United Nations Open Border Migration Officials Mock National Sovereignty

At a reception held on October 22, 2015, to honor the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative for International Migration, Peter Sutherland, claimed that caps on refugees enforced by certain countries in Europe are “directly reminiscent of the type of caps that took place under the Reich [against] the Jewish population.” This outrageous comparison of good faith attempts to control the tide of mass migration from the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust is aimed at browbeating European countries into putting their own citizens in danger to serve a globalist agenda. Make no mistake about Sutherland‘s intentions. He is not really focused on saving persecuted religious minorities from the Muslim majority countries in conflict-ridden regions, particularly persecuted Christians and Yazidis. He advocates an open border policy in which migrants leaving their countries of origin to seek better economic conditions would have essentially the same right to settle in their destination countries of choice as persecuted refugees seeking political asylum:

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"What are economic migrants, I ask? Are they everybody else who isn’t persecuted? Well if that is what they are, does it mean that you’re going to send home people who are starving? That you’re going to send home people who are living through environmental degradation of a dreadful kind? …It’s just not good enough."

Sutherland has no way of knowing the motivations of the many hundreds of thousands (and possibly millions eventually) of migrants from Muslim majority countries flooding Europe, let alone who they really are. He ignores legitimate concerns regarding infiltration by members of the Islamic State and other jihadists. What we are witnessing is in part a genuine humanitarian crisis and in part a Hijrah, or “jihad by emigration,” as Robert Spencer calls it. The Islamic State has made no secret of its intention to flood Europe with hundreds of thousands of its jihadists posing as refugees. Some Islamic State jihadists have already been caught crossing into Europe doing just that. Without proper vetting and border controls, the jihadists will succeed in exploiting humanitarian outreach to accomplish their Hijrah, with potentially catastrophic results for the West. National sovereignty and the territorial integrity of a country disappear without effective border controls. But UN officials such as Sutherland could not care less about national sovereignty if it gets in the way of their preferred model of free flowing global migration irrespective of the impact on the destination countries. He admits to a degree of “antagonism which I feel towards nationalism.” Earlier this month, in an interview with UN News Centre, Sutherland said that governments must recognize that “sovereignty is an illusion – that sovereignty is an absolute illusion that has to be put behind us. The days of hiding behind borders and fences are long gone.” Likewise, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Francois Crepeau, declared in 2012 that “territorial sovereignty could not be the alpha and omega of migration policies.” In May 2015, Crepeau used a Nazi analogy - similar as it happens to the one Sutherland used more recently – to criticize the British government’s consideration of a proposal to quit the European Convention on Human Rights. The purpose of this proposal was to free the British government to deport foreign criminals without interference from European judges sitting in Strasbourg.

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UN officials who ignore, much less mock, the principle of national sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter should be removed from their positions forthwith

Crepeau said in response to the British government’s desire to ensure protection of its own citizens: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people.” On October 23, 2015, Crepeau issued a statement jointly with Francisco Carrion-Mena, Chair of the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, criticizing the recent UN Security Council resolution allowing the European Union to inspect, possibly seize and use force against boats off the coast of Libya that were suspected of being used for the illegal smuggling of migrants. Instead, they called for “smart mobility solutions” – a United Nations euphemism for open borders. “Whether considered migrants, asylum seekers or refugees, all are entitled to a protection response based on international law, in particular the human rights law, humanitarian law, and refugee law treaty framework,” they said in their statement. UN officials are deliberately conflating refugees who seek asylum from persecution or the threat of persecution, and have special protected status under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, with the much larger group of economic migrants who are simply looking for greener pastures. Economic migrants do not have an inherent human right to choose to live anywhere in the world they wish and demand to be taken in. Each country must be free to apply its own laws in considering applications for admittance by such migrants, based on national interest and humanitarian concerns. UN officials should butt out. The United Nations Charter sets forth the fundamental principle of national sovereignty: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit to such matters to settlement under the present Charter….” (UN Charter, Article 2.7). Article 2.1 of the UN Charter states that the UN organization is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” (Emphasis added) The UN Secretary General's Special Representative for International Migration, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and other like-minded UN officials who ignore, much less mock, the principle of national sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter should be removed from their positions forthwith.

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