are proposing.

MF: Well, the system we are proposing would not be just quick registration on islands, so that when 5,000 people arrive per day they can be quickly processed and moved from the islands. Those islands cannot handle these numbers. The people that would arrive would be probably more on the mainland, they would stay there for a while, the process would be more comprehensive and complex. Also, people determined not to be in need of international protection, asylum seeker and refugees, would be identified.

Q: Comprehensive how? How is our system is exactly more comprehensive, how in the fact, in the reality?

MF: There are ways and this would be done under EU authority, to do much more thorough registration and background checks, interviews, etc. I don’t have the methodology of the EU, but it would be much more comprehensive, that is all I can say.

AF: So, lots of interest as you can see Melissa, we are already half-way through the briefing and the questions are focused on this issue.

Q : Est-ce que le HCR, si un Etat ne respecte pas ses engagements envers vous, envers la communauté internationale dans le respect de la Convention de 1951, est-ce que vous le dénoncez aussi ? Parce que quand je regarde les chiffres 13,4 millions de déplacés internes en Syrie, 4,2 qui sont des réfugiés qui sont gérés par des pays aux alentours de la Syrie dont personne ne parle, et que l'Europe qui continue à nous parler d'humanisme ne respecte pas cette Convention de 1951, qui je le rappelle a été créée pour les Européens, qu'est-ce qu'il faut dire ? Est-ce qu'il ne faudrait peut être pas changer de discours à ce moment-là ? Est-ce que le HCR, si un Etat ne respecte ses engagements concernant la Convention de 1951, est-ce que vous les dénoncez ?

AF: Right, so this question is to the three of you.

MF: I will let Rupert start.

RC (Rupert Colville, for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): In fact the High Commissioner for Human rights addressed this a little bit last night. We sent you his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and he focuses precisely on that. He’s really flagging a big concern. He talks about “The slow undoing of human rights – those universal, core values that bind together and uphold development, justice, the rule of law and peace.” And he say “It seems that the defences against chaos and bloodshed that States erected at the close of the Second World War – the laws they wrote, and swore to abide by; the agreements and treaties they signed – are giving way to increasingly unilateral action, bound by no principle, nor any foresight.” You might want to take a look at that and he also focuses on the immigration aspect of it.

We are very concerned that if this attack, as was the case with the Charlie Hebdo attack earlier in the year, if it is allowed to feed discrimination and prejudice, it will be playing straight into the hands of ISIL, of the extremists, whose clear aim is to divide religions and societies. As the High Commissioner has already said, with xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiments already on the rise in Europe, he is very concerned that these types of awful calculated acts, and let’s be clear -- they’re calculated, and think about those calculations – what are they aiming for? They’ll be exploited by extremists of all sorts.

I mean ISIL – Da’esh – they want us to pick on refugees and Muslim communities already resident in the European Union. They want us to do that. So are we going to be so stupid as to play their game for them? It’s really pretty disgusting how extreme anti-immigrant politicians and media commentators have jumped on this attack to push their existing agendas. That’s really pretty obscene actually, given what happened in Paris, given there were Muslims among the victims, and it’s very, very stupid. The only way to defeat ISIL is to join hands across communities, to recognize that the biggest group to suffer at the hands of ISIL are Muslims: thousands and thousands and thousands of Muslims have been slaughtered, beheaded, tortured, brainwashed, terrorized by ISIL. And European Muslims – if people would listen to them – European Muslim communities are saying they are very ready to help. So it’s absolutely senseless, stupid, to alienate them, to abuse them, to profile them, to demonize them en masse. So, I think we have to be clever, to deal with ISIL. ISIL’s very clever and we’re not going to make any progress against them if we allow them to make us play their game for them.

AF: Thank you very much Rupert.

MF: Just a tiny thing to add, we are going to put this to the bottom of our press briefing note. The security of our societies and ensuring the integrity of asylum in Europe are objectives that are not incompatible. These are central to maintaining European core values and to protect the right to seek asylum. So, we don’t want to see, you know, one overtaking the other, we can provide security and also preserve the system of asylum at the same time. It is possible.

RC: If I could add something specific to that question Gabriella… and she said you know ‘Could it be they’re going to come by sea?’ I just say -- they don’t need to come by sea, they’re coming by social media. They’re here. So we have to deal with it, and we have to sort it out. But I think to focus on this one passport – and as Melissa says, you know, the story changes, there could be all sorts of oddities about that situation. It’s quite odd it was found in the first place. So to focus obsessively on that, on that one person – among how many this year? Half a million? 600,000 people? – and when most of the other attackers were people who were already resident in Europe, citizens of Europe. So I think we have to be so, so careful in how we respond to this hideous attack. And there are voices out there saying exactly that. Angela Merkel has been terrific. You know she is under political heat. I was reading some of the, kind of trolls on articles citing her most recent, very sensitive and sensible comments: absolutely vicious. and you know I think we really have to push for better attitudes across the globe, and more sensible attitudes.

AF: Thank you very much. Agnes, do you still have a question?

Q: Yes, I still have a question. On what you say and what Melissa says, you say we don’t have to be stupid and everything. Maybe if you could be more concrete on those hot-spot centres because it is really not clear what is it and how people can understand what it is? For example, should refugees and migrants stay inside the centres all the time that screening takes place, or if this is a more thorough screening, is it many days, would they have to stay inside the centre during all those days, would they want to stay inside those centres and not go outside before the security is made. Many questions like this.

MF: What I hope is that it would be a system whereby you know that you have to register in that centre in order to have access to Europe. So that is the goal. We would anticipate that there would be accommodating, we are looking at all kinds of schemes including the schemes whereby to help the Greek economy where the people willing to take people in during this process would be compensated. It is a mixture of things, but yes, this should be clear that that you need to register when you arrive in Greece in order to move forward. So it’s, there is a long way to go before we reach that point, but that’s the plan.

AF: Yes, please Joel.

Joel Millman, for International Organization for Migration (IOM): I also want to say that we have faced the same dilemma in trying to manage the flows as a non-governmental or as outside of humanitarian organization. In the Balkans, IOM has assisted local authorities in registering and making sure that the pipeline of people coming up from Greece was moving intact from border post to border post. We have been pretty successful in Gevgelia on Greece’s border with The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and in Presevo in Serbia. Even to the degree I think IOM rented a train just to move people half a kilometre or so, just to make sure that they would not be wandering across fields from border post to border post. When I was there, there was one day when 14 different people used the same ID they obtained somewhere in Athens. So we know there are all kinds of holes, no matter what we do there are going to be ways to gain the system. That was why we have been calling for some kind of more comprehensive management, but, you know, with this many people it is hard to imagine someone would not slip through.

AF: OK, shall we conclude this with Tom and then move on to the figures from IOM. Tom.

Q: A question for Rupert following up on what you were saying. I wondered if you think that European governments need to sensitize their people a bit more to the dangers, because, you know, we have 4 million people plus as refugees in the region and suddenly everyone starts getting shocked when people start coming to Europe. Likewise, there have been suicide bombings and atrocities in Iraq, in Lebanon, all across the region, and there is you know, now we’ve been awashed with headlines for three of four days because it’s happened in Paris - not trying to belittle what has happened in Paris. What more can European government do to make people more aware that this is a problem that they need to be dealing with.

RC: Yes, I think it is a really good question and I am sure they can do more. The issue of responsible politics on this - there is so much at stake, that it shouldn’t be reduced to winning votes, by appealing to those worse sides of our human nature. You need the kind of responsible politics that we have seen over the years in Sweden where there is basically an agreement across the main parties not to politicize the migration and refugee issue. That is, of course, coming under pressure because the rest of Europe did not match and follow suite at the political level, and the tendency has been more to subsume the more anti-foreigner rhetoric and policy ideas into the mainstream, in order to fend off those kind of extreme parties. So I think, it would be incredibly important -- and we are seeing Angela Merkel really do it at quite a lot of personal cost in political terms. We could have 27 Angela Merkel in the European Union taking a really realistic non-politicised view of this; because of the extreme gravity, it should be over and above all political agendas. We need to stop ISIL and we need to think of the best way to do it. And demonizing already marginalized communities is clearly a stupid way to go. That has to be pushed back, and try and get much more solidarity across the whole political fabric of Europe to deal with the problem sensibly, and also to deal with it humanely, not throw away the values of civilization, throw away this wonderful body of international laws that was brought into being after World War II, in a kind of gut-reaction, short-term view. So, yes, politicians could do more, we’ve said it before, we’ve said it in relation to the United Kingdom tabloids, very rarely they are tackled on those issues by political leaders in that country, because it can be politically costly to do so.

AF: Thank you very much. Wow, what a probing session we’ve had, I thank you all for your probing questions, thank you Melisa and you Rupert for your incisive answers. Some really strong statements there.

IOM calls for legal, safe and secure migration for all, concerned about negative impact of responses to Paris attacks on migrants and refugees

Mr. Millman, for the International Organization of Migration (IOM), said that IOM had released a statement yesterday in which its Director-General William Swing expressed concern about the impact the response to attacks in Paris might have on migrants and refugees, many of whom are themselves fleeing violence. IOM was calling for over two years, ever since the Lampedusa disaster for migration that is legal, safe and secure for all: legal meant migrants not being forced to seek dangerous underground roads operated by criminals; safe meant no more death-defying voyages on unseaworthy crafts; and secure for all meant just that migration that is managed by governments and professionals.

Mr. Millman said that their staff in Greece reported another shipwreck this morning leaving at least nine dead, two of whom were children, aged seven and 14. The tragedy today brought to at least 562 the number of refugee and migrant fatalities in the Eastern Mediterranean this year, and to 3,515 the total of all migrant and refugee fatalities across the sea-borne routes to Europe in 2015.

A donor conference for Syria to be held in February 2016

Jens Laerke, for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Kuwait and the United Nations were increasingly concerned about the plights of the Syrian people and the current funding of the 2015. In order to raise significant new funding to meet the needs of all those affected by the Syrian crisis and to identify long-term funding solutions, a donor Conference for Syria would be held in London on 4 February 2016. Stephen O’Brien, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said that this was a critical opportunity to remind the world of the suffering of Syrian civilians and expressed hope that the humanitarian appeals would receive better funding.

Further information on the situation in Syria available here: http://bit.ly/1HS5A0u

The Under-Secretary-General O’Brien had briefed the United Nations Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Syria yesterday, 16 November.

Answering reporters’ questions on the current state of appeals, Mr. Laerke clarified that the appeal for the people inside Syria was 37 per cent funded, while the funding of the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan reached 51 per cent. With the latest displacement, the number of people inside Syria in need of humanitarian assistance had reached 13.5 million; not all of them were accessible, and there was virtually no access to more than two million persons living under ISIL-controlled areas.

In Yemen, there were several humanitarian responses going on simultaneously, said Mr. Laerke, first the response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict, to which humanitarian responses to the two cyclones had been added.