Former Irish Attorney General, Peter Sutherland, in his capacity as UN special representative for international migration, will have an audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Friday morning.
Mr Sutherland, who is in Rome partly on a fact finding mission about the conditions for migrants arriving in Italy, is likely to make common ground with the Pope on the need for the international community to show greater solidarity when dealing with the global problem of migration.
Pope Francis has consistently highlighted the plight of migrants in recent years. His first official visit outside the Vatican in 2013 was to the Italian mediterranean island of Lampedusa through which many migrants travelling to Europe pass.
In writings such as his Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” or last week’s encyclical, “Laudato Si”, Pope Francis has indicated that his pontificate is one marked by a preferential option for the poor and the displaced.
At a time when the European Union has struggled to define an EU-wide common line in relation to migrant quotas, Mr Sutherland and the Pope are likely to agree on the perception that some major EU countries have abanadoned solidarity in the face of an ever-burgeoning crisis. Writing on the world news site, “Project Syndicate” this week, Mr. Sutherland said:
“Last week, the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) reported that the number of refugees worldwide surged by more than 20 per cent last year, to 19.5 million, with the total number of people displaced by conflict reaching a post-World War II high of nearly 60 million. Each day last year, more than 40,000 people, on average, were forced to flee their homes – up from about 20,000 in 2012 and 10,000 in 2010... Despite this increase in the scale and rate of displacement, the international system’s capacity to cope with refugees has barely improved at all.”
Mr Sutherland also suggests that the EU’s current military-based approach to the migration crisis, via attempts to disrupt human trafficking in the Mediterranean, is deeply flawed. Not only does it risk “criminalising” migrants and asylum seekers in the eyes of European public opinion but also, in the meantime, the smugglers can quickly and easily change their routes, moving towards Greece from Turkey and Egypt.
Mr Sutherland also bemoans the “inexplicably strong resistance” encountered by the European Commission’s “modest proposal” to share responsibility for processing asylum applications and resettling refugees – rather than leaving Greece and Italy solely responsible.