I think this is probably the most crucial question. The crux, really, of the issue around internal displacement is, as you said, national sovereignty. National sovereignty has been a barrier to making progress on this agenda ever since the UN guiding principles on internal displacement were developed 20 years ago. This is also the reason that, as I was saying earlier, no single UN agency formally has the mandate to deal with the issue of internal displacement. Because it is so quintessentially politically sensitive and because it touches on the sovereignty of states, we see it playing out in many different ways, not least every other year when the IDP resolution has to be readopted at the General Assembly. We always have a lot of resistance on the part of certain states for pushing the boundaries of that resolution.
For a number of years, the main arguments that were being made to address internal displacement were human rights arguments, as I was saying earlier, which typically were met with a lot of resistance on the part of a number of countries, particularly those experiencing conflict, where the political sensitivities were much higher.
Now, having said that, even though the issue of sovereignty is and will probably remain a massive obstacle in finding solutions to this issue, there are some promising opportunities on the horizon. We have noticed that conversations with national governments about internal displacement are, for example, far more palatable when the entry point is not conflict or violence but is more disasters or climate change. Then we can have a conversation not so much about human rights and a country's human rights track record but about sustainable development. Talking about reconstruction, development and longer-term planning and couching the issue of internal displacement within a broader conversation about a country's commitments under the SDGs, for example, is far more constructive, I would say, than presenting it as a more forceful human rights issue.
We have made some progress. I was talking about the high-level panel on internal displacement, a proposal that was put forward to the Secretary-General by a number of member states. We're hoping this proposal will see the light of day perhaps early next year. We hope it can create a forum where a constructive conversation about internal displacement and sustainable development can take place.
It is absolutely essential that countries affected by internal displacement are part of that conversation and that they're not sidelined in policy debates that up until now, if I'm honest, have mostly been led by donor governments and western governments that are not directly experiencing this phenomenon in the same way as these other countries are. Some of these countries—not all, of course—have expressed an interest and an openness to discuss the issue constructively. They really should be in the driver's seat of any future policy-making on this topic.