This World Refugee Day let's end double standards towards refugees

This World Refugee Day, we should all celebrate the throwing open of borders and homes to receive the millions of Ukrainians in the last months. But this generosity simply highlights the huge disparity and hypocrisy in the way we treat the rest of the world’s refugees.    

Refugees and migrants have positively shaped and built societies and cultures for millennia, and continue to do so. However, even before the recent events in Ukraine, the global numbers of displaced people were unprecedented, driven by increased conflict, climate change and economic desperation. Over 100 million people are now forcibly displaced.

Away from the Ukraine crisis, hostility by host governments and punitive migration laws are growing. Whilst welcoming Ukrainian refugees, the UK government is using every piece of legislation at its disposal to deter and remove refugees and asylum seekers from places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria, including deporting them to Rwanda.

For me, displacement is personal. Both sides of my family came to England as refugees, but were given the right to work, enabling them not just to survive, but to thrive, and eventually become citizens and making significant contributions to society.

''The world’s richest countries must shoulder more of the responsibility as they are now doing with Ukraine, which is in stark contrast to their normal, woefully inadequate, position on hosting and resettling refugees.''

International refugee law was 70 years old last year – agreed by governments at the 1951 Refugee Convention – and enshrines the rights of refugees and countries’ legal duties to protect them. It sets multiple explicit obligations for host countries, including permitting people seeking asylum to engage in both wage-earning and self-employment. Yet over and over again this law and the promises it commits to are broken by the governments who signed it.  

By denying the right to work, host Governments are denying themselves of the skills and capacities of the displaced, whose average period of displacement is nineteen years. Nineteen years of not wanting to be fully dependent on aid, but desperate to make a meaningful contribution to their host country, feel valued and be valuable.   

Yet there are a few, like Uganda, who have taken a different path.

Home to over 1.5 million refugees, the government has proactively supported them to engage in livelihoods, providing land for farming, allowing refugees the right to work and access the education system.

I have seen the impact of this - South Sudanese refugees moving from being dependent on humanitarian handouts to being self-sustaining, making positive economic contributions and feeling the sense of celebration that comes with it.

 While it is easy to point the finger at host countries, it is critical to understand that 85% of refugees are hosted by developing countries. The burden of helping those most in need, once again, is falling on those who themselves are struggling.  

The world’s richest countries must shoulder more of the responsibility as they are now doing with Ukraine, which is in stark contrast to their normal, woefully inadequate, position on hosting and resettling refugees.

At the same time as Poland welcomed 3.5million Ukrainians, mainly with open arms and a hot meal, a couple of hundred kilometres north, it is completing a  €350 Million wall intended to keep out asylum seekers from other countries.

Not content with closing borders, Western Governments exacerbate the burden carried by low-income countries by failing to fund programmes.   

One in four people in Lebanon is a refugee, which is asking the impossible of the country’s already weak systems and infrastructure. Yet only 29% of their refugee budget remains funded, resulting in the UN and NGOs having to make desperate decisions over who gets what.

The current global response to forced displacement is both immoral and incredibly short sighted. We must learn from the past, stop the broken promises of the present, replacing them with opportunity and hope for the future.  

Imagine what the all of refugees of today could achieve and contribute, if, like my grandparents and great-grandparents, they were given the same opportunities as Ukrainians are being provided with today. 

Eleanor Monbiot OBE is the regional leader for Middle East and Eastern Europe for World Vision. She has over 30 years of working in the humanitarian sector across emergency response and development, driven by her passion to see justice and opportunity for all.

Follow her on Twitter: @EleanorMonbiot 

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