The IRC has been handling refugees for 80 years. How bad is the crisis today?
The last refugee crisis of this magnitude was during and after the Second World War. There were very similar concerns from countries accepting refugees to what we see today. The response at that time was the 1951 Refugee Convention. Today the international community is struggling to come up with any cohesive framework.
What are you proposing?
We are calling for a common European asylum system for people arriving in the European Union. There is a proposed piece of EU legislation, the European Union Resettlement Framework, which allows for a much more efficient process to determine who is a refugee and who is an economic migrant. This would be accompanied by a commitment from each member state to settle a minimum number of refugees based on a number of factors including the size of that country’s GDP.
