A vigil for Ferguson at McGill University in Montreal in November 2014. Credit: Gerry Lauzon / Flickr Creative Commons CC BY 2.0.

By Phoebe Braithwaite
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 2016 (IPS)

Stressing the enduring relationship between injuries inflicted by slavery and contemporary injustices, a UN committee has recently issued a strongly-worded call for reparations for black U.S. Americans.

“A systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today,” said the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, in a report released in August.

So far this year 212 black people have been killed by police in the United States, according to statistics collected by The Guardian. This is almost a quarter of the total 883 people killed by police in 2016, despite the fact that only 14.4 percent of US Americans are of African descent.

While only 6.5% of the US population are African American men, they constitute 40.2% of prison populations, according to Ana DuVernay’s recent film 13TH. While 1 in 17 white men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated.

The group’s report, which focuses especially on police brutality against black Americans as “reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” makes 35 diverse recommendations, from establishing sovereign human rights commissions to the reinstatement of voting rights of former felons.

Yet critics question whether the liberal human rights paradigm can adequately address this kind of cruelty and oppression, originating as it does in 20th century Europe, where fascism had recently taken root, and in light of Europe’s own role in creating and perpetuating racial injustice.

“In the era of the Atlantic slave trade,” says Andrew Johnson, Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, “new notions of difference – absolute, racial notions of difference – were used to define, describe, and justify the political economy of slavery”, articulating the centrality of racism in capitalist exploitation.

Demands for reparations have been largely ignored in the political mainstream. A bill, HR-40, introduced in 1989 to establish a commission examining the “fundamental injustice, cruelty” and brutality of slavery has gained little traction – though the UN committee recommends its passage through Congress. Last year, then-presidential candidate democratic socialist Bernie Sanders dismissed the question of reparations saying that it wouldn’t get through Congress and would be “too divisive”.

Noting Sanders’ determination to push the boat out on issues of class, celebrated writer and proponent of reparations Ta-Nehisi Coates deplored this lack of political imagination: “I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualising the former we can’t lose sight of the latter,” Coates said.

He urged that class-based solutions are inappropriate to address “racial plunder” – borne out by the fact that the median income for African American households ($36,898) is almost half their white counterparts ($62,950). The median value of total assets of black families, $4,900, versus white families, $97,000, reveals an even starker difference.

Movement for Black Lives

The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of over 50 black-led organisations, has set out five key requests which would begin to restore what has been being stolen “since the time that the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa,” in the words of Black Panther Angela Davis.

They focus especially on education, a particular site of harm since it was made illegal to teach enslaved people to read, a law which began in South Carolina in 1740 and was punishable by death in Louisiana. Since then, owing to redlining policies and explicit disinvestment in primarily-black schools, African Americans have continued to suffer from worse educational opportunities, with black students expelled at three times the rate of white students.

“You’re more likely to walk into your hallway and interact with a police officer – in a school – than a guidance counselor,” Kesi Foster, Coordinator at the Urban Youth Collaborative, and contributor to the policy recommendations for the Movement for Black Lives’ demand for reparations, told IPS, saying that in New York, there is one guidance counselor for every 322 students, but a police officer for every 192 students.

These officers are more prevalent in schools with metal detectors, which are usually primarily non-white. Describing what is often called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, Foster says that reparative justice could begin by defunding the COPS programme which stations police in schools in line with the perception that black and brown males are “inherently dangerous”.

Reparations

After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, people who were formerly enslaved were given forty acres of tillable land – and, sometimes a mule. But after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination the same year, his successor Andrew Johnson reversed Lincoln’s directive for redistribution.

Calls for reparations have a long history proceeding from this date, and have tended to focus on material restitution, which makes the Movement for Black Lives’ emphasis on education salient. “Not only is there no curriculum recognition about the real history of our country… but there’s also no cultural recognition,” Foster says. “In Germany and other places… where really atrocious things have taken place, there are markers.”

They call for “mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs.”

It is clear that fulsome reparations for the continued atrocities perpetrated against people of African descent are not about to be freely given simply because whites are made to see the error of their ways. In the words of Mariame Kaba, organiser, educator and founder of Project NIA, speaking at a recent conference on the disproportionate effect the war on drugs has had on black communities, “the system can’t indict itself. You can’t think that the system that is killing you is going to save you.”

Kaba, who helped in the fight for plaintiffs’ justice in the Burge torture trials, discussed the extensive public apology that was eventually won by some of those Burge tortured, and the history’s inclusion in Chicago’s curriculums, demonstrating the essential role honest expressions of responsibility can play in processes of healing for black communities who have been brutalised by the state.

But the Movement’s foremost demand is for the “full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education” in its every form, including the “retroactive forgiveness of student loans”.

Professor Harold McDougall, who teaches law at Howard University, has, among many others, argued for the necessity of black-only education. McDougall would like to see Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), like Howard, funded to set up “Reparations Academies” for the descendents of people who were “damaged by educational racism”. This is a practical measure as much as it compounds Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s view that “group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength”.

McDougall, like others in this struggle, wears two hats: “you have to be able to firmly advance your point of view in the governance process, but even at that time to have your feet firmly grounded in the community, so that the broad-base of the population is continually informing your sense of what needs to be done,” he told IPS.

“When this is going to happen is not something we’re necessarily wrestling with,” Foster says. “For me, it’s more important [to ask]… how does this struggle lead us forward in a way that’s actually transformational, and that’s actually trying to significantly change the material conditions that black people are living under, because of the way that the system was set up, which is to basically profit off of our bodies, profit off our labour, and then give nothing back to us,” citing Chicago’s victory as an example.

Taking a long view, McDougall says that “it’s important to look at these struggles as multi-generational – the problems were not created in a generation. It is unlikely, although not impossible, that they will be solved in your lifetime, so what you do is you roll the ball forward for as long as you can.”

Flint water tower. Credit: George Thomas / Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Phoebe Braithwaite
NEW YORK, Oct 16 2016 (IPS)

When the water in Flint, Michigan was found to be corroding cars at a General Motors’ (GM) factory, government officials agreed to change the factory’s water source, yet the same water source continued to poison the residents of Flint for another year.

From 17 to 20 October governments will meet in Quito, Ecuador, for HABITAT III, the UN’s most important conference about cities, which only occurs once every 20 years. HABITAT III looks to inaugurate a new urban agenda and set down goals about how cities can and should be responsible for the wellbeing of their inhabitants.

Flint’s ongoing crisis demonstrates some of the challenges cities face, all the more important due to extensive urbanisation, which means that half the world’s population now lives in cities. Judging by the example of Flint, much more can be done to hold state officials to account, and protect and support the most vulnerable in society, as corporations become more powerful.

In October 2014, six months after the crisis in Flint had begun, GM were given permission by the city’s emergency manager, appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, to reconnect their water to Detroit’s water source, Lake Huron, at a cost of $440,000. According to reporting by Democracy Now!, GM also took all the water fountains out of the plant, indicating they knew it was not fit for human consumption.

All over the world, the poorest pay the most for water, and 650 million people – almost 1 in 10 – don’t have easy access to clean water. Many of these people spend half their daily income on informal water supplies, while those connected to formal water sources pay a fraction of this amount, according to a report published this year by Water Aid. It cites Papua New Guinea as a salient example, where 60% of the population lives without access to clean water, and water costs, on average, 54% of an already economically deprived person’s salary.

But the United States is the richest country in the world, and the web of factors which have brought about this crisis did so because – in America as elsewhere – poor lives matter less than richer ones. “If this had happened in a more well-to-do or more economically successful or vibrant area, it is arguable that the problem would not have become as bad as it was permitted to become… their voice was more easily ignored,” lawyer Kenneth Stern, Chief Executive of Stern Law PLLC, who has represented many Flint residents affected by the crisis, told IPS.

“It’s shameful. I’m not proud as an American to say that to you. It embarrasses me, quite frankly… You can’t treat these people like that,” Stern said.

“It is truly sad that money is more important than the welfare of the people,” Lorei Graham, a Flint resident who to this day deals with chronic rashes and hair loss as a result of ongoing contact with Flint water, told IPS. Graham has two jobs, one in a department store, another for a merchandising agency. She used to work in a gas station, where customers would cringe at the sight of her skin, thinking she was contagious, an experience she says wore her down.

In East Chicago’s West Calumet Housing Complex, 1,100 residents were recently forced to move after extraordinary levels of lead were found in their soil, showing that the public health crisis in Flint is by no means a lone example of negligence towards poor, primarily black citizens. There are thought to be comparable problems with plumbing in at least 19 states.

“Really, humans matter. Life matters,” said Flint resident Clarissa Camez to IPS. “And when you put profits before people, profits before the environment, profits before the good of all, this is what you end up with.”

What happened in Flint

All of Flint’s 98,310 residents have been exposed to the water’s various toxins. A public health crisis of enormous proportions has afflicted the city: Legionnaire’s Disease, a virulent form of pneumonia caused by bacteria that can multiply in certain water systems, has so far killed 10 of the 87 people it affected. Though data is scarce, the city’s 8-9000 children under six have been exposed to lead poisoning, which leads to brain damage, developmental disorders, and sudden behavioral change. It has also been linked to violent behaviour later in life.

Graham has noticed changes of these kinds in her own grandchildren. Her 8-year-old granddaughter, who used to be a good student, is now struggling in school. Her grandson, who is even younger, is no longer the obedient kid he once was, and she says that both children are far slower to respond to requests. These reports are incredibly common, and doctors are clear that no level of lead exposure is safe for developing brains.

About 57 percent of Flint’s inhabitants are black, and 41.6 percent of the city lives below the poverty line. There is nothing accidental about the fact that Flint’s primarily black population experiences increased poverty, while its more affluent suburbs are still substantially white: beginning in the 1930s, racist mortgage redlining policies were explicitly and systematically designed to stop black people from buying homes and building wealth, and left them more vulnerable to extortion through contracts that overvalued homes, harshly punished them for missing payments and never entitled them to own those houses.

These policies enabled white residents to move out when GM began to de-industrialise and jobs began to be cut in the 1940s, as the company sought cheaper labour according to the whims of the global economy. This trapped black people in increasingly economically deprived areas, and lay the groundwork for the poverty that persists in Flint today, a shell of the headquartered industrial town General Motors claimed it as in 1908.

“The Federal Housing Administration, along with the Homeowners Loan Corporation, mapped out cities across the country and determined which areas of the metropolis were safe for federally backed mortgages,” Andrew Highsmith, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Demolition Means Progress, a history of inequality and metropolitan development in Flint, told IPS. “Effectively, this enabled millions of white Americans to leave cities like Flint or Los Angeles and move to racially segregated suburbs with federal subsidies.”

Alongside the movement of whites into the suburbs, a drastic restructuring of state revenue-sharing occurred between 1998 and 2012, reducing Flint’s income from $900 million to $215 million, and significantly diminishing its tax base. This is led to a chronic lack of investment in public services. The same impulses underlay initial plans to build a cost-saving pipeline and the corresponding switch from Lake Huron to Flint River water.

Cutting Flint’s money, Highsmith says, has been “part of this broader shift towards austerity,” “this belt-tightening at all levels of government”. But, reflecting the same pattern of prioritising private investments over basic social provisions, in this topsy-turvy world, enormous tax subsidies were created to attract private investment, such as the millions film studios were offered to set up in Michigan. GM saves an undisclosed amount in capped tax credits, in return for which the company has made a deal with Governor Snyder that it should spend a billion on public investment.

Today

This is more than just inconvenient, he stresses. It is an extraordinary cost to bear over years – and Graham, like many other Flint residents, is still being charged for water that has poisoned her and continues to cause them severe health problems There have been recent reports of shigellosis in Flint, a bacterial disease that spreads from people not washing their hands.

There are also a vast number of problems caused by the crisis for which it is impossible to demonstrate a direct causal connection. Camez suffers from a chronic auto-immune disorder, as well as accompanying psychiatric effects. Both have been aggravated by the crisis – she experiences tingling in her hands and feet, she has pain in her joints and her hair falls out. All of the pre-existing difficulties in her life have been exacerbated by the crisis, and she conveys her sense of betrayal that what is causing all the ruin in Flint is “something that is necessary for life”.

“People say, ‘why is it so important?’ Well, why is it so important that you have something that’s necessary for the sustenance and maintenance of life? You know, you can do without food for a few days, but you should really have water every day. It would help if it was clean.”

The International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas.

By Phoebe Braithwaite
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2016 (IPS)

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will pay more attention to crimes of environmental destruction and land-grabs, according to a new policy paper published by the court.

This may see business executives and government officials in cahoots to exploit natural resources prosecuted for crimes that displace millions. 38.9 billion hectares – an area the size of Germany – has been leased to investors in resource-rich but cash-poor countries since 2000, Alice Harrison, Director of Communications at Global Witness, told IPS.

“It is an important acknowledgement that crimes against humanity are not exclusively perpetrated by warlords in so-called failed states, they can also be linked back to company directors in our financial capitals,” she said. The ICC has been criticised since it was set up in 2002 for convicting too few people and being too expensive. African leaders have also accused the courts of unfairly targeting their continent.

According to the policy paper, the court will pay special attention to crimes committed in light of “the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land” in the selection of cases. The proposal does not increase the Hague-based court’s mandate, established by the Rome Statute in 1998 to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This has been hailed as a landmark shift in international criminal law that could reshape the way business is done in poorer countries. Global Witness have said that it shows the ICC adapting to the “modern dynamics of conflict,” to violations and displacements which happen in times of peace.

There are hopes that this change in policy signals good news for hundreds of thousands of victims of land grabbing in Cambodia, ten of whom are represented by international criminal law firm Global Diligence LLP, and whose case is currently under review at the ICC.

“The government talks about poverty reduction, but what they are really trying to do is to get rid of the poor. They destroy us by taking our forested land, 70 percent of the population has to disappear, so that 30 percent can live on. Under Pol Pot we died quickly, but we kept our forests. Under the democratic system it is a slow, protracted death. There will be violence, because we do not want to die,” a Cambodian victim of land grabbing recounts.

Speaking to IPS, Richard Rogers, who lodged the case with the ICC, said this is an indication that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda “has accepted the argument of Global Diligence and others that the systemic crimes committed under the guise of ‘development’ are no less damaging to victims than many wartime atrocities – forced population displacement destroys entire communities and leads to massive suffering.”

“I feel very confident that the ICC Prosecutor will soon move forward with the case that I filed relating to the land grabbing and forcible evictions in Cambodia,” he said. “That case is a perfect test case for the new policy.”

But Senior Appeals Counsel at the ICC, Helen Brady, has disputed any connection between the two situations, saying that the Cambodian victims’ case and the policy document are “two completely separate things. We wrote a policy, and separately, we have under analysis in our office a preliminary examination going into the Cambodian [case],” she told IPS.

Brady, who also chaired the working group that came up with the policy document, stressed that the court’s policy on the selection of individual cases, which takes place after the decision to commence a full investigation into an overall series of crimes, is a distinct issue from whether the court decides to formally declare a preliminary examination into the Cambodian victims’ case, which will be determined by different means laid out in a policy document published in November 2013.

In fact, this earlier document already determines that cases where there is “social, economic and environmental damage inflicted on the affected communities” will be given special attention.

Yet it is clear that the recent announcement describes these kinds of environmental crime in more detail, even specifically mentioning “land grabbing” in its introduction. Paying heed to other major watchwords of supranational judicial bodies, it also refers to the increased vulnerability of victims instilled by terror, and of the trafficking of arms and persons.

Perhaps this isn’t the watershed moment environmental activists have been campaigning for, but it remains a promising step towards accountability for the victims of environmental crimes. “I think it’s highly important and it’s not just symbolic – it means something,” the ICC’s Helen Brady said.

Legal experts have played down the significance of the shift since the ICC’s mandate has not changed, with some saying this looks more like an attempt for the ICC to work with national judicial authorities in helping them to prosecute crimes of this kind, provided for in the paper’s seventh clause.

As it stands the ICC can only prosecute Rome Statute crimes if the perpetrator comes from one of the 124 countries that have ratified its statute, or if the UN refers a case. Three of the five members of the UN Security Council – the US, Russia and China – have not ratified the court’s statute and can veto crimes referred to it.

Nevertheless, as Rogers argues, should the Cambodian victims see a fair hearing, prosecution for environmental crimes would be entering new waters: “the impact of the new ICC focus can be enormous. Those who commit land grabbing and related crimes have a lot to lose – they tend to be government ministers and businessmen with reputations to protect. Therefore, they are far more likely to change their behavior than regular war criminals,” Rogers said.

In Cambodia, 10 percent of the country’s land has already been carved up among 230 companies. There are estimates that 770,000 people have been affected by land grabs in Cambodia since 2000, 6 percent of Cambodia’s total population.

“Chasing communities off their land and trashing the environment has become a common and accepted way of doing business,” Harrison said.

“More than three people a week – ordinary citizens – are murdered for defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness. These numbers are increasing. In 2015 we documented 185 deaths – by far the highest annual death toll on record.”

Women are disproportionately targeted in these killings, which were brought greater attention after Honduran activist Berta Caceres’ high profile murder in March.

Bertha Lutz at the San Francisco Conference, in 1945. UN Photo/Rosenberg.

By Phoebe Braithwaite
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 2016 (IPS)

It was little-known Brazilian delegate Bertha Lutz who led a band of female delegates responsible for inscribing the equal rights of women and men in the UN Charter at the San Francisco Conference on International Organisation in 1945.

“The mantle is falling off the shoulders of the Anglo-Saxons and…we [Latin American Women] shall have to do the next stage of battle for women,” Lutz wrote in her memoir, recalling the conference.

Researchers Elise Luhr Dietrichson and Fatima Sator of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) presented this forgotten history at a recent news conference at the United Nations, wishing to publicise the true history of women’s rights in the UN Charter.

“It’s not only about representing historical facts. It’s political; it’s about how history is presented,” Luhr Dietrichson told IPS. There is, she says, little recognition of the role of nations in the global south in establishing “global norms”.

Contrary to popular assumption, women’s rights in the charter were not achieved by Eleanor Roosevelt – this was not an American, nor a British, stipulation. It was, instead, a Latin American insistence: Lutz along with Minerva Bernadino from the Dominican Republic, and the Uruguayan Senator Isabel P. de Vidal, who insisted on the specific mention of “the equal rights of men and women” at the charter’s opening.

Lutz and those behind her were acting at a time when only 30 of the 50 countries represented at the conference had national voting rights for women. Thanks to their spirited determination, alongside support from participants in Mexico, Venezuela and Australia, she was successful in her demand to have women explicitly mentioned in Article 8, which states that men and women can participate equally in the UN system.

Australian representative Jessie Street “was very vocal, saying: ‘you need to state women specifically in the charter, or else they won’t have the same rights as men; you see this time and time again…’” explains Luhr Dietrichson. Among others in their number, Street’s and Lutz’s feminism enabled them to foresee that the rights of women would be sidelined if they were not explicitly accounted for – that it was not enough simply to enshrine the “rights of man,” as had been argued.

Lutz’ arguments were met with opposition from British and American representatives. Recalling the 1945 conference that brought the United Nations into being, Lutz described the American delegate Virginia Gildersleeve saying “she hoped I was not going to ask for anything for women in the charter since that would be a very vulgar thing to do,” trying to pre-empt any action in the name of women.

Gildersleeve rewrote a draft of the charter, omitting the specific mention of women. In the end, however, alongside Lutz and Bernadino, Gildersleeve and Wu Yi-fang, the Chinese delegate, did sign it as a whole. They were the only four women out of 850 total delegates to sign the seminal document.

A British representative, Labour Parliamentary secretary Ellen Wilkinson, assured Lutz that equality had already been achieved, saying that she had achieved a position on the King’s Privy Council. Lutz disagreed: “’I’m afraid not,’ I had to tell her, ‘it only means that you have arrived”. Such a discourse mirrors contemporary debate born out of Cheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, which celebrates individuals’ ambition and success, rather than taking a more global perspective on the systemic injustices women face.

“They were actively engaged in not fighting for gender equality… This is something that goes against everything we have been taught: that the West has been teaching us about feminism. But on this matter, on the charter, they were more than opposed,” Sator, who is from Algeria, told IPS.

“Again, it goes against everything we have been taught that the global south also has visionary ideas,” Sator said. “We only want these Latin American women to be acknowledged as much as we acknowledge Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Though Roosevelt was not involved in the creation of the charter, she became head of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1946 and was instrumental in drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Yet Western countries – including the United States, the United Kingdom and France – later worked to undermine that same declaration in the early 1950s.

As with the history of women’s rights in the UN charter, the role of countries of the global south in creating and protecting the human rights charter has been underestimated.

“It was very clear that Bertha Lutz and Minerva Bernadino they saw themselves as representing “backwards countries” – this was something they said themselves,” Luhr Dietrichson recounts. “They were so critical that these women from more [economically] advanced countries didn’t recognise where their own rights had come from.”

Speaking at the conference, Brazilian Ambassador Antonio Patriota conveyed that Lutz and this story are not at all well known even in Brazil, and welcomed this effort to share the history more widely. At the conference, Luhr Dietrichson emphasised that a sense of “ownership” can lend legitimacy, enabling the engagement and involvement of future generations.

This research is part of a wider effort to “rediscover the radical origins of the United Nations,” Professor Dan Plesch, Director at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, told IPS. It forms part of a wider academic project, UN History for the Future, which seeks to re-contextualise the UN, created not as “some liberal accessory” but “out of hard, realistic political necessity,” Plesch argues.

At a time when there have been widespread calls not only for a woman to finally lead the United Nations, but for a self-described feminist to be seen in the role, Sator and Luhr Dietrichson’s research is a reminder that we still have a long way to go in fulfilling the charter’s vision of equality.

Still, as Plesch asked, “if it had not been for Bertha Lutz and the work of the enlightened dictator (Getúlio Vargas) of Brazil at the time, where would gender equality be now?”

Border guards in Bangladeshrefusing entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Phoebe Braithwaite
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 14 2016 (IPS)

Next week’s landmark UN summit on refugees and migrants was supposed to help resettle one in ten refugees, instead UN member states have settled for vague gestures, including a campaign to end xenophobia.

Human rights organisations and humanitarian actors alike have expressed disappointment with an outcome document agreed upon by member states in advance of the summit, which falls short of creating a binding, comprehensive framework to protect migrants and refugees.

“If global leaders adopt a resolution with some nice language – but so lacking in concrete commitments it fails to make any real difference to the lives of those fleeing war and conflict – they are merely fiddling while Rome burns,” Richard Bennett, Head of Amnesty’s Office at the United Nations, told IPS.

They say that the UN’s richer member states are missing a crucial opportunity to tackle xenophobia and racism by actually resettling refugees within their own borders.

“When you actually speak to refugees, the men with Kalashnikovs are pushing them away, but the men in suits are running away,” Arvinn Gadgil Director of Partnerships and Policy at the Norwegian Refugee Council told IPS.

“There seemed to be an appetite from member states to actually find a mechanism for responsibility sharing. Now – perhaps naively – we thought that was true, and we are of course disappointed. That was the one key output from the summit that we now seem not to be able to get,” said Gadgil.

Gadgil described the talks as a “race to the bottom,” entailing “systematic risk-aversion” and overwhelming concern for national self-interest. “There is very little reason to be optimistic,” he said, deploring states’ negotiations, which, he says, were governed by the “lowest common denominator of shame.”

Revealing a process in which member states stripped back meaningful promises to vague re-affirmations of shared responsibility, Bennett said, “there’s this enormous crisis, and these diplomats sit in New York discussing words which may or may not even be implemented… there’s a huge gap between their rhetoric and the reality.”

Numbers of displaced people remain at unprecedented levels globally, higher than ever before in the UN’s history. With around 65 million people forced from their homes, one in every 113 people is now either a refugee, asylum seeker or internally displaced person. 21.3 million of these people are refugees; 51 percent of refugees are children.

Yet even a clause on the detention of children was considered too controversial by some member states.

Karen AbuZayd, Special Adviser on the summit, explained that the implementation of children’s right never to be detainedhad been extremely contentious for some states and amended to the principle “for children seldom, if ever, to be detained.”

In an effort to address the broad issues created by human mobility, the summit will focus on both refugees and migrants, though discussing them side-by-side has proven controversial since migration is a less settled area of international law. Internally displaced persons will not be discussed, though there are approximately 45 million people currently displaced within national borders.

Around 86 percent of refugees reside in low and middle-income countries, such as Lebanon, Jordan, Chad, Turkey, and Nauru, where Australia holds refugees, including children, in offshore detention.

Criticising those states “who are continuing to put up borders and walls,” Bennett said, “there is no trigger mechanism; there are no concrete, objective criteria for deciding how a country meets its fair share… It’s a kind of ad-hoc approach, based on largesse, of whether a country offers resettlement places or money or not.”

The outcome document says that “in many parts of the world we are witnessing, with great concern, increasingly xenophobic and racist responses to refugees and migrants” – as well as the increasing acceptability of such attitudes. Yet states themselves perpetuate these attitudes by refusing to welcome people from different countries, even when fleeing violence and persecution.

On Monday Amnesty criticised the G20 declaration calling for greater “burden-sharing” with regards to refugees, calling this “callous hypocrisy” given that many G20 countries actively blocked efforts to resettle refugees. Moreover, the term itself ‘burden-sharing’ explicitly views refugees negatively.

Migrants & refugees contribute greatly to host countries – spread the word ahead of #UN4RefgueesMigrants Summit! pic.twitter.com/NmKAlHWcBC

— United Nations (@UN) September 2, 2016

States, said Bennett, are “reluctant to set targets when it comes to taking and supporting refugees because there is a toxic narrative about migration and refugees which affects national politics. Another concern we have about the outcome document of the summit is that it moves in the direction of securitisation – of seeing the movement of people as a security issue, and not that refugees will make societies more diverse and actually stronger.”

Last week Angela Merkel’s party, which has consistently acted as a moral force by resettling refugees, and refusing to bow to the xenophobic electoral strategies of parties in many European countries, lost a local election to far-right populist party Alternative for Germany.

Without wishing to read too much into a single local election, said Gadgil, “this could potentially be a watershed moment in European politics, where we end up with the definitive rise of parties that are primarily motivated by xenophobic views of the world, and primarily motivated by the artificial portrayal of immigrants as essentially and only bad.”

Talks “Abstract, Academic Exercise”

September 2 2016 marked the one-year anniversary of the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose picture moved publics to sympathy last summer, helping to individualise suffering on an enormous scale.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was recently reported saying, “nobody is ever just a refugee,” emphasising the centrality of migration in human history at the UN’s World Humanitarian Day.

At the preliminary talks, however, Bennett said: “I didn’t really hear any countries give examples of actual refugee or migrant stories… for the states this seemed like an abstract, academic exercise.”

Narratives and public statements are doubtless indispensible tools in communicating every person’s humanity, but a more sustained level of attention is needed among policy-makers, who play a critical role in shaping public opinion, to bring about real change and uphold the rights and the dignity of refugees and migrants.

Speaking on Tuesday night in New York Médecins Sans Frontières’s Executive Director Jason Cone looked to the summit, saying, “ultimately it’s political leaders that have to step up and make these decisions… These are problems that are eminently solvable with the right resources directed towards them.”

The UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants will take place at UN headquarters in New York on September 19.

Hopes now turn to the Leaders Summit on Refugees, convened the following day by Barack Obama, where he will invite heads of state and government to make national, rather than collective, resettlement pledges.