From 23-24 October the Vienna Migration Conference took place in the Austrian Academy of Sciences. "Migration Partnerships - Frameworks for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration" were discussed by 350 high-level participants from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.
Against the background of the ongoing UN Global Compact for Migration Process, the VMC, in its second edition, debated the concept of Regional Migration Partnerships as a key aspect of creating safe, regular and orderly migration as stipulated in the New York Declaration of 2016. Governments are presently engaged in efforts aimed at fixing the present migration policy crises. In this situation, they all too often resort to short-term operational cooperation, while the longer-term objectives receive too little attention.
The Vienna Migration Conference debated both aspects of migration partnerships and highlighted approaches aimed at solving immediate migration challenges associated with humanitarian crises, forced displacement and mixed migration flows as a precondition to tackle the fundamental and long-term requirements of better migration management.
In the future, migration partnerships will be required to reframe their scope to go well beyond the crisis mode. They need to provide enabling frameworks for countries, societies and communities to effectively work together to ensure that international migration can be the positive force in support of economic, social and cultural development processes. The Vienna Migration Conference 2017 critically assessed the current concepts and practices of Regional Migration Partnerships between countries of origin, transit and destination, and the extent to which they represent such enabling frameworks.
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Watch the conference video