Recommendations on Implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees

Made in collaboration with NYU Center on International Cooperation.

This note summarizes recent outputs of the Experts Group on the Global Compact of Refugees (CCRF)1, a joint initiative of the New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.

Over the course of 2019, the Group met to deliberate on and make concrete recommendations for strengthening international refugee policy, including in relation to the Global Refugee Forum (GRF), the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, and other mechanisms. These summary recommendations – detailed in the following pages – seek to further the fundamental objectives of the international refugee system:

• Strengthening Protection: work towards a stronger regime for the protection of refugees displaced in the context of disasters and the effects of climate change, and examine ways of extending protection to displaced persons beyond those defined as refugees under the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol. (pp 2-3) • Refugee Participation: take concrete steps to facilitate meaningful participation of refugees, including by supporting and strengthening refugee-led associations and ensuring their full participation in GCR mechanisms (pp 3-4)

• The Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework: critically examine the assumptions and bargains that underpin the CRRF, advocate for further positive steps on refugee rights, build realistic and costed country-level plans for refugee self-reliance and host community support, commit to tracking donor humanitarian and development support, and re-affirm third country resettlement as an essential component of any framework. (pp 4-5)

• Refugee and Asylum Seeker Work Rights: facilitate dignified and decent refugee employment, including by opening labor markets to registered refugees and asylum seekers and by providing proper identification and legal protections that ensure the automatic, unconditional freedom of movement and the right to work, including the right to be self-employed. (pp 5-6)

• Accountability and Responsibility-Sharing: enlarge accountability and responsibility-sharing foreseen in the GCR to include deeper structural and institutional changes in the areas that could benefit refugees and their hosting countries, such as debt relief, trade concessions, and efforts to combat impunity for leaders or regimes that provoke forced displacement. Displacement as a standing item on the Security Council as well as state and stakeholder peer review mechanisms could drive these efforts of greater accountability. (pp 6-7)

• Making GRF Pledges Successful: focus pledges under the GCR on addressing structures of inequality and marginalization, tied to on-going dialogue with national actors and refugees, ensure that they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented and Timebound. (pp 7-8)