There are times when I feel
really quite ashamed
to be a European.
In the last year,
more than a million people arrived in Europe in need of our help,
and our response, frankly, has been pathetic.
There are just so many contradictions.
We mourn the tragic death
of two-year old Alan Kurdi,
and yet since then, more than 200 children
have subsequently drowned in the Mediterranean.
We have international treaties that recognize that refugees
are a shared responsibility,
and yet we accept that tiny Lebanon
hosts more Syrians than the whole of Europe combined.
We lament the existence of human smugglers,
and yet we make that the only viable route
to seek asylum in Europe.
We have labor shortages, and yet we exclude people who fit
our economic and demographic needs
from coming to Europe.
We proclaim our liberal values in opposition to fundamentalist Islam,
and yet we have repressive policies
that detain child asylum seekers,
that separate children from their families,
and that seize property from refugees.
What are we doing?
How has the situation come to this,
that we've adopted such an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis?
I don't believe it's because people don't care,
or at least I don't want to believe it's because people don't care.
I believe it's because our politicians lack a vision,
a vision for how to adapt an international refugee system
created over 50 years ago
for a changing and globalized world.
And so what I want to do is take a step back
and ask two really fundamental questions,
the two questions we all need to ask.
First, why is the current system not working?
And second, what can we do to fix it?
So the modern refugee regime
was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by these guys.
Its basic aim is to ensure
that when a state fails, or worse, turns against its own people,
people have somewhere to go,
to live in safety and dignity until they can go home.
It was created precisely for situations like the situation we see in Syria today.
Through an international convention signed by 147 governments,
the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees,
and an international organization, UNHCR,
states committed to reciprocally admit people onto their territory
who flee conflict and persecution.
But today, that system is failing.
In theory, refugees have a right to seek asylum.
In practice, our immigration policies block the path to safety.
In theory, refugees have a right to a pathway to integration,
or return to the country they've come from.
But in practice, they get stuck in almost indefinite limbo.
In theory, refugees are a shared global responsibility.
In practice, geography means that countries proximate the conflict
take the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees.
The system isn't broken because the rules are wrong.
It's that we're not applying them adequately to a changing world,
and that's what we need to reconsider.
So I want to explain to you a little bit about how the current system works.
How does the refugee regime actually work?
But not from a top-down institutional perspective,
rather from the perspective of a refugee.