Jun 26, 2008 / 00:10 am
Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, the apostolic nuncio leading the Holy See’s permanent observer mission to the United Nations at Geneva, in a Tuesday speech to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, urged further action to protect refugees. The archbishop said close to 40 million people have presently been uprooted by violence and persecution.
The treatment of refugees displaced by ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, Archbishop Tomasi said, has brought attention to the “inadequate action” taken to protect refugees and has revealed a “growing insensitivity to asylum seekers.”
Many countries’ responses to refugees, he said, are often paradoxical. As more people seek protection in other countries, political action presses for greater restrictions on their entry. “In the process, genuine victims from abuses of basic human rights and of specific hostility are confusedly catalogued with other people on the move,” the archbishop observed.
Archbishop Tomasi said international agreements such as the 1951 Convention on Refugees and regional agreements such as the 1969 Convention of the Organization of African Unity and the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, have variously protected people fleeing from external aggression, occupation, foreign domination, serious disturbances in public order or massive violations of human rights. These protections, he said, have been extended to stateless peoples, returnees, and certain peoples who have been internally displaced.