Nilufar Amiri (center) from Kabul, Afghanistan
With the New York Declaration of September 2016, Member States of the United Nations committed to developing two distinct global compacts: the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. One year after 181 states signed the Global Compact on Refugees, they gathered at the first Global Refugee Forum in Geneva. Over the last two days, heads of states and governments as well as over 100 companies and foundations, pledged to enhance responsibility sharing, education, jobs and livelihoods, energy and infrastructure, solutions and protection capacity for over 25 million refugees worldwide.
After speeches by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, Chancellor Merkel and others, the Republic of Serbia – as a state party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and a signatory of the Global Compact on Refugees – presented five pledges to the Global Refugee Forum: to improve refugees’ access to secondary and tertiary-level education, to vocational training, to housing and to work permits.
“The Global Refugee Forum once again underlined the importance of distinguishing between refugees and migrants and their distinct needs, rights, and duties,” commented the Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to Serbia, Hans Friedrich Schodder “The UN Refugee Agency welcomes Serbia’s contributions to the Forum. We stand ready to support the Government in easing refugees’ access to documentation, health insurance, citizenship and other rights and services and to support – together with other stakeholders – Serbia’s implementation of the Refugee Convention and Compact. Both, host communities and refugees, will benefit.”
Bosnia and Herzegovina, also on behalf of Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, presented the Regional Housing Programme as a good practice in reconciliation, confidence-building and the provision of housing solutions to refugees to the Forum. By now more than 15,000 vulnerable refugees received housing solutions through the Regional Housing Programme in the Partner Countries, of whom some 12,000 in the Republic of Serbia. Since 2008, the authorities of Serbia granted asylum or subsidiary protection to 162 new refugees. UNHCR enjoys close cooperation with the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration of the Republic of Serbia also in developing individual integration plans for each new refugee.
Photos and video footage from the Forum are available on Refugees Media
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