 Welcome back to our world on the move and today we have Karen Abouzaid, a special advisor to the UN Secretary General on refugees and migrants for the summit which is about to take place and she's here because there are some very difficult questions to be asked and to be answered and we have refugees and migrants from around the world to pose those questions. Over to you Karen. Thank you, but I'm really very happy to be here with all of you. I look forward to discussing with you what difference you think the summit can make concretely in the lives of refugees and migrants and for host countries by the way around the world. As you know 193 states have signed up to commitments on refugees and migrants, a consensus document with a whole list of things that they're promising to do and we'll sign up officially in September. Some of the things that we think are extremely important first of all to protecting the rights, the human rights of refugees and migrants regardless of their status. So this is something that's quite new and we're very happy that the 193 states have signed up to that. They also have committed to things like getting refugee children into school within a few months of their arrival at a destination. Some people wanted a few days, others said this is impossible, but we got in a few months. There's also going to be a campaign as we're calling it right now against xenophobia for diversity and so on and we will hope that this will be something that helps people who are living in places where they're not entirely welcome when they first get there or even after being there for a while. And then we're looking at concrete ways that will come up in September about how to follow up on these commitments and the world leaders are expected to say yes we signed up for these on early August and we're going to make all of them happen and so that's something that will take some work from the UN itself and from all of their partners in the NGO world and elsewhere. So these are all the things that we're looking forward to. My question regarding the summit is one I think it's an amazing forward towards finding a solution for the migration crisis that we're facing, but how how will the UN encourage member states or states in general to comply with these recommendations without infringing on state sovereignty and how can we tackle that without government without the host country support or the sending country support? To answer your question all 193 member states signed up. This was a consensus document so they've all committed to it already. They will sign these commitments and they'll be written in a different way based on the report and the outcome document as we call it in September. So we're not and certainly the questions of sovereignty were brought up about some things and some things fell out of the original Secretary General's report which you might have seen because because of that very issue but a lot of them we managed to get in in different sort of language and dealing with it. We had two co-facilitators if you don't know how this works, one ambassador from Ireland and one ambassador from Jordan and they did a beautiful job with this of negotiating and compromising and although some things got left out that we would have liked to have seen some strong points so we would like to have made it stronger but I think we're all pretty satisfied that 193 states have signed up this much to that many commitments so when we saw some news reports that were criticizing we said they weren't in the negotiations. They didn't see how difficult this was and how really wonderfully well it was done. A couple of interesting things are going on here in Hungary regarding the situation of refugees. Somehow to all the refugees that I was in touch with they feel like being a refugee is like being a crime. They're making it almost impossible to enter the country, the restrictions and border and mostly the attitude of the host countries are not that positive. It's something we've got to get a lot of positive stories out there about migrants and refugees. This is what happens is people just think of them as you said as some strangers they don't understand they're not wearing the same clothes they don't have the same culture and that's what we want to emphasize the other side of this is that the value of diversity how this makes us stronger and makes us the world as we say a better place and the more we do this and the more we advertise this conversation we're having this morning and what you're saying yourselves from your own experiences I think it's going to help make things better. The first question is about employment of refugees where is that going to be in the narrative of this summit the employment opportunities because education is really important but if one thing we learned from the Palestinian experience it's you can educate a nation but then it's going to become something dangerous when you have a desperate educated community that doesn't have access to jobs. It's not an easy thing of course when there's unemployment in other in countries for their local citizens and so on but we've mentioned how important it is to when you agree to take in refugees and we're talking a lot about responsibility sharing that no one nation can take care of the refugees or the migrants themselves you have to have every country stepping into help. My question and comment is about how to foster translating those commitments into action especially when it comes to countering xenophobia an approach that has been tried is storytelling and by that I mean reciting having refugees recite their tale not just through description but through the almost theatrical art of storytelling people relax when they listen to stories they are educated in a non-threatening way they don't even know they're being educated and most importantly it opens their hearts it taps into their emotions that we all have and to me this is key if we're going to stimulate action especially when it comes to countering xenophobia. A single contact with a refugee can make a real difference in someone's mind you just meet oh oh a person like me and so to get people together is so important and to talk about not you know I don't want to say just success stories but stories like like all of you refugees who show this resilience and you're coming back from having had a difficult time but but but you're managing now and you're strong and so on I think it's so important we use that word a lot especially we used it with Palestinian refugees about you know their resilience and their steadfastness and I think it's true of most refugees that you're always surprised at how well they're managing and so on and those are things that we want to do the personal contacts the storytelling as you say and I have with me in the room our particular person who's working on public information and so she's taking notes so she's listening to everything you say too I want a question I would have like it's one day and I know you will not like solve the world's problem but I hope that you have a representative of Syrian people I don't see Syrians representing themselves right now I don't see them anywhere there are many many events around the summit I mean there's the big summit itself which is you know it's only so many people can get into the UN but there are really dozens of them maybe more events going on all around some by the NGOs and so you'll find that the refugees will be at those they'll speak for themselves and that's what's very important to hear that and you hear the good and the bad on both sides you know and I really sympathize with what you say about Syria because I've been working on Syria for five years before coming to do this and I do it of course when I worked with UNR and it was just a very beautiful place with very beautiful people and it's very very very special I'm sure you know there is the world largest refugee camps that are in in Kenya so I was in one of them which is called Kakuma refugee camp that's where I was I lived there finished my high school I made so many challenges and got a scholarship that got me here to to to Canada in in countries that host refugees for example Kenya it's not just about xenophobia like some of the areas that these people that refugees are put in for example Kakuma is a semi-arid area that is like there is no any economic activity that goes on there for the people that live there the indigenous people the locals and the locals see the presence of refugees as a threat to their own living not because they are a threat in xenophobic terms they are a threat in terms of poverty and most of these locals who might have committed some murders or some killings that I have witnessed such incidents happen not on the basis of actually fearing the presence of refugees this problem of the relationship to the local population and I don't think it's just in places like Kenya or Africa or Asia or anywhere that's one of the big arguments in the election here in the United States right now is the people who are supporting the send the refugee send the migrants homes and the refugees home don't let them in it's because it's they're worried about jobs and they their own economy so it's a it's a universal thing and we have to approach it that way and when we fix it in one place we hope we have then a chance and a model to fix it somewhere else and that's why we keep looking at Canada to see how they're doing things and how well they're doing things and accepting refugees and taking care of them and sponsoring them and integrating them the very pressing issue that we're facing at the moment is the issue of funding and the Syrian refugee crisis has been happening for a couple of years now and at the beginning all of the big donors were very enthusiastic they were sending a lot of funds to Lebanon as a result we had so many NGOs opening up and as you know Lebanon at the moment doesn't have a legitimate government we don't even have a president so I'm not even sure who's going to be representing Lebanon at the summit who were discussing in this podcast about you know education integration and facilitating the the lives of refugees without funding these NGOs won't even be able to exist we know that you know there are a million refugees million Syrian refugees in in Lebanon and it's a small country as you mentioned of four million people that that's quite a burden to take on it doesn't have any refugee camps so the refugees are all over the country as I mentioned earlier in the program the humanitarian appeals generally all over the world are only funded between 25 and 29 percent right now they're not getting the money they need because there are so many needs and they go so high but you know Lebanon is a special case along with some of the other Middle Eastern countries that have taken many refugees and especially Syrian refugees recently and so there is a lot of work being done on new international financing concessional financing that can be made to help the countries that will take this on so at least they'll be getting more money to do some of the things that need to be done not just for the refugees but for the country generally to be able to accept refugees when you reduce the the WFT has to reduce its funding for food by a third in for every month and you're feeding a family of several children you have a real problem in somewhere like Lebanon and it is the Lebanese people who've kept this going and worked on allowing kids into their schools in a third shift doing all sorts of things to to make it possible for those million refugees to be able to stay there in Lebanon as they're doing so your case is not forgotten by by many people who are advertising it the needs very much and and we do we hope too that there'll be something that that will be positive for you out of the summit as well for Lebanon thank you so much Karen we're going to bring the program to a close now but it's I must say it's been a really fascinating and detailed and forensic examination of the issues from the perspective of the organizers of the summit but very much so from the perspective of the refugees and migrants who walk the walk as we said a little earlier and it's been a terrific opportunity and I really want to thank Karen for coming forward and joining us on this program today and hopefully you will encourage other participants at your end to come forward so that we can continue the conversation and we'll be glad to have you back of course as well