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The RSC Director discusses the UN Summit in the Guardian

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Patrick Kingsley focused on the outcome of the ‘Leaders’ Summit on Refugees’ hosted by US President Barack Obama. Here, a US-led coalition of more than 30 countries “collectively agreed to roughly double resettlement places for refugees, increase humanitarian aid for refugees by $4.5bn, provide education to 1 million more refugee children, and potentially improve access to legal work for another million adults.” As Kingsley writes, this constituted “the most concrete set of refugee measures at the UN general assembly.”

Kingsley spoke to the RSC Director, Alexander Betts, about the announced coalition. Betts commented that: “For people who are thinking that the achievement of [the UN-led declaration on Monday] was a fairly abstract declaration, [Obama’s summit on Tuesday] is about something more specific. It’s about pledges, it’s about real commitment, it’s about money and resettlement. But the question that remains is about what kinds of pledges will be made and followed through on.”

Betts also questioned whether the US-led initiative had gone far enough: “At a time of profound need, world leaders had squandered a chance to radically rethink the treaties and organisations that govern the world’s handling of refugees, Betts said, arguing that the refugee system needed to be rethought in the same way that the international monetary system was reworked in the 1970s.”

Read the full article here: US-led coalition to double refugee resettlement places and expand aid

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