UN annual summit opens with refugee pledge

NEW YORK (AA) - The UN General Assembly (UNGA) began in earnest Monday with a summit on refugees and migrants in hopes of tackling the greatest crisis of its kind since the Second World War.

The summit aims to achieve a ''breakthrough'', as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put it, for the world's nearly 245 million migrants, among them 21 million refugees.

''Refugees and migrants are not to be seen a burden; they offer great potential, if only we unlock it,'' he said at the opening session.

The Assembly n Monday adopted the New York declaration to do more to that end.

The declaration offers pointers on better sharing the responsibility for hosting and supporting refugees, as well as countering xenophobia and harmful rhetoric.

“We must change the way we talk about refugees and migrants. And we must talk with them. Our words and dialogue matter,” Ban said.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi added a caveat. “The world – shocked by images of people fleeing in huge numbers and dying at sea – does not want our intentions to remain on paper. It demands practical action and results.”

Grandi’s words resonated outside the UN stronghold of diplomacy in midtown Manhattan, where the reality of suffering and a global failure to address the crisis continued to play out.

A UN convoy carrying desperately needed humanitarian aid has yet to cross into Syria from Turkey to reach eastern Aleppo, where as many as 275,000 victims remain trapped without food, water, proper shelter or medical care, UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien said Monday.

He said he was “pained and disappointed” to see the convoy fail to move forward despite months of negotiations and a recent weeklong U.S.-Russian brokered cessation of hostilities extended till Wednesday.

Also addressing the opening session was Nadia Murad, a Yezidi activist who was kidnapped and enslaved by the Daesh terror group.

“We are living a third world war without naming it as such,” she said. “I beg you to put humans first. You and your families are not the only ones who deserve life. We also deserve life.”

In a poignant statement UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said, “Excellencies, this should not be a comfortable summit.

“The bitter truth is, this summit was called because we have been largely failing,” Hussein said.

The summit seeks to set in motion a number of steps to change the tide in years of failure.

The New York Declaration calls on countries which can resettle or reunite more refugees to do so. It also urges for those in the richer part of the world to recognize their responsibility to provide timely and dependable humanitarian funding, while robustly investing in communities that host large numbers of refugees.

Host countries are called upon to increase opportunities for refugee adults to work and for children to go to school. The declaration commits governments to better address the drivers and triggers causing the record numbers of forcibly displaced in today’s world.

The declaration also tasks the UN’s refugee agency to develop a response framework, setting out a blueprint for a stronger system with more reliable funding and early engagement of development actors to help those forced to flee their homes and the communities hosting them.

The summit continues with leaders’ statements including the U.S., European Union and Turkey.