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Jesuit agency head in UK blasts call to scrap UN refugee convention as ‘appalling’

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LEICESTER, United Kingdom — A proposal by the UK Home Secretary to tighten refugee admissions in Western countries is “appalling,” according to the head of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, one of Great Britain’s leading agencies serving refugees and other forcible displaced persons.

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Sarah Teather, the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, said the convention “is a vital and core mechanism to protect people fleeing persecution, and it is badly needed, now as much and more than ever.”

“To suggest that many of those to whom it has extended protection for decades should be shut out and cast back into danger is appalling,” Teather said Tuesday.

“The government should work to extend protection to those who need it, not to find new ways to deny sanctuary. These comments from the Home Secretary are the latest in a cruel, vaunting attack on refugees,” she continued.

Teather also questioned why a British politician chose to give her speech to a U.S. policy group.

“One is left to wonder who the Home Secretary is trying to court with this international speech? Is her focus political and aimed at her own party? If so, she is recklessly giving comfort to dictators and tyrannical regimes on the world stage for vain purposes,” Teather said.

In her speech in Washington, Braverman claimed the current global asylum framework “is a promissory note that the West cannot fulfil.”

“We have created a system of almost infinite supply, incentivizing millions of people to try their luck, knowing full well that we have no capacity to meet more than a fraction of demand,” the government minister said.

Teather responded by mentioning Pope Francis’s recent message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees.

“Pope Francis renewed his call for the practice of ‘good politics — one that is transparent, honest, farsighted and at the service of all, especially those most vulnerable’. These actions from the Home Secretary today are anything but,” the JRS UK head said.

“Where people are forcibly displaced from their homes, we have a human duty to work together to seek solutions. Trying to draw others into a coordinated attack on those in need is a new low,” she concluded.

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The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, responded to Braverman’s speech by saying the decades-old convention “remains as relevant today as when it was adopted in providing an indispensable framework for addressing those challenges, based on international co-operation.”

The UN agency said the present need “is not for reform, or more restrictive interpretation, but for stronger and more consistent application of the convention and its underlying principle of responsibility-sharing.”