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Julia V. Taft Assistant Secretary of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration Statement before the Biannial General Meeting of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles Washington, DC, September 30, 2000

What a wonderful opportunity it is to be here today, meeting with some of Europe's strongest voices speaking out for refugee protection. It gives me particular pleasure to address an NGO audience. As some of you may know, I was formerly the head of the American NGO consortium InterAction. I am -- as you might expect -- a big believer in government-NGO partnership!

For those of you who may not be familiar with my corner of the State Department, let me briefly explain that we have primary responsibility for setting U.S. overseas refugee policy. We oversee the resettlement of refugees in the United States, and we manage a substantial portion of the U.S. Government's humanitarian assistance, including contributions to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, ICRC, and UNRWA. In fact, I just arrived yesterday from 2 weeks in the Middle East to witness first-hand the protection and assistance issues of Palestinians. While UNRWA, rather than UNHCR is the vehicle for support for Palestinian refugees from the international community, it shares many of the challenges UNHCR has in carrying out its mandate.

In the 3 years I have been with the State Department, I have experienced the complexity we face in bringing refugee protection into the new century. This is a time when the values we believe in so strongly are increasingly challenged. It's a time when the management of migratory movements has become more complex than the drafters of the Refugee Convention could ever have imagined, and the challenges to protection are by no means limited to the industrialized world. Deterioration of first asylum principles in developing countries is also a growing problem.

We are indeed, as UNHCR has said, at a "crossroads." The United States welcomes UNHCR's initiative to commence a process of global consultations on international protection. This will be, of course, a highly complex undertaking.

The first step, in our view, will be to reaffirm the continued relevance of the Convention and Protocol. We are disturbed by the increasing trend toward arbitrary interpretations of the Convention's refugee definition, a concern which was highlighted in the NGO statement at last July's UNHCR Standing Committee meeting. In the protection consultations, you can expect the United States to argue for a generous and inclusive interpretation of Article 1, true to the intention of its drafters.

We are also ready to tackle the range of tough issues discussed in the ECRE position papers tabled today: complementary forms of protection, situations of mass influx, internal flight alternatives, interception, safe country designations, return of rejected asylum-seekers -- the list is long.

The United States can be counted on to be among the Convention's strongest defenders. We see a grace and majesty in the document. We marvel at its profound impact on millions of people over nearly 50 years, and at how its ideals have been made concrete by the majority of the world's countries. If you take away any one thought from my remarks this morning, let it be this: the United States believes in the Convention and Protocol. We reaffirm their principles without qualification, and we will oppose any effort to reopen it for negotiation.

It is not surprising perhaps, that as a refugee advocate and an American, I would draw an analogy between the Convention and the United States Constitution. Our Constitution, a relatively simple document that has guided our nation for more than 200 years, has required relatively few amendments in all that time.

Experience with the U.S. Constitution shows that important reform can be achieved without changing underlying documents. Consider that during the 1970s, there was a national movement in the United States to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, to guarantee workplace and other forms of equality for women. This movement failed, narrowly, while generating bitter partisan controversy. But today virtually all of the goals of the Equal Rights Amendment have been achieved anyway, through legislation and court decisions.

When it comes to protecting victims of persecution, we believe the refugee definition of the Convention offers us guidance as durable, and as flexible, as that found in our Constitution. The protected categories set forth in Article 1 have provided both the U.S. immigration authorities and our courts with the interpretive flexibility necessary to address a broad range of abuses.

We continue to grapple with the particular needs of our youngest refugee applicants and asylum-seekers, and have developed special procedures for ensuring that the claims of minors are considered in an age-appropriate manner. We also have turned our attention to the ongoing need to ensure that human rights abusers are not allowed to take advantage of the protections offered by the Convention.

We are proud of our generous interpretation of the Convention. We believe that the United States can continue to apply the Convention's key provisions in ways that will respond to the changing needs of those who are forced to flee their countries of origin. Of course, we still face many challenges and issues -- but I'm sure your American NGO colleagues will be more than happy to go into great detail on those points!

I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the difficulties of ensuring protection in the context of large migrant flows. This is especially difficult where there are strong economic as well as political factors contributing to that flow.

The dramatic increase in large-scale alien-smuggling has also tested the ability of the international community to combat an unacceptable criminal activity while offering protection for bona fide refugees who, in desperation, turn to smugglers. We need to find a balance between protection and enforcement. All indications are that the Vienna organized crime convention negotiations, on the two separate protocols against the smuggling of migrants and the trafficking of persons, will help us in this effort.

The reality is that refugee status determination procedures are expensive, time-consuming, and uniquely vulnerable to abuse. I've heard an estimate that the developed world spends 20 times more money on status determination processes than on support for UNHCR and its overseas refugee activities. This is a mind-boggling statistic that should give us all pause.

We hope the UNHCR protection consultations will explore solutions to these vexing issues. And we believe that NGOs such as you can help us. The United States will advocate an active, meaningful role for NGOs and other experts in this process.

The United States has a strong record of partnership with NGOs. I don't have to tell this audience that we don't always see eye-to-eye with our nongovernmental colleagues. We do however, always engage with NGOs, both in the executive and legislative branches, and certainly our advocacy community is not shy about going to the courts.

The U.S. Government recognizes that much of the credit for the generous standards of protection in the United States, including our refugee resettlement program (which brought in more than 73,000 refugees this year), is due to the hard work of American NGOs both in advocacy, and in the quality of resettlement assistance services they provide. It strikes me as particularly important that our voluntary agencies not only advocate for protection, but actually enhance it domestically through their sponsorship efforts.

Now more than ever, it is absolutely essential that European and U.S. NGOs strengthen their ties. I recognize that ECRE members are focused on the European asylum agenda, just as your U.S. colleagues focus on what's happening in Washington. The fundamental protection issues, however, are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Those of us in government who speak in defense of the refugee need the weight of your combined forces to help counter those who would weaken protection.

The UNHCR consultations process will inevitably and ultimately be political, and there is nothing wrong with that. States must act based on the will of their citizens. Nonetheless, we hope that UNHCR will develop a process underpinned by a foundation of expert and NGO input, so that when the politicians, lawyers, and diplomats finally sit down to pull it all together, they will be able to draw from a substantive body of protection-focused written work.

On the government-to-government level, some of you may wonder how the United States talks to Europe about asylum and migration issues. We do have dialogues, both formally with the European Union in Brussels, and informally through a process called the Intergovernmental Consultations (which include Switzerland and Norway, as well as Canada and Australia). We have also developed joint U.S.-EU projects to curb trafficking in women.

I want to emphasize that all of our discussions with the European Union on these questions are premised on our support for the process of European integration. We understand, and fully accept, Europe's hard work to develop common asylum and migration policies. These are European questions for Europeans to decide, just as it is up to the United States to set its own course.

And yet -- the influence of European and American asylum policies on the world's thinking is undeniable. We believe that the decisions Europe makes to implement the Amsterdam Treaty provisions on asylum will shape global norms profoundly. I'm not talking here of questions such as social welfare benefits for asylum seekers or procedural issues. But rather those most fundamental issues which cut to the core of the Convention: defining who is, and isn't, a refugee, persecution by nonstate actors, and "safe country" policies. On these matters, the United States follows developments in Europe closely.

Although not our primary focus today, I would like to note that the United States and the European Union have an active dialogue on humanitarian assistance coordination.

Given the complexity of the policy issues, and the huge amounts of money involved, it's not surprising that we do sometimes have our differences. For instance, the question of EU contributions to UN humanitarian agencies is one subject we've discussed extensively. While member states of the EU are often quite generous donors to multilateral and UN agencies, we are very disappointed with declining levels of European Commission support for UNHCR and WFP. Since much of the EC humanitarian aid is channeled through NGOs, we know you have great influence. We ask your help in talking to Brussels about the need to support multilateral humanitarian response mechanisms in addition to the NGO ones.

Now, if you'll allow me to get philosophical for a moment, I'll wrap things up! Some of our European friends may imagine that the United States, as the "melting pot" country, has a tidy history of immigration and integration. In fact, we have experienced tremendous tensions over immigration, particularly during wartime or in difficult economic times. Although the nationalities in question have changed over the centuries, the anxieties remain constant.

One of my favorite chapters in the long-running story of American immigration, and integration, concerns Dutch-Americans in the late 19th century. Now these folks, rightly proud of their long-ago ancestors who founded "New Amsterdam" across the Atlantic, were very concerned about the threat that high immigration levels posed to the essential "Dutchness" of American society.

And who were these new immigrants? Many of them were Europeans -- Germans, Italians (like my father), Irish -- but foreigners nonetheless. Would these less educated, less affluent newcomers be able to adapt to American values and culture? Some Dutch-Americans were so worried that they formed clubs to promote study of Dutch colonial life as a way to inspire patriotism in new immigrants.

Now, here in the year 2000, I'll have to admit that Dutch ethnicity is no longer a dominant force in our society. Yet what we've lost over time in our "Dutchness," we've gained in our diversity. We have learned -- and are still learning -- to live with our differences, to respect them, and to celebrate them as part of the American ideal.

Of course America is not Europe, and I would not presume to draw simple comparisons. Yet the days of the "us vs. them" divide between the "immigration" countries -- the U.S, Australia, Canada -- and Europe, are over, finished. On migration and refugee protection issues in the 21st century, more unites us than divides us.

Emerging from the tragedy of World War II, the United States and Europe worked to promote the principles enshrined in the Refugee Convention on the world stage. We shared then, as we do now, common commitments to human rights and human decency.

Nearly 50 years later, the United States and Europe face many challenges in continuing to work together again for protection of the persecuted. We will need your help to fulfill this fundamental commitment.

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