Morocco's Permanent Representative to UN Chairs High-level Panel on IDPs

Morocco’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Omar Hilale, chaired on Thursday a high-level panel on the theme “Mobilizing action to improve humanitarian assistance for IDPs and achieve durable solutions”.

The panel brought together several UN senior officials, including Federica Mogherini, Co-Chair, United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement, Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and António Vitorino, Director General of the International Organization for Migration.

The virtual high-level panel discussion is part of the 2020 ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment.

In his opening remarks, Hilale said that the multidisciplinary composition of this panel makes its well placed to provide information on how to progress in the fight against internal displacement.

In this regard, the Moroccan diplomat, who is also Vice-President of ECOSOC, regretted the sad record of 50 million internally displaced people in 2019, stressing that “internally displaced people have often lost everything, their homes, their livelihoods, their access to education and basic services their communities and much more.”

The ambassador said these challenges are magnified in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, hence the need to help displaced people regain their normalcy, dignity and autonomy.

For her part, Mogherini stressed the need for a discussion at the highest level on how to foster the capacity and political will to deal with the problem of internally displaced persons more effectively.

Addressing the work of the high level panel of the Secretary General of the United Nations, which she co-chairs, she said that the work will be “frank, creative and daring”, as instructed by the UN Chief.

For her part, Bachelet underlined the need to address the root causes of the phenomenon as it is the only way to avoid repeated cycles of displacement.

She also underscored the importance of strengthening national capacities to ensure the sustainability of efforts made. 

The High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, welcomed the focus of discussions on durable solutions that are lacking in addressing the issue of internal displacement.

To this end, he noted that the approach to displacement situations must not be solely humanitarian, but must involve development factors as quickly as possible.

“As if the challenges we faced to finding concrete solutions to internal displacement were not enough, we must now also consider a pandemic on a scale the world has not seen in generations,” said IOM Director General António Vitorino.

Vitorino highlighted the importance of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus (HDPN) to address the destabilizing impacts of COVID-19 on IDPs by strengthening local capacities in humanitarian and health responses and ensuring socioeconomic recovery. 

This event explored concrete ways the international community can better support IDPs, host communities and governments to help IDPs to move towards durable solutions to internal displacement.