“We see that strategic calculations are much more important [to politicians] than the protection of human life,” lamented John Prendergast, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member and Co-Founder of The Sentry, at the ‘Forced Displacement & Refugees’ session as panelists shared their experience with addressing the issue and pondered possible solutions to the crisis. The discussion was held on May 9, 2024, during the Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum in Los Angeles, California.
Other speakers included Dana Graber Ladek, Chief of Mission at IOM Mexico, IOM – UN Migration; Ahilan Arulanantham, UCLA Law Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the UCLA Law Center for Immigration Law & Policy; and Rez Gardi, Founder of Empower and Co-Managing Director of Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table.
In her keynote address, Rez Gardi, Founder of Empower and Co-Managing Director of Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table, talked about her personal struggles as a Kurdish refugee who had lived for 10 years in a camp for displaced people in Pakistan before being resettled and starting a new life in New Zealand. “I learned about the denial of human rights and the lack of justice before I knew what those concepts meant legally. As refugees, the circumstances we are born into are shaped by powers beyond our reach, yet we are the ones that live the consequences of persecution and displacement,” noted Ms. Gardi. “In Pakistan, I was denied an education because of my refugee status. At some point, I was a refugee with dreams of higher education, and now I stand before you as a lawyer.”
Dana Graber Ladek, Chief of Mission at IOM Mexico, IOM – UN Migration, walked the audience through the highlights of the World Migration Report released just days earlier, and explained her organization’s role and priorities in the context of the global displacement crisis. “In terms of IOM is doing, we have a strategy that we just launched, and our strategic plan that goes from 2024 to 2028 has three main priorities: the first one is saving lives, the second one is identifying solutions for displacement, and the third one is promoting regular pathways for people in mobility. And really, all three of these are linked,” said Dana Graber Ladek. “So, you can tell that for IOM at a global level, this is extremely important for us to find local level solutions, policy and planning, data, partnerships, etc..”
John Prendergast, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member and Co-Founder of The Sentry, highlighted the alarming trend of individuals and governments forcefully displacing people with impunity, driven by the politicization of the issue. “In most cases, there are specific officials in governments and their international collaborators who are deciding to pursue strategies of forced displacement. They can escalate ethnic cleansing, as you all know, and sometimes even to [the point of] genocide,” said Mr. Prendergast. “When Nagorno-Karabakh was ethnically cleansed last year, not one, not one Azerbaijani official has faced any kind of repercussion, any kind of consequence, whether diplomatic, legal, or financial. It’s extraordinary.”
At the same time, argued Ahilan Arulanantham, UCLA Law Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the UCLA Law Center for Immigration Law & Policy, some governments who have the power to decide the fate of people seeking refuge are actually using it for good. He evoked the concept of “parole” in its humanitarian sense and clarified it for the audience: essentially, the US government can simply let somebody come to their country for humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. He then quoted the case of Afghanistan as an example of a discretionary use of that principle. “The United States military pulled out of Afghanistan in August of 2021, and at that time, there were about 90,000-ish people, a huge number of people, who actually came on planes as the pull-out was happening, in the days before and on the last day as Kabul was falling, and those people were all let into the country on parole,” explained Professor Arulanantham.
The discussion was moderated by Nasra Ismail, US Enterprise Executive Director of Alight, who expertly led the speakers to sharing their views and encouraged an open discussion. “I’m intrigued by the variety of different responses, and I think it’s really helpful for any discussion to be both honest and truthful and a little challenging as well, because not all responses are equal, no matter how much we want them to be,” noted Ms. Ismail as she was closing the session.