Suella Braverman is right. The United Nations Refugee Convention is no longer fit for purpose. As the Home Secretary will explain today in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, the convention makes a mockery of genuine refugees.
‘Simply being gay, a woman or fearful of discrimination’ is enough to qualify for refugee status, Braverman will tell her audience. This means that 780 million are entitled to protection, a figure she describes as ‘absurd and unsustainable’. The Home Secretary wants the refugee convention, which was in her view an ‘incredible achievement’ when it was introduced in 1951, to be reformed because in its current guise it offers ‘huge incentives for illegal migration’.
The UN is now an institution with a warped morality, where Iran and China dispense virtue to the West
Braverman’s words are unlikely to go down well with the UN. Last year the organisation’s Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, criticised Britain’s plan to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda.
‘I believe that Europe has asylum responsibilities that are at the heart of European values and tradition,’ said Guterres, adding that he was against ‘outsourcing refugee protection and especially of doing it in a much poorer country, where the prospects for integration and the future are obviously much less promising.’
The prosperity of a country should not be the paramount factor for a so-called refugee; it is whether the country offers them protection. Rwanda does. Guterres’ petulant response to Britain’s plan suggests that he is aware most of those coming to Britain are not refugees but economic migrants in search of a more prosperous future.
The UN has also been critical of Italy this year. When in February Giorgia Meloni’s government passed a code of conduct for migrant NGO vessels in the Mediterranean, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, described it as ‘wrong’.
In an address last week to the UN in New York about the migrant crisis, Meloni described those who champion open borders as ‘utopistic and self-serving’. Without naming certain UN officials or NGOs, the Italian PM also took a swipe at the ‘hypocritical approach to the issue of immigration’ which entails turning a blind eye to the people smugglers. ‘The fact is that the fight against organised crime should be an objective that unites us all, and that also invests the United Nations,’ she said.
Guterres is a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal who also served as the president of Socialist International, a global alliance of left-wing parties, between 1999 and 2005. He remains true to his ideology even in his capacity as Secretary-General of the UN.
Guterres astonished France last week during an address to the UN General Assembly when he made a veiled reference to the Republic’s recent interdiction on the wearing of the Islamic Abaya to school. Criticising countries ‘where girls are punished for wearing too many clothes’ as well as those where they are punished ‘for not wearing enough’, Guterres had the temerity to compare France to those Islamic countries where females must dress appropriately or face punishment and, in extreme cases, death at the hands of the police.
It was an immature understanding of what the Abaya represents, but typical, as one French magazine said, of the current progressive left. It is not simply a garment like any other. As the French-Algerian philosopher Razika Adnani explained recently, the Abaya is a ‘sign of the rise of religious fundamentalism and a symptom of radicalisation…the use of the term Abaya reveals a desire on the part of French Muslim women to resemble Saudi Arabian women’.
It is not the first time this year that the UN has attacked France. In May, the Human Rights Council accused the Republic’s police of excessive violence during a series of protests against President Macron’s pension reform. They overlooked the fact that 2,000 police officers had been injured in the line of duty that spring, the majority by far-left extremists.
As I wrote at the time, the United Nations has in recent years ‘taken a sharp turn to the progressive left’. Simultaneously, for a number of years the UN has come increasingly under the influence of China.
In 2020, the Brookings Institution think tank warned that China ‘now flexes its muscles in the heart of the UN…the Chinese-Russian tactical alignment in the UN Security Council challenges protection of human rights and humanitarian access’.
This was evident last year in the UN’s reluctance to criticise China’s human rights’ abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. How is that the UN finds it easier to criticise Britain and Italy for wanting to protect its borders than it does China for crimes against humanity?
Incidentally, China and Russia were among the countries that used its platform at the UN to criticise France’s police in May. Iran, Venezuela and Tunisia also lectured France on law enforcement.
This is the warped morality that the UN now embraces; an institution where Iran and China dispense virtue to the West, and where its secretary general likens France’s treatment of women to Iran’s.
It’s not just the United Nations Refugee Convention which is in urgent need of reform; the organisation as a whole has outlived its purpose.
Comments