Temer in the UN
Brazil inflates numbers on refugees
Nova Iorque - EUA, 20/09/2016. Presidente Michel Temer durante abertura do Debate Geral da 71ª Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas - ONU. Foto: Beto Barata/PR
Representing Brazil in the United Nations for the first time since the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, President Michel Temer inflated the number of refugees received by the country in a speech given at the opening of the UN High-Level Meeting on Refugees, which took place on Monday, September 19.
The president said there are 95,000 refugees living in Brazil, contradicting information from the Ministry of Foreign Relations that there are, in fact, 8,800. According to the Minister of Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Temer added this figure to the number of humanitarian visas issued to Haitians since 2010, which stands at 85,000.
“The confusion by the president and the minister over these two categories is unacceptable,” said Juana Kweitel, program director at Conectas Human Rights. “There are no signs that the Presidency is working to devise concrete policies to receive a larger number of refugees or even to include Haitians that come to the country in a more accessible and robust protection system, such as the one for refugees. Even today, many Haitians enter Brazil precariously and must improvise to obtain documents, to work and to have access to other social rights,” she added.
Drawing on the International Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951), Brazil’s National Committee for Refugees (Conare) recognizes refugees as “any persons who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, are outside the country of their nationality” and are unable or unwilling to return to it. There are 8,800 such refugees living in Brazil, according to the Ministry of Foreign Relations.
In order to not include Haitians in this category, the federal government in 2012 established a policy of humanitarian visas that facilitates their entry into the country. Since 2010, 85,000 Haitians have received these visas.
In a press conference, Moraes said that “it would be discriminatory to exclude the Haitians from the possibility of being treated as refugees merely because they are from Latin America and not from other parts of the world”. Unlike what the minister defended, however, Conare does not grant refugee status to Haitians who come to Brazil with a humanitarian visa.
Criminalization of immigrants
Kweitel also commented on Temer’s mention of Bill 2516/15 that puts an end to the discrimination and criminalization of immigration. “It is an important recognition of the urgency to replace the Foreigner Act, which dates back to the military dictatorship. But it must not be an empty commitment. One concrete and immediate step could be the appointment of a person with a background in the defense of immigrant rights to Demig [the Ministry of Justice’s Immigration Department],” she added.
On Thursday, September 15, twenty civil society organizations – among them Conectas – filed an official petition to the Ministry of Justice stating that “the occupant of the position should not have a background and career in the field of security, since immigration should be addressed from a rights perspective, and no longer from a national security perspective”. Click here to read the document.
UN General Assembly
Following a tradition that dates back to 1947, the Brazilian president gave the inaugural address at the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly held this Tuesday, September 20, in New York. Conectas Human Rights, Greenpeace Brasil and Fluxo analyzed the speech by Michel Temer. See below:
