Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's a great pleasure for me to be here.
I spent 25 years in my own parliament, so as you can imagine, I feel very much at home attending this committee session. I'm very grateful for your wish to have this dialogue with me.
First of all, Canada is an exemplary partner of the UNHCR, a partner in support of our operations worldwide with very significant financial support. But I would say it's not only financial support. This is a very engaged country in the debates about our strategy, our policies, and our internal reforms.
At the same time, Canada has a very solid asylum system. I had the opportunity during this visit to have lengthy discussions with the Minister of Immigration and with the departments that deal with asylum questions in Canada.
This is a moment of, I believe, great interest in the internal debate on these issues. But I will probably concentrate more on our activities worldwide.
The number of the world's refugees and the internally displaced due to conflicts has been relatively stable in the last two or three years. We have about 60 million refugees, including the Palestinians, and 27 million people internally displaced. But even if this number has been relatively stable in the last two or three years, we are witnessing the fact that most of the refugees are becoming so for a protracted situation.
In 2009 the number of people we were able to help go back home in safety and dignity, namely in the three biggest countries of return in the world--Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and southern Sudan--dramatically decreased because of insecurity in those countries of origin. What we are witnessing more and more is the tendency of countries in which a peace process was established at a certain moment to go back into conflict, or at least to have their security situation worsen. This makes the present global situation a very worrying one.
If one looks at today's world, I usually divide our operations into two groups. One group of what I would call the “arc of crisis” starts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, goes into Iraq, and the Middle East. That's even if UNHCR is not directly involved in the Palestinian refugees in the area, because there is another UN agency, UNRWA, that was there before we were created. Then there is Sudan, Chad, Somalia, the Horn of Africa, and Yemen.
These regions are the origin of two-thirds of the world's refugees and they have a group of crises that are becoming more and more interrelated. These crises are also strongly linked to considerations of global security—many of these countries are breeding grounds for terrorism in today's world—and in this group of crises, to a certain extent, the relationship between the so-called Western world and the so-called Muslim world is at stake.
To a certain extent the solution to this crisis is the key element to avoid the movement of the world into what some would call a risk of the clash of civilizations. The solution to this crisis would be an extremely important element for world peace and stability. Of course it would also diminish the dramatic humanitarian impact of displacement caused by these conflicts that, as I said, generate about two-thirds of the world's refugees.
And then we have all the other crises. Some of them are dramatic from a humanitarian point of view. There's the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and many others. But these crises only have a local or a regional impact and can be seen in an isolated way. Because of that, because they do not correspond to a global threat, they tend to be forgotten by the international community. The investment of the media and the investment of the international community--political, developmental, and humanitarian--is, I would say, relatively less relevant than in relation to the arc of crisis that I described.
Another pattern that is very important to analyze and that will be at the centre of the policy debates we will have in 2011 during the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the 1951 convention of the protection of refugees, has to do with the new patterns of forced displacements.
Traditionally there was a very clear distinction. One could be a migrant moving from one country to another in search of a better life. Of course, this is something that we respect. Canada has been a country of migration through immigration since its very beginning. It's a key source of the fabric of Canadian society. One could be a refugee fleeing persecution or conflict. The distinctions were clear.
In today's world, we are now witnessing the distinction becoming a little more blurred. We are witnessing a new trend of forced displacement. In some situations, we see that extreme poverty, climate change, and conflict are becoming interrelated to a certain extent. It's difficult to know the motivation of someone who is moving from one place to the other.
If one looks at the world's mega-trends--population growth, urbanization, climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, and the movement of people--they are all becoming more interrelated. To a certain extent they enhance each other. It also is a factor of displacement.
This is a relatively serious problem for us. How can the international community respond to the challenge of these new forms of forced displacement? It may be someone going in a boat from Somalia to Yemen through the Gulf of Aden. As you know, many people die on such a trip. Did this person embark on that journey because of the conflict? Or is it because of the drought in the region? What are this person's motivations? What kind of protection does the international community have to provide when facing these problems?
This is a very important debate. We would not want to change the 1951 convention on the status of refugees but we do recognize the importance of finding better international cooperation mechanisms in order to respond to the need for protection created by the interrelationships of all the factors contributing to increased population movements. Some of these movements are voluntary--this is the migration phenomenon-- but more and more there are new patterns of forced displacement.
Finally, I have to say we are increasingly concerned about our activities. The humanitarian space is shrinking. Security is becoming more complex. Three of our colleagues were killed in Pakistan last year. More and more of the actors in conflicts do not abide by the rules and sometimes directly target humanitarian workers.
Wars between two armies are becoming quite infrequent. In eastern Congo, they are our five or six armies, militias and groups of armed bandits. All of this creates an extremely difficult situation in terms of security. The humanitarian space is also shrinking because of national sovereignty claims made by some governments. For example, Sudan expelled NGOs from Darfur and it was very difficult to get access to the victims of cyclone Nargis in Burma. Moreover it is sometimes difficult to make a distinction between the military and civil presence of the international community.
There are more and more peacekeeping operations in places where peace does not even exist anymore. Thus UN peacekeepers are becoming a part of the conflict and, when this happens, the protection of the humanitarian space becomes increasingly difficult.
There is a last issue that is certainly of interest to the committee. It is the fact that human rights are losing ground against national sovereignty. This development can be observed in a number of countries. The power relationships in the international arena have evolved in such a way that I believe an operation like the one which was mounted a few years ago, when I was in the government of my country, in order to save the people of East Timor would not be possible today. I believe the protection of human rights has lost ground against the protection of national sovereignty, even though the United Nations General Assembly approved the notion of the responsibility to protect. The truth is that this responsibility is now severely limited because national sovereignty is increasingly invoked, sometimes to violate human rights in the most appalling way.
Mr. Chairman, I am now ready to answer questions.
