Valdai Club

At noon on June 21, 2019, the Valdai Discussion Club will host an expert discussion dedicated to World Refugee Day.

The United Nations declared June 20 World Refugee Day 19 years ago, in 2000. Since then, the plight of displaced persons has worsened to the point where it is considered among the most important on the global agenda of humanitarians. People become refugees mainly due to conflicts and civil wars which flare up in various parts of the world.

Armed clashes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya led to a sizable flow of new refugees earlier in the 2010s, both within the Middle East and from the MENA countries to Europe and other regions. The Syrian refugee crisis elevated awareness of the problem to a new level. To address the problem, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees drafted a Global Compact on Refugees, which was signed at the end of the last year. Its main objective is to arrange for the “fair distribution” of responsibility for the refugee problem between different countries of the world, as well as ensuring the full protection of the rights of those people who were forced to leave their countries of residence.

What are the main problems refugees face today? How can the Global Compact help solve these problems? How acute is the problem faced by refugees leaving the Middle East and North Africa? What other regions are most affected by this phenomenon? How can Russia contribute to solving this problem? The participants of the expert discussion will answer these and other questions.

Speakers:

• Ewen MacLeod, Special Advisor to the High Commissioner at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR);

• Albert Sitnikov, Deputy Director, Department for Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation;

• Sergey Andrianov, Head of the Department for Protection of Social Rights at the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation.

Moderator:

• Oleg Barabanov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club.