 Before I introduce Valker, I'm going to ask Dr Hayes of Irish Aid if she'll say a few words. This is part of the Irish Aid lecture series here at the Institute and we are very grateful to Irish Aid for all of their support. Valker has been in his current position as Assistant, our Deputy High Commissioner for Protection since 2015. He's had a pretty long career in UNHCR with extensive experience in the field and that headquarters including Director of the Division of Dealing with Protection and prior to joining the UNHCR, Valker had a career in academia in Austria and we're very happy that he's able to be here today to speak to an issue which is probably one of the most topical issues on the international agenda today and is one with which all of you are familiar. I mean currently we have 65 million displaced persons globally and of those 16 million are refugees and we tend to see it here as a European crisis but of course it's not, it's a global crisis because 70% of the displaced population is hosted in Africa and the Middle East and of course because it's a situation that appears on our screens on a daily basis it has generated, there has been a very significant international response and it's a process, the process of defining the international response at the UN is one in which there has been a strong Irish involvement because you'll be aware that our Ambassador to the UN, David Donough who is sort of hot on the heels of his triumph of having co-facilitated the Sustainable Development Goals, David was appointed by the Secretary-General of the UN to co-facilitate the process looking at how the world could come up with a more coordinated and humanitarian response to the current global crisis and the outcome of David's work was a summit in New York last September which came up with two concrete outcomes or of course the outcomes were commitments on the part of the international community that by next year they'd come up with a global compact on migration and a global compact on refugees, the global compact on refugees UNHCR is the leading UN player in this process and for, you're probably quite familiar with the outcome, it did agree a framework for the comprehensive global response to the refugee crisis and it put together all the existing international commitments from human rights law and from the various conventions dealing with refugees and what the UNHCR has been doing in the past year is piloting the application of that framework so I'm very pleased to have the opportunity myself and I know I speak for all of you that we have the opportunity to hear from the individual in the UNHCR who's probably most intimately connected with this very challenging work so without further ado I think I've said enough, I look forward to hearing you Dr. Tertl, thank you. Well thank you very much to the institute but also to be here in Ireland it's great to be in Ireland in a country that knows very well what migration and flight actually means in your own history and I think that's sometimes important to not forget that history especially when we often see very polarized discussions around migration and refugee issues in today's world. In fact I think Ireland has also been a country and you have just mentioned Ambassador Donahoe who indeed was one of the co-facilitators and one of the most able masterful co-facilitators and diplomats that I've ever met not just delivering on the sustainable development agenda but also on the New York Declaration which was a minor miracle from the perspective of those who have been working in refugee issues and have been trying to push the multilateral side. I think it was indeed very impressive that that document was adopted last year on the 19th of September but Ireland to someone like myself is also a country that I have always associated to be at the forefront of human rights, forefront of humanitarian action with a very strong civil society tradition that also goes not just here in Ireland but beyond Ireland dealing with humanitarian situations around the world so it is no surprise at all to actually in my own work and the work of my colleagues to have met many Irish non-governmental organizations and staff around the world working sometimes in the most remote parts of the earth to work on humanitarian and development issues and I think that has to be acknowledged. It's a very strong tradition, it's a very important tradition and it's one that we so desperately need in today's world where indeed sometimes the fact that you care about what's going on in other parts of the world is all the more important and we certainly see this very powerfully when it comes to refugee issues and the type of issues that we are dealing with today and if you look at you have mentioned the numbers 65 million people as we speak we're actually preparing the statistics for 2017 we suspect that the numbers will go up slightly we had about out of the 65 million most of them as you know are internally displaced there are people who cannot leave their country because of conflict and violence very often inside their own country there are multiple displacement that has occurred it's not just once or twice some people have gone through various internal displacement situations often under quite difficult circumstances before they're even able to seek safety outside we have this more and more in in some countries around the world where you also have this phenomenon that almost comes from the middle ages of in people who are really trapped in enclaves and besieged areas I must say I was myself quite shocked when a couple of years ago I had a chance to go to Syria and to go to the old town of Homs where you could see people coming out after the evacuation and where you cannot imagine under the type of circumstances people had to live in for years because they were not able to leave that area and it was of course civilians that were bearing the brunt of what was happening at the time and that's not just the case in Syria we know that this is the case in most conflict situations around the world where there is a very almost flagrant violation of fundamental norms of international humanitarian law which then lead people to to leave because that's the only way for them to save their lives so some of the reasons that compel people to flee are very much the reasons that we have always had it's human rights abuses it's persecution it is war and violence and it is also governance and rule of law issues I mean we we know that a lot of people who flee today are also fleeing because of weak or or fragile governance structures or non-existing governance structures and and as a result are forced to to to leave and I think when refugees when we welcome refugees in countries they really tell us a story about what is going on in the rest of the world they're often the most visible manifestations of some of the ills that that we have in countries but they also show us that the world is very interdependent I just came back from Central America and I must say if you look at not just the internal displacement happening in for instance in Honduras or in in other parts of Central America but also at the refugee flows from from from there you will actually see that some of that displacement is due to develop so-called development projects and related quite frankly to the extraction industry to mining projects for example and if you would do a deeper analysis you will see that these mining projects are all related to businesses to the private sector if you like not necessarily with their headquarters in these countries but with their headquarters elsewhere and I think that type of interdependence is very important to bear in mind because that gives us also in a way an explanation why things are happening and how interdependent they are and when people benefit from a certain situation and in fact exploit that situation it obviously has consequences very often detrimental to to to the human to the human being so the refugee experience teaches us that first of all interdependence is there but also that isolationism can never be a solution in a way the stories of people that we listen to are a shadow story of human society but also show us the necessity of a legal order that is founded upon a common principle of humanity but they also show and those of you who know refugees who have been engaged with them you will I mean one of the things that we are often struck by is the incredible resilience that refugees show the survival instinct again coming back to Central America it was interesting that those communities in El Salvador where no violence was present because you have a lot of areas where a lot of gang violence is happening but those communities that were violence free were actually former refugee communities because when they during the civil war when they left they had developed a sense of solidarity and community spirit and the resilience among themselves when they were refugees in Honduras for example that they took back home when they could when they were able to return after the civil war and that's interesting because it tells us something about refugee communities and the resilience that they have and the spirit they have and and indeed despite the fact that you have a lot of parts of the territory controlled by violent gangs the areas that are not controlled by gangs are the ones where you have this strong solidarity among communities and they were former refugees so we we know about the figures we know about the reasons we also know and that's important especially in the public debate in Europe that most refugees are not in the global north they are in middle income countries or primarily in the global south and I know in the Syria situation we know about five million refugees from Syria in the neighboring countries um which affects particularly Turkey Lebanon and Jordan but you have for example in Uganda about on average 2000 people crossing the border every day from south Sudan so Uganda actually now the biggest refugee hosting country in Africa but within a context of other countries that are equally affected you know Somalia you know of course Kenya with the Somali refugees that are both in Ethiopia Kenya and and in other parts of of the Horn um you know about the 2.5 million Afghan refugees some of them have been there for a long time both in Pakistan as well as in Iran and some of them have been there for for 30 years living in protracted exile situations but let's not forget all the other situations that we have of course Nigeria with the Lake Chad situation for example um where you see refugee movements into Cameroon but also Niger and Chad um you have the situation in Yemen a lot of internal displacement you have the situation now in the Democratic Republic of Congo we have about 30 000 refugees from Kasai from the Kasai region of of the Democratic Republic of Congo who have just entered Angola for example in Kasai itself about a million people displaced sometimes within the span of a couple of weeks and I think it's clear that with these numbers and with these complexities there is always this urge how do we find solutions and what type of solutions do we have and quite frankly the traditional solutions that we have been working on within the international community for years are not really working that well anymore voluntary repatriation for example we had a period over the last couple of decades where indeed you saw millions sometimes of people being able to go back that's not the case anymore in fact last the first half of last year just saw the return of about 123 000 refugees in the second half of last year more Afghans and Somalis returned but quite frankly sometimes under very very precarious circumstances and also sometimes ending up in a situation of internal displacement again back in Somalia or in Afghanistan and you can imagine what what this means to people so they leave a situation of relative stability and go back to a period of great uncertainty and sometimes continuous displacement back in their home country and we the other solution that we often talk about and we hear and I learned has contributed to this is resettlement international refugee resettlement again if one looks at the last 10 years about 1 million refugees were resettled over the last 10 years which is a good number but certainly not adequate it's not at all commensurate with the needs if one does the analysis it's actually less than 1 percent of of refugees that are being resettled on a on a regular basis so it is clear that the call for better numbers and more resettlement countries is is clearly extremely important but if resettlement and voluntary return doesn't really happen what's then the solution and quite frankly it will have to be one where we accept the reality of some form of self-reliance for refugees which means access to livelihoods to vocational training to education to employment and labor which is easier said than done I know but it's probably the only way for some sense of normalcy for people whose lives have been disrupted and it also helps people to become productive and engaging members of their host communities so finding solutions that can address that scale and gravity of these situations is clearly a daunting challenge and I mean we we have often heard discussions about prevention and obviously prevention is the best solution in in these cases and you it's no coincidence that the former high commissioner and now secretary general has made prevention one of his big themes for the UN because he certainly as high commissioner for 10 years has lived through the consequences of of failed prevention or no prevention or continuous conflict because as high commissioner for refugees you obviously are confronted with the daily lives of people whose lives were disrupted because of conflict violence and failed prevention so it's clear that this focus on prevention is going to be extremely important and it is it has worked in some instances in in other instances it will require it won't just be the UN or the regional organizations that we will be able to do it it will obviously require a lot more than this in particular commitment by member states but precisely also to look at some of these interlinkages that I was mentioning because that shows that it's not just one conflict far away but it is also clearly always linked with with broader regional and global phenomena the other area of solutions that I would like to put forward about from prevention is is better preparedness and contingency planning and we saw this in 2015 quite frankly in Europe very close to our shores in the eastern Mediterranean in particular I think we had expected for quite some time that things would change and that people would move onward and indeed it did happen I think Europe would have faced this situation in a much better way had it been prepared had it accepted the reality of displacement because as you as you know with the population within the European Union of over 500 million citizens one million should not pose an issue really especially if you compare these two countries like Lebanon with a population of 4.5 million and over one million refugees or now Uganda with very limited resources managing a population of one million refugees and I know sometimes there is a critique about making these comparisons but I must say they have to be made because it actually shows political willingness and engagement and that indeed if we accept the realities of displacement then we can also find the ways and means to address them I would also like to say apart from this solutions orientation a couple of words on the particular nature of of the refugee regime and as you know my own responsibility within the organization is protection which is the policy and the legal side and the operational side of making sure that people are protected who require it in the current discussion it's always important to remember that we have a solid international legal framework that was crafted in the wake of the Second World War precisely to address the type of situations that we are facing today again history tells us that in the 40s in Europe itself alone you had about 60 million people who were on the move mostly because of persecution war and conflict 60 million and it was still somewhat it was of course incredibly difficult and challenging but it was a historical fact against which the 51 convention was born and what the 51 convention actually wanted to achieve is to repair the rapture that exists between an individual and his or her country of origin because that's essentially what refugee hood means you end up with the social contract that you normally have as a citizen with your state that social contract gets demolished as a result of your refugee experience and the 51 convention was precisely the legal instrument to rebuild that rapture and that social bond it's also the embodiment of a mod of a of an of a time honored tradition of asylum and of a fundamental humanitarian tradition that spans religions and practices and legal traditions over centuries and yet today we sometimes see quite uninformed debates among political leaders about the value of this 51 convention despite the fact that that convention has saved millions of lives millions of lives over the last couple of decades often it's uninformed on purpose and deliberate in order to blur the minds because the 51 convention is as adaptable today to the current circumstances as it was when it was conceived and I think it is important to bear that in mind it's actually a very modern instrument some would say it should go farther than it does others would argue that it should address the type of challenges that we face today but you actually if you look at it carefully including against a different security background you will find that it had already then the checks and balances that is so much required precisely in a very complex environment that quite frankly the framers of the convention had in mind when they were drafting it because they came out of quite a brutal war they came out of a very difficult security situation and they knew very well what mass movements meant at the time and we have certainly seen that this convention is applied in practice by courts around the world by decision makers around the world and has proven to be flexible and adaptable to different circumstances perhaps even to those circumstances that the framers may not have had in mind such as in relation to gender related persecution or to lgbt claims and and things like this but it is it was crafted as a flexible adaptable living instrument that responds to these areas so at the end of the day it's not the law but it's politics that actually needs to be reinvigorated to provide the commitment to and the leadership to ensure that legal obligations that states have that they are actually implemented and quite frankly that political leadership will not come without civil society and academic institutions such as this one to be the voice of reason within a debate that is often and we have to witness this increasingly is often not just informed by the facts and by the evidence but in fact but really driven by emotions and fear so how can we learn from the recent experience to achieve this more effectively I think for us it's sometimes the terminology that has to be used we often hear this crisis there's a lot of talk about crisis but maybe if we frame the challenges that come from the refugee experience especially refugee arrivals not as a threat to our way of life or to our sense of identity but actually as an opportunity for concerted action multilaterally agreed supported as citizens of a global community we may move away from seeing them as unmanageable situations and we may actually see them as areas where we can learn and benefit from including about ourselves and who we are but so inclusion means in today's world and diversity means and the richness that can be found therein and I think that's really the big task that probably all societies around the world have these days we in the European context at the end of last year we provided some very detailed comments to the European Union on in light of the experience of 2015 to actually have very careful look at the current common European asylum system and how it can deal much better in the future and I can just we will make this available to you but I think it may be quite some interesting reading for those who work especially on the European regional front we have given it a lot of thought of how we could manage this better this very difficult situation but beyond Europe we also have the global framework and the New York declaration that has already been mentioned offers a huge a huge opportunity for us at the global level to engage with refugee movements in a very different way it actually allows for refugee issues to be dealt with through a whole of society approach not just whole of government because sometimes that's also one of the problems we see that sometimes within governments or within UN organizations you have a very fragmented fragmented almost siloed approach but we know that a refugee issue especially when people come in large numbers cannot be addressed through one government institutional loan or through one UN agency alone it will require a whole of society approach and it will include the civil society the non-governmental actors the academic institutions the faith communities but also the private sector increasingly and we have seen in the wake of the adoption of the New York declaration a number of interesting initiatives coming for instance from the private sector where the private sector says well we deliberately want to provide vocational training to refugees who arrive in our territory we want to ensure that they get employment opportunities that we help in the process of integrating them because of course employment and education are always those two areas whether you have the most connectivity with the host community so we need to work on education issues access to education and and employment because that's where the host community connects socially interacts with with refugees and the way that we want to work further on this is we are going and it was mentioned we're going to apply the comprehensive refugee response framework that is now contained in the New York declaration in a number of situations for instance we have pilot countries such as Uganda Ethiopia the Somalia situation but also we are working very hard on the Central America situation because it's a regional displacement situation that has elements of mixed migratory flows but also of refugee movements linking up the countries of origin countries of transit and countries of destination and we want to show that if you work in a regionally concerted way you can actually make a difference to people and you can find ways and means to actually improve it but we also hope that with engagement especially of the world bank that we have seen of some of the regional development banks the strong connection between humanitarian action and development to make sure that you know we also fulfill one of the promises of the sustainable development agenda that no one is to be left behind that includes refugees that that actually becomes something concrete and that it's not that we constantly need to have parallel education health and other systems for refugees but that they are actually included in the national development plans I mean that's what Uganda has shown us Uganda is a country despite the fact that they are the biggest refugee hosting country in the world in Africa today they have a deliberate national policy re-hope as they call it of integrating refugees into national development planning so they make sure by way of policy that there isn't a distinction between host communities and refugees but that they're actually integrated into that planning and they can only do this if they get the financial support from the institutions and from the international community so that the host communities and the refugee communities can benefit from it and that's really one of the big areas that we know is is changing enormously in in the way that the international community overall engages with this and and we have learned a lot over the last years especially as a result of the Syria crisis because for instance middle income countries in the past were not able to to get loans from the world bank for example they were not necessarily considered for it what was not taken into account is suddenly if you have a population of a million in addition to your citizens it does mean that you are going to be challenged in terms of infrastructure in terms of services and it is that support that the world bank with the infusion of of financial resources can in fact provide so with the New York declaration the follow-up to the comprehensive refugee response and hopefully the adoption of the global compact next year we we hope that these different areas of work will become much more interlinked that it's not seen as a fragmented siloed thing but it's actually as a coherent whole that really talks to the refugee experience of today and links it up in a much more coordinated way than ever before and perhaps perhaps let me conclude by with an interesting anecdote that I found out coming here to Ireland you had a very famous progressive Irish reformer in the 19th century is a barrister from Kerry called Daniel O'Connell and I don't know whether you knew that he had a relationship with my country because the Austrian Chancellor Count Metternich who as you know was behind the Vienna Congress and was quite a conservative man in fact he was terribly frightened by modern ideas obviously you can imagine did not do terribly well whenever he heard about the barrister Daniel O'Connell and in fact formally complained about him to the British Empire because he was so upset about that but there was one quote that I found from this wonderful progressive Irish reformer of the 19th century that really talks to this experience that we have here today about the fact and it really talks to the refugee experience because the refugee experience is one that transcends international boundaries that is indeed transponder international in its character and nature requiring an international response and he said my sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own Green Island no it extends itself to every corner of the earth my heart walks abroad and wherever the miserable are to be secured or the slave to be set free there my spirit is at home and I delight to dwell there so I think on that note we have a very strong addition here that we need desperately thank you very much