UNHCR Agency Calls On Canada, Nordic States To Take More Refugees From Resettlement Camps

Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland should consider taking in more refugees from resettlement camps in Africa, Director for the UN Refugee Agency's (UNHCR) Regional Bureau for Southern Africa Valentin Tapsoba told Sputnik

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th November, 2019) Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland should consider taking in more refugees from resettlement camps in Africa, Director for the UN Refugee Agency's (UNHCR) Regional Bureau for Southern Africa Valentin Tapsoba told Sputnik.

In mid-October, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said that the number of resettlement places available globally was dropping. In particular, the UNHCR expressed its concern in early November with the US decision to decrease the number of refugees it would accept for resettlement.

"The European countries have decided to increase the number of quotas. This is why we have people in Libya being lifted to Niger first, and now Rwanda came up offering UNHCR another spot, so that we can lift them to Kigali and then the resettlement countries can come and assess, do their own interviews and take more refugees to their own country. We are very happy with that and we hope that the numbers will continue to increase because this is the solidarity ... We want, for example, Canada to increase the numbers, and the Nordic countries, too," Tapsoba said when asked whether the regional bureau was involved in efforts to increase the number of resettlement camps.

At the same time, the official said that climate change was increasingly becoming a trigger for migration, the official noted.

"This is a big topic nowadays and we, as the UNHCR have already felt it when we had Cyclone Idai and Cyclone Kenneth, which hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. We had to send non-food items, consignment to these three countries, but as you could imagine, we have also people who have moved for example from Mozambique to Malawi," Tapsoba underlined.

Migration sparked by climate change will be the next issue that the international community will have to deal with, he noted.

"Because it forces people to move not only because of war, but because of climate change and if the farmers, for example, can no longer farm because of climate change, they will start moving from the rural areas to the cities and then may cross into the neighboring countries," Tapsoba stated.

According to the UNHCR, resettlement implies the relocation of people who have been forcibly expelled from their homes and are still at risk in the country of asylum and who require transfer to a third country to guarantee their safety.