I am travelling to New York in a couple of days with the Prime Minister of Sweden, the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate at the UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants on 19 September. Together with our colleagues from around the world, we are entrusted with a certainly daunting task: finding innovative and sustainable solutions for the sixty-five million refugees and internally displaced people around the world. At the same time creating the conditions for safe, regular and orderly migration for the 244 million international migrants in the world. In 2018 we are to present our results.
I am convinced we can succeed. We need to succeed. For the countries affected, for countries hosting refugees, but most of all for the people in the midst of the crisis and those fleeing from it. The need for international co-operation, responsibility-sharing and solidarity is today greater than ever before.
Approaching 2018, I believe we need to focus on five areas in order to deliver on our task at hand:
First, we need solutions to the sixty-five million refugees and displaced people based on solidarity and responsibility sharing.
Together we need to support first countries of asylum, increase co-ordination at the international level and more timely respond to persons in need of protection. This is a responsibility that can be shouldered in various ways. One example is providing secure and legal options, such as resettlement in cooperation with UNHCR, for people in need of international protection.
Second, we need to do more to address the root causes of forced migration. People need to migrate out of choice, not out of necessity.
This includes providing humanitarian assistance as well as long-term development cooperation in host and neighbouring countries. Sustained political leadership and dialogue to prevent and end conflicts and thereby address root causes of forced displacement is also important. Efforts need to be coupled with long-term tackling of the root causes of forced displacement in order to effectively manage forced movement.
Third, we need to provide opportunities for legal migration while ensuring that migrants are not exploited.
Labour migration, for example, offers opportunities for economic development and acquisition of knowledge and skills. However, this is only possible if migrants receive fair terms of employment. We need to prevent labour exploitation and discrimination of migrants as well as step up our efforts to address corrupt and unethical recruitment practices. Furthermore, decent working conditions are key to sustainable business practices.
Fourth, we need a long-term strategy to harness the positive effects of migration on development.
It is a great success that migration is included in a comprehensive manner in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. We now need to deliver on our commitments. The commitment to facilitate orderly, safe, regulated and responsible migration and movement of people gives support for humane, sustainable and integrated migration policies where relevant policy areas interact. We further need to deliver on our commitments to lower the transfer costs of remittances, increase cooperation on access to and portability of earned benefits, enhance the recognition of foreign qualifications, lower the costs of recruitment for migrants and combat unscrupulous recruiters. Migration in the 2030 Agenda and Addis Ababa Action Agenda will help to better integrate migration into development policy. It will also contribute to foster collaboration between multilateral actors as international organizations with related mandates are encouraged to consider the development effects of migration. We are already seeing this happen.
Fifth, we have to improve the international governance of migration.
The UN needs to take a comprehensive approach to migration issues. We have taken a crucial step by including the International Organization for Migration, IOM, in the UN system. IOM has great knowledge on migration and long experience of practical work on migration in all its parts. Member States and the UN system now have to contribute to IOM's successful integration into the UN system. Only then can IOM contribute to better coordination within the UN system as well as strengthen its roles of knowledge generation and providing policy relevant advice on migration. The UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for International Migration, Peter Sutherland, will have a central role in this work.
Improved international governance of migration also requires strengthened cooperation between States. Here, the Global Forum on Migration and Development, the GFMD, has contributed enormously by creating greater trust between countries around the world.
Sweden is taking its commitment to refugees and migrants seriously:
Sweden is ranked as the number seven largest humanitarian donor and the number one donor of non-ear marked financial a humanitarian financing which is adequate, flexible, predictable and consistent, to enable host countries and communities to respond both to the immediate humanitarian needs and to their longer-term development needs.
Sweden actively promotes the strengthening of bi-lateral partnerships between other third other countries and major refugee host countries, with a view to pursue long-term development co-operations inspired by the Swedish Syria Strategy.
Resettlement is and has been a priority for Sweden for many years. We are now committed to expand the Swedish resettlement programme to 5 000 annual places before the end of 2018. We strive to make refugee resettlement a high priority on the EU- as well as on the international agenda and encourage states to contribute and pledge their fair share.
Sweden has a long-standing commitment to creating dialogue and cooperation on migration at the global level. Already in 2003, we co-chaired the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM). We also chaired the Global forum on migration and development, GFMD, 2013-14.
Sweden has one of the world's most open labour migration systems. To ensure that labour migrants receive fair terms of employment, the Swedish Government has appointed a commission of inquiry to propose measures to strengthen labor migrants' rights in the labor market. Sweden also supports the development of a global certification system for ethical recruitment (IRIS) and the creation of a website to compare transfer costs of remittances from Sweden.
Through the Swedish Prime Minister's initiative Global Deal, which promotes workers' rights and social dialogue, Sweden aims to step up engagement in order to make globalisation work for everyone, including migrants.
This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post to mark the occasion of two critical conferences at the UN on the Refugee and Migrant crisis: the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants (Sept. 19th, a UN conference) and the Leaders Summit on Refugees (Sept. 20th, hosted by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, at the UN). To see all the posts in the series, visit here. To follow the conversation on Twitter, see #UN4RefugeesMigrants.