 We're living in a period of the greatest human mobility in recorded history. One out of every seven people on the globe is some form of migratory status. We're also in a period of the greatest number of humanitarian disasters that we've ever seen. The last few years we've had unprecedented humanitarian crisis and we've seen crisis, natural disasters and conflict increase globally. From South Sudan to Central African Republic to Syria to Iraq to the Philippines, the typhoon that we had in the Philippines. We've seen the number of crisis increase, not just small crisis. We're talking about an integrated level 3 emergency response that is requested of IOM and the whole humanitarian system in the world. This has brought us to the point where we need to ask ourselves in IOM how good are we, what kind of principles are we going to put in place to make sure our staff in the field are equipped enough to help the people we're supposed to be helping. Previously IOM has come up with the support of our member states what we call the Migration Crisis Operational Framework and that's an operational framework that helps us put together our response in any kind of conflict or natural disaster. But right now we need to come up with our own principles, what we believe in and we look at international recognized principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence to make sure this is ingrained in IOM's team's response in the field and they can work with the humanitarian and country teams and are able to help our beneficiaries and our member states in responding to all the crisis we're facing now. The process I think was remarkably original and innovative. We had two major workshops in May and October 2014 which involved a very substantial number of staff up to 50 staff involved in both plenary and breakout sessions. Between these two sort of framing activities we had a very important field survey, field study in the summer of 2014 which was again scoping out the main challenges in the field from six case studies, essentially looking at natural disasters for example in the Philippines and Haiti but also humanitarian conflicts related to a crisis in Myanmar for example and also looking historically at the IOM experience in Kosovo. The principles themselves I think are framed around the four core principles of humanitarianism, independence, impartiality, neutrality and humanity but within that I think what we've tried to do is to provide a more specific framing in terms of the operational challenges for IOM. What I particularly like to highlight I think are sort of four key areas which the principles deal with. First of all obviously the mainstreaming of protection which is critical to any humanitarian organisation, not least IOM. The importance of partnership because clearly IOM works with a huge range of partners in the field and it's important that these principles are translated right through the implementation process for its humanitarian emergency programming. Clearly the challenge of accountability, accountability to donors, accountability to partners, accountability to governments, accountability to the beneficiaries of IOM's programs is an important area in which principal action and a principal stance is needed. And I think finally the challenge of sustainability. Clearly the focus is on emergency situations but as we know most emergency situations moved into protracted challenges of displacement, protracted challenges of humanitarian intervention so we need to look at sustainable programs in a way in which the principles inform that sustainability in a more development led approach to humanitarian responses and humanitarian crises. First and foremost the principles for humanitarian action will be for helping our staff members in the field to be able to respond with all the principles required in a humanitarian action. Our own staff have come to us clearly and have said this is what they want. They want to have a policy that will guide them in the field with all the issues that come up when they're responding in a humanitarian crisis. It also brings up the whole issue of our accountability to beneficiaries. It strengthens IOM's accountability to our beneficiaries. It strengthens our coordination with the humanitarian country teams in every country we're going to be responding. But at the global level it also strengthens our response mechanism and coordination with our intelligence standing committee, the UN, the Red Cross movement and every other partner who is in humanitarian action. Developing the principles themselves I think is going to provide the organization with a much clearer framing of guidelines and a much more transparent approach to its operational challenges in the field. And at the same time I think the principles are going to provide a very robust framework for working with its partners and in communicating externally the stance and the precepts which IOM operates. It's a very timely process because it fits into the wider context of the humanitarian reform process which is taking place in which obviously principles and particularly issues of protection are going to be central features. So I think IOM is very much sort of at the cusp, at the cutting edge really of this reform process. First I would like to thank our staff. More than 2,000 staff members of the organization were able to respond to a global survey. What the survey told us is it's really important to have this humanitarian policy and that gives us the next steps where we're going to go from here. We've discussed very closely with the Director General on how this policy is going to be implemented. One of the areas that we need to work on now is to bring this to the Policy Formulation Coordinating Committee. And we move to the next step which is the field testing. And for the field testing we want to look at countries which face numerous humanitarian crises to look at those countries and field test it and see if it's fit for purpose. I'd also want to thank the staff. Our staff have been working very hard in supporting the development of these processes and I hope they can continue to engage in this process until we finalize it.