Locsin explains PHL stand as UNGA votes 152-5 for GCM
‘MIGR ANTS are not slaves in transport but free human beings on the move; with more courage to improve their condition abroad than endurance to persist in the wretched places they must flee or perish.”
With these words, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. explained the Philippines’s stand at the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly on the new Global Compact On Migration in New York on Wednesday (December 19).
Locsin’s much applauded speech was one of the 152 votes for, beside the 5 against, the sweeping accord “to ensure safe and orderly migration” of an estimated 224 million migrants sweeping across the developed world. This number is 3.3 percent of the world’s 7.2 billion population today.
The United States, Hungary, Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland voted “no,” while 12 countries abstained.
The vote in favor of the resolution was lower than the 164 countries that approved the agreement by acclamation at a conference in Marrakech, Morocco, earlier this month.
The Global Compact for Migration is the first international document dealing with the issue that is not legally binding.
However, the escalating debate over people leaving their home countries for new ones has sparked increasing opposition and reservations among the UN’s 193 member-states.
Locsin said that sometimes the needs of states and migrants overlap; sometimes not; “hence the false
and ugly narratives of migration peddled by those who have benefited from migration but fear too much of it.”
Noting how some of the world’s most progressive places benefited from migrants, Locsin said in his explanation of vote:
“Western cities would be cesspools without migrants. And there would be— as my friend Fernando of Mexico said— no World Cup as we know it today; nor Miss Universe, the part-Scottish, part-Filipina Catriona Gray, lava-walking the runway for her one and only people. That is the enigma of arrival: the arrival of needed migrants—some of them but not all.”
He said that’s where sovereignty comes up against—“not a challenge to its unlimited freedom to act—but to the moral imperative to live up to a standard of reciprocal decency in its actions.”
He added: “For one day a sovereign people may find themselves migrants as well with no country. We repeat: no enforceable obligation can be laid on sovereignty. But certain standards are expected of it; and failure to meet them results only in self-condemnation.”
The Philippines’s top diplomat said some of the UN’s friends in this endeavor have withdrawn under pressure from political constituencies.
“Others opposed it from the start for the same reason. And that is only right; we should respond to our constituencies for we are all democracies.”
Still others, he said, “have reasons with which we agree or with which we do not completely disagree; but where we do disagree we must not leave them unanswered.”
He said countries that favor migration “defeated the notion that migration is bad, with facts and not frightful fantasies of job losses no Westerner would take.”
He said jobs that are lost are not taken by migrants; “but by people who stay home, work harder for lesser pay, and beat the better-paid competition abroad.”
“We did it with reason by showing that migrants have been useful additions to the work forces of host countries; they are a
good response to unfair foreign competition,” he added.
The secretary knows the value of migration’s benefit to the sending country, as the estimated 10 million overseas Filipino workers have remitted to the country $28.06 billion in 2017.
He said: “We should be proud to acknowledge that a decent regard for the opinion of mankind, prompted by the better angels of our nature, dictated our decision regarding the Global Compact.
“Migration is a shared responsibility of sending, receiving and transit states. No one state can address it alone; nor should any state presume to lead in saying what can and cannot be done about it.”
He said the Global Compact for Migration was undertaken because it needed the inputs of everyone who had good intentions toward migrants.
He said the word “compact” was picked precisely for having no settled meaning in international law, unlike the word “treaty,” which in international practice has been a mere scrap of paper torn time and again by surprising acts of aggression.
“Right from the title, ‘Compact’ excludes any suggestion of enforceability other than the compulsion of conscience if one has any—and if not, then all the less is it compelling.”
He continued: “The Compact assumes that states, not just in the exercise of sovereignty but out of practical sense, must start and end with effective national controls over their borders. A world without borders, like a world without string to hold things together, would be chaos.”
He said the word “hints at the shared feeling of a common endeavor to address that which we would not want to be visited on ourselves and our families, who are fortunate to have countries we are happy to call our own.
“There will always be claims that good intentions become obligations; but these claims are as easily ignored as they are easily made. It is part of the free expression we all uphold without qualification.”
Citing as example the politically intractable problem created in Myanmar with the international dilemma over the fate of the Rohingya people, Locsin said: “The Compact merely seeks by clear delineation, and with the mildest suggestion of
what might be done out of decency, about the problems encountered by migrants. It does not presume to tell states what to do with people who happen to be in their midst; for that is surely a strictly sovereign decision. We see this in the unsolved Rakhine problem created by one empire at the expense of a subject nation. None of us should presume to dictate to the latter how to solve it. But we might speak politely of what would be the decent thing to do.”
The Compact assumes, he added, “that states, not just in the exercise of sovereignty but out of practical sense, must start and end with effective national controls over their borders. A world without borders, like a world without string to hold things together, would be chaos.”
He said the Compact does not derogate one iota from sovereignty, “but it reveals sovereignty’s fundamentally moral nature.”
“A key aspect of sovereignty is the care states must take of people inside them; even if they are on the move—from countries of origin, through countries of transit, to where finally they end up to be welcomed or booted out. The Compact merely speaks truth to sovereign power and reminds it of its moral aspect.”
Noting how some UN members have decried “the current retreat from multilateralism,” Locsin nonetheless chided them for withdrawing from the GCM “for its multilateral character.” The GCM, he stressed, “is a triumph of multilateralism. It is an assertion of sovereignty acting in concert with other sovereignties for humane objectives; but in no wise does it deny any particle of sovereignty’s full extent and reach. But no question, world government is an unmitigated evil; hegemonic aspirations alone committed the worst crimes against humanity in history throughout the Cold and postCold War worlds. We will have none of that, from any quarter.”
He concluded: “The Global Compact for Migration took two years of difficult negotiations over complex issues and strong opposition not least from countries of migrant composition. The experience must not have been good. But we persevered in the confidence that decency would prevail. And it is in decency that we anchored the Compact.”