Determined to save lives? UN Summit on Refugees & Migrants

At a time when the number of people displaced by wars, human rights violations and natural disasters is skyrocketing and the length of global displacement breaking records, restrictive migration policies are spreading like wildfire from one region of the world to the next.

 Despite the declarations UN leaders will adopt on the 19th, refoulement and push-backs, violence by states authorities at borders and squalid camps have become the rule rather than the exception in the tool box of the international response to migration and forced displacement.

 For the UN commitments to become meaningful and turn into concrete results, states will have to start by putting an end to border policies that restrict the right to seek asylum and trigger violations of human rights. The international response does not need improvement, it needs a radical shift or these commitments will just be empty promises.