Statement at the Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Migration

https://www.facebook.com/pg/ngomigrationcommittee/posts/

Making UN “leave no one behind” principle a reality 

Reducing inequality is a top priority for the UN Social Development Commission. The following article was published in the March-April 2019 issue of NewsNotes.

Inequality – the state of not being equal in status, rights, and opportunities – is recognized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs as a central concept in every social justice discourse. Growing disparities between access, opportunity, wealth, and gender undermine social, environmental and economic sustainability and fuel inequality, poverty, insecurity, crime, and xenophobia. Addressing rising disparities within and among countries is seen as a requirement for sustainable development. 

Because inequality tramples the inherent and inalienable dignity of all human beings, it is crucial to shift the prevailing development paradigm to integral human development. Integral human development combats inequality through the inclusion of every individual in society in its social, political, and economic policies. 

Income inequality – the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else – is one of the most persistent challenges in the fight to eradicate poverty. According to new research by Oxfam International, the world’s 26 richest people own the same wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest half of humanity. The report also said women and girls are the hardest hit by rising inequality, as men own 50 percent more of the total global wealth and control 86 percent of corporations. 

The 2018 World Inequality Report found that the wealthiest 1 percent of humanity acquired 27 percent of the world’s income between 1980 and 2016 – more than twice the rate of the bottom 50 percent, who acquired only 12 percent. This has resulted in a steady decline of public capital and stagnation among the global 50 percent poorest while private equity continued to increase. Various analyses by experts shows that these gaps are brought on by the dominance of neoliberal policies, the speed of technological change, weak global and national tax policies, the erosion of labor rights, and the corporate control of political processes and state institutions. 

Neoliberal policies such as austerity measures and budget cuts in the social sectors hit women the hardest. In his independent expert statement to the UN General Assembly last October, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsk said, “Women carry most of the burden of austerity measures, fiscal consolidation and other economic reform policies. These measures, instead of promoting women’s human rights, add to existing structural inequality, and further entrench discrimination against women.” 

In July, the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development will review Sustainable Development Goal 10 (SDG 10): “Reduce inequality within and among countries.” One of the targets for SDG 10 is for countries to adopt fiscal, wage and social protection policies that progressively achieve greater equality. Two commissions of the United Nations, the Commission on Social Development (CSocD57) and the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63) have chosen this important target as a priority theme, as has the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Fourth Financing for Development Forum. 

Policies on fiscal, wage and social protection offer a systematic approach to lessen inequalities within countries and among countries and align with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’s ambitious principle to “leave no one behind.” In particular, social protection is key to sustained inclusive economic and social development, for individuals, communities and nations. In February, the UN relaunched the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection to increase the number of countries that provide Universal Social Protection (USP). Some examples of good practices towards USP are universal old age and disability pensions by Timor Leste, China, South Africa; cash transfers by Brazil, Philippines and Colombia; and unemployment benefits by France, Malaysia and Romania. 

The 57th Session of the Commission on Social Development submitted a resolution to ECOSOC on tax and wage reform to combat inequality within countries. The resolution also encourages developed countries to fulfill their development assistance commitments as a means to reduce inequality among nations.

Photo: A girl receives services at Our Lady of Victory Youth Training Center, founded by Maryknoll Sister Cecilia Woods, MD, in the Philippines in 1983. The center promotes social inclusion for people with disabilities. Photo by M. Misolas, MM.

UN conference on women takes on gender inequality

Maryknoll Sister Marvie Misolas reports on the 63rd UN conference on women. This article was published in the May-June 2019 issue of NewsNotes. 

The achievements of women were celebrated around the world on International Women’s Day on March 8 with this year’s theme, “Think equal, build smart, innovate for change.” The same theme was adopted for the 63rd UN Conference of the Commission for the Status of Women (CSW63), held in New York over the course of 11 days, starting on March 11. 

Approximately 10,000 people from around the world came to the annual UN conference on women to share and learn ways to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, in the areas of social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure. 

One of the keynote speakers, Kiara Nirghin, a student from drought-stricken South Africa who famously won the 2016 Google Science Fair at age 16 for her use of orange peels and avocados to invent a super-absorbent material that retains water in the soil, spoke about the importance of supportive family and economic and educational opportunities in her career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). She urged governments to prioritize and step up STEM education for girls to break down barriers and close gaps in gender equality. 

Education is a tool to end gender inequality and an example of sustainable infrastructure. Tragically, 60 million girls still lack access to education. 

UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka spoke about the power and potential of women as innovators. “Women are not simply consumers of prescribed solutions—they also design solutions for the whole of society.” By intentionally including women in innovation, we ensure that solutions are appropriate. 

On March 12, President of the General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa hosted a high-level event on ‘Women in Power’ to identify barriers that hinder women’s political participation and leadership, and to share best practices that can accelerate women’s empowerment in this area. Espinosa shared some disturbing statistics: “90 percent of heads of state and government are men, as are 76 percent of members of parliament. The vast majority of countries have never been governed by a woman: this is the same in all regions of the world.”

If this trend continues, Espinosa said, it will take 107 years to reach parity. “But what makes the situation even more serious is that, only 4 years ago, in 2015, the projection was that this gap would be closed in 30 years. We are clearly facing a regression and this event today is the key to revert the situation.”

Women in power tend to promote economic stability, institutional strength and reform of laws. Women have a central role in solving conflicts and consolidating peace, Espinosa said. “In fact, when women participate in a peace negotiation, the possibilities for it to last more than fifteen years increases 35 percent,” she noted.

Women also have a vital role to play in social protection systems. According to International Labor Union’s Christine Behrendt, “there are still 4 billion people on the planet or 55 percent, who are not covered by any kind of social protection.” Conferencees discussed a variety of solutions, including universal basic income, microfinance, universal social pension. 

Member states commited to 10 recommendations:
•    Invest in social protection, public services and sustainable infrastructure to support the productivity of women’s work, including in the informal economy;
•    Ensure that women’s access to social protection, public services and sustainable infrastructure is not undermined by budget cuts and austerity measures;
•    Build on multilateral commitments to gender equality, to strengthen access to social protection, public services and infrastructure for all women and girls;
•    Recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and domestic work by ensuring access to social protection for unpaid caregivers of all ages;
•    Scale up investment in quality public care services that are affordable and gender-responsive;
•    Identify and remove barriers to women’s and girls’ access to public services;
•    Guarantee the availability of safe, affordable drinking water and sanitation, including for menstrual hygiene, in homes, schools, refugee camps and other public places;
•    Ensure that transport policies and planning are sustainable, accessible, affordable, safe and gender-responsive, and adaptable to be used by persons with disabilities and older persons;
•    Promote the full and equal participation and leadership of women and women’s organizations in policy dialogues and decision-making relating to social protection systems, public services and sustainable infrastructure;
•    Strongly condemn the impunity and lack of accountability rooted in historical and structural inequality that accompanies pervasive violence against women.

United Nations: Forests and climate change

The global community gathered at the United Nations in New York in May to take action on behalf of the world’s forests. The following article was published in the July-August 2019 issue of NewsNotes.

The 14th session of UN Forum on Forests (UNFF14) took stock of progress in implementing the UN Strategic Plan for Forests, which provides a global framework for sustainably managing all types of forests and trees, halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation, and increasing forest area by 2030.

With an estimated 1.6 billion people – or one quarter of the overall population – dependent on forests for subsistence, livelihood, jobs and income, forests are essential for human well-being, and play a vital role in promoting economic growth. Forests are also increasingly important to combat climate change. 

“Forests have an important role to play in both climate change mitigation and adaptation,” the UNFF14 Panel Concept Notes state. “Forests constitute a vital part of the carbon cycle, absorbing, removing, recycling and storing large amounts of carbon dioxide through trees, understory vegetation and soils. Wood products also store or ‘fix’ significant amounts of carbon. The resilience and adaptive capacity of all types of forests helps reduce the risks of natural disasters and climate change.”

Ministers from Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, EU, and others, shared their best practices, challenges and gaps in forest-based solutions to climate change. Civil society organizations representing numerous stakeholders, including scientific and technological communities, small forest landowners and farmers, women, indigenous people, etc., were welcome to share their best practices as well. 

During the upcoming UN General Assembly in September, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will convene a Climate Summit in which “nature-based solutions” to climate change will be discussed. Many of these solutions focus on forests and life on the land. 

During discussions at the UN Forum on Forests, participants noted that forests play a vital role in limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change as examined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report. Forests are essential for their carbon sequestration or carbon dioxide removal. 

Participants noted that the links between climate and forests need to be addressed in international, national and sub-national policymaking. Climate change related threats to forests include increased drought, fire, wind, flooding, erosion, and pests and disease. Sound policymaking needs to be science and evidence-based and recognize the role forest ecosystems play in climate change adaptation and mitigation. In order for policy to be effective, broader issues of land use, energy, sustainable production and consumption, means of implementation and governance, need to be addressed. 

It is essential that communities have agency in the development and implementation of forest programs and that women are included. For example, in Antipolo, a city east of Manila, in the Philippines, women participate in the implementation and management of reforestation and afforestation programs that are part of the community-based watershed conservation project in an area known as the Marikina Watershed Protected Landscape. The programs aim to address rural and indigenous livelihood, water security, disaster risk reduction and nature-based resilience. 

Women in the community have taken leadership roles in collecting seeds/wildlings, setting up seedling nurseries, participating in government meetings and capacity building workshops, planting and monitoring and selling seedlings to the government. Women and men in the community have organized small-scale coop stores that sell necessities such as rice, oil, sugar and vegetables from their common garden. During meetings, men and women share how their lives have been impacted and changed, no longer cutting trees to make a livelihood and instead protecting the trees and forest. Women and men in the community have become the agents of climate adaptation and resilience.

Published in Newsnotes:  https://maryknollogc.org/article/united-nations-forests-and-climate-change

What Matters to God?

Reflection on the readings of the 18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

What Matters to God?  

I will reflect on three vignettes from the readings:  “All things are vanity!”,  “Christ is all and in all”, and  “one’s life does not consist of possessions”.

In his book, Jesus, An Historical Approximation, Spanish theologian and scripture scholar Jose Pagola writes, “For those who seek God’s will, the important thing is not to read laws written on stone tables, but to discover the requirements of love in people’s lives.  There are no sacred places in which we can encounter God alone; we cannot worship God in the temple and neglect those who suffer; love of God becomes lie when neighbor is excluded.  What goes against love, goes against God.”  In my context of understanding, “neighbor” does not only mean humans, it includes the whole of creation~ the Earth and all its inhabitants.

The writer of Luke 11:21 attributed to Jesus explaining ‘what matters to God.”  That life is much bigger than material possessions,   “that one’s life does not consist only of possessions,” and that one must “guard against greed.”  What matters to God is the primacy of love.  The love of God and neighbor is the essence of the law.  Love of God comes first, all other things are vanity!  For Jesus, seeking God’s will, trusting in the forgiving love, to be in relationship with God, to accept God’s love is primal.  Then acknowledging Love of God in us, like a flame, must spread.  Love of God in us is consummated into solidarity with those who suffer and those excluded in the reign of God, it is, as Pagola wrote, “precisely in our love of neighbor that we show the truth of our love for God” (p.249).  Love of God is manifested in our awe to life itself, in the magnificence of God’s creation, and to our refusal to the evil of greed that destroys life itself---humans and the planet. 

The second reading ends with the phrase, “Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3: 11).  Saint Paul speaks of the “putting on the new self in Christ”, “who is being renewed in the knowledge of the image of creator.”  These words signify .Saint Paul understands of a new paradigm, a shift in the current understanding of one’s relationship in the light of one’s relationship with Jesus the Christ.  If Christ is the arrow of creation, being one with Christ means evolving into being like Christ. Theologian Ursula King wrote about Teilhard de Chardin’s Soul of the World which refers Jesus Christ as “universal Christ” whom he understands as the “organic center of the universe,” of all physical and spiritual growth, of evolution.  This meant, in the words of theologian Beatrice Bruteau that “God is making the world by means of evolution.  God is self-expressing and self-realizing in evolution. The creativity that makes the world is built into the world as its own essence. And in this self-creating world there is gradually growing the most Godlike capacity, consciousness. And with humans, consciousness is aware of the fact that it is conscious.”  Hence, Christ is all and in all. 

The Gospel reminds us of praxis of the consciousness that we are a new being in Christ, that talents and wealth are important but not the essence of our humanity, “to take care to guard against all greed.”  Physical wealth and richness is a sign of positive development but it must be for the service of those who are still suffering and those who are excluded, those left furthest behind in the development.  Unfortunately, national and corporate greed has created “development apartheid” in our world which is destroying people’s lives, nature itself and the life-support systems in the planet.  The Earth’s sixth mass extinction is well along the way leaving uncertain pathways of existence for the next generations.  We must practice our cosmic consciousness, our Christ consciousness:  we must refuse and fight all greed. 

Interview by Chris Herlinger for Global Sisters Report

http://www.globalsistersreport.org/news/migration/un-moves-forward-compacts-manage-migration-refugees-55171

Published in Newsnotes

https://maryknollogc.org/article/crafting-global-compact-migration%C2%A0

Crafting the Global Compact for Migration 

UN member states are scheduled to hold their last round of negotiations for the Global Compact for Migration July 9-13 with the goal of producing a final draft document for adoption at the International Migration Conference in Morocco in December. The following article was published in the July-August 2018 issue of NewsNotes.

Since the United Nations General Assembly hosted the first-ever Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York in 2016, where 193 UN member states adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, there have been five rounds of negotiations for a final draft of a Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration. Member states are scheduled to adopt the compact at the UN’s intergovernmental conference on migration in Morocco on December 10 and 11. 

The summit in 2016 was a historic event, with countries and civil society cooperating at the highest level of governance to improve the conditions of the estimated 244 million migrants and 21 million refugees worldwide. The resulting declaration committed member states and civil society to a two-year process of negotiations to create and adopt two global compacts: a Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and a Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration (GCM). 

The purpose of both compacts is the establishment of a framework for more migration options, lower cost and greater security, respect for human rights, and access to justice when life and human rights are violated. Juan José Gómez Camacho, Permanent Representative of Mexico, and Jürg Lauber, Permanent Representative of Switzerland, have been leading the negotiations.

Negotiations have been challenging. Shadowing the momentum to implement the objectives of the New York Declaration are the growing political scape-goating of migrants and the growing racism and xenophobia worldwide. Also, some countries oppose the inclusion of the term ‘human rights.’ The United States pulled out completely in December, claiming the compact could undermine the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.  

The text of the compact highlights its “360-degree” vision of migration, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive approach that addresses benefits as well as risks and challenges, and covers countries of origin, transit, destination and return. Member states acknowledge their shared responsibilities “to address each other’s needs and concerns over migration, and an overarching obligation to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of all migrants, regardless of their migration status, while promoting the security and prosperity of all our communities.”

The majority of the document consists of a cooperative framework made up of 23 objectives, each with an associated commitment and set of policy options and best practices. The 23rd and final objective, ‘Strengthen international cooperation and global partnerships for safe, orderly and regular migration,’ was included after the fourth round of negotiations, in May. This new, stand-alone objective was proposed by Comoros, an island nation off the coast of East Africa, for the African Group. The proposal was countered by Austria, representing 27 European Union states which prefer incorporating elements of the African Group proposal into Objective 2 (‘minimize the adverse drivers and structural factors that compel people to leave their country of origin’).

The fourth round of negotiations resulted in substantial revisions of all the objectives. It also included updates in the sections on implementation and follow-up and review to reflect the ongoing UN systems review. 

NGOs have submitted statements and oral interventions on the text for both compacts at informal interactive multi-stakeholder hearings. One of the concerns civil society has raised for further discussion in the GCR is the possible omission of protections for children, women, and climate and environmental migrants. 

Another concern is disagreement among states over the inclusion of the principle of “non-refoulement.” This principle ensures individuals or groups the right not to be forcibly sent back to the country of origin. The majority of the countries insist on including the term “state sovereignty” to maintain a security approach on this issue. Likewise, some of these countries also insist on distinguishing between regular and irregular migrants, which conflicts with the principle of inherent human dignity and human rights of all migrants promoted by other states. Yet another concern is the need to address climate and environmental migrants in both compacts. 

In one of her oral interventions Maryknoll Sister Marvie Misolas, a Maryknoll representative at the UN, addressed the need to highlight a value shared by every faith and culture: the practice of hospitality and welcoming others, to counteract the seemingly negative view of migration. The beautiful description of a French scholar, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt(1704-1779), that says, “Hospitality is the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity,” is a gentle reminder of our goodness beyond ourselves.

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Social justice

Migrants

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