Migration
It is undeniable that the phenomenon of migration has become in recent years one of the most dramatic and complex phenomena of the modern era.
For APG23 migrants are never numbers, but people, brothers and sisters, real faces that always have their own unique and unrepeatable story. They are men, women, families, accompanied or unaccompanied children, young people, elderly people who decide to leave their homeland, often driven to move to escape wars, persecution, famine, or even more simply motivated by the search for a better life . All of them, whether refugees deserving international protection or economic migrants, face countless sacrifices and difficulties, risks and dangers just to find a place to live in peace and dignity.
In 1990, the UN General Assembly, by resolution 45/158 adopted the “International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families” in order to effectively protect the migrants. Unfortunately, only a minority of Member States has ratified this convention.
In 2017 and 2018, the Global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration and the Global Compact on Refugees have been respectively adopted by the UN.
During the negotiations for the two Global Compacts, the Catholic Church through the Migrant and Refugees section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development produced a document, “20 Action Points for the Global Compacts – Accept, Protect, Promote, Integrate”. APG23 fully supports the contents of this document.
For us as Christians, welcoming migrants should be a priority since the words of the Gospel (Matthew ch. 25) say: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”.
Moreover, APG23 is convinced that migration, in our unjust world, is one of the many ways in which each person can exercise its Right to Development in the search for a better future.
