Global Forum Blog
MRN’s director, Don Flynn, is in Athens from 1-5 November, attending the meetings around the 2009 Global Forum on Migration and Development.Â
The GFMD is a unique forum bringing together, in its different components, representatives of official governments and also of key stakeholders from civil society.
Also organising at the GFMD is the People’s Global Action for Migration and Development, an international movement of grassroots migrants’ rights organisations working to support the rights of all migrants across the globe. Don will be talking to key activists working in these networks and will report their views on how the debate is developing in his report.
Check the MRN Blog page on our website for his reports.
Blog start
Athens is a very appropriate place to hold the third annual GFMD at the present moment. The capital city of the EU country reaching out, by virtue its geographical position, towards Anatolia, the Middle East, and Asia and Africa beyond, it looks and feels like an exhibition of failed European migration policies.
Around the university district, a substantial chunk of the city’s downtown, groups of Africans trade in items of jewellery, sunglasses and luggage on the wide pavements that surround the collegial buildings. On the patches of park behind them, tents are pitched which advertise the permanent protests of other migrants, mainly refugees from Iran, who are aggrieved at the failure of the Greek authorities to provide them with the documents needed to live a normal life in the country they have found themselves living for the last decade and more.Â
On the other side of the street, in uniforms of drab combat green, the visored and shielded forces of law and order stand, for the moment, at ease. Past recklessness with swinging batons and brute force has made them more unpopular with the passing public than the groups of migrants a short way off. Until some provocation justifies action, the police are constrained to act with untypical civility towards the passersby.
You would have to visit a score of countries in Europe to find a better, tangible example of immigration policies which just aren’t working, either for the host community, or the migrants who have come to live and work in its midst. This is where the organisers of the third Global Forum on Migration and Development have landed to spend a view days in consultation about what can be done to clear the whole mess up.
I’ve been observing this GFMD process since it emerged from the Kofi Annan-inspired Global Forum on Migration and Development, which published its report in 2005. At that point the discussion went through a process of semi-sponsorship by the United Nations, with a ‘High Level Consultation’ in New York agreeing to continue the deliberations in annual meetings of a new Forum.
With the first Forum meetings taking place in Brussels, in 2007, and Manila, in 2008, the Forum has evolved a dual structure which combines an intergovernmental meeting consisting of representatives of the UN’s member states, and a ‘civil society’ grouping which brings together stakeholders from amongst employers in the private sector, trade unions, academics and policy think-tanks, faith community organisations, and the migrants themselves.
In Athens we are expecting to meet with representatives of around 150 governments. The UK presence will be led by migration experts working in the international development ministry, DIFID. I will be present at the two ‘Civil Society Days’, along with 350 others who have gone through a selection processes to emerge as representatives of non-governmental organisations and networks.
It is tempting to see the days ahead as another talking shop set-up which will produce little that is likely to be useful to groups working at the grassroots level. Well, maybe that will prove to be the case, but I’m hoping that pessimistic expectations will, for once, prove to be disappointed, and instead we can look forward to something positive coming from the discussions.
There is the potential to challenge many of the security-driven aspects of the immigration policy agenda when it is framed by the wider concerns of international development and the commitments, which remain the official positions of governments across the world, to eradicate poverty in line with the Millennium Development Goals. The narrative emerging from the earlier GFMDs has confronted state authorities with the fact that migrants play a vital role in the global circuits which redistribute wealth from the developed to the developing countries. Furthermore, this beneficial effect is best secured in circumstances where migrants are acknowledged as agents of change and progress, possessed with rights and the capacity to act on their own behalf. The real significance of the GFMD is that it provides the opportunity to make this argument, adduce the evidence in its supports, and push it forward to a place of prominence on the migration policy agenda.
Of course the governments of the Global North will not easily concede the argument. Its logic implies a thorough re-evaluation of all the policies which have been pursued by their state authorities over the course of the past half century. These are the policies which have produced the distressing scenes at the heart of Athens and on the islands of the Aegean, where more migrants land each day in pursuit of opportunities to work and better their lives. But it is an argument that will be advanced by yet a third tier to the GFMD process, that of Peoples’ Global Action for Migration and Development (PGA).Â
PGA is a network of migrant organisations that organise throughout all the relays of global movement – countries of origin, transit and destination. Hundreds of representatives of PGA supporting groups will also be present in Athens, organising their own parallel event consisting of workshops, lectures and exhibition setting out the work they are doing to promote the rights of migrants. I will attending as many of the PGA’s events as I can over the next week and will report back on the discussions which are taking place in this important alternative Forum.
In the meantime, for more news about the work of the official Forum, look at its website at www.gfmd-fmmd.org. The PGA has its own website – check out www.mfasia.org/peoplesglobalaction/. And visit MRN’s website during the next week for more of my reports.
Don Flynn
Athens, 1 November 2009