Let’s be honest, as campaigners we rarely feel the urge to applaud politicians. It’s our task to hold them to account, to raise ambitions and to always ask for a little bit more to get closer to our goal of ending poverty and fighting inequalities. But sometimes we see exactly the kind of leadership we call for, and a bit of cheering is definitely in order. One of those moments happened on Saturday.
On the stage of the Global Citizen Festival, First Vice President Frans Timmermans announced that the European Commission will commit €500 million of additional funding to a trust fund to help refugees in regions surrounding Syria. This is truly remarkable and here’s why.
Europe is facing its largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. The United Nations has reported that this year over half a million people have arrived in Europe seeking asylum. Over the last few months especially, thousands of Syrians who initially had fled their war-torn country to neighbouring countries have taken on the dangerous journey to Europe by sea due to the deteriorating situation in many refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Already in July, the World Food Programme warned that because of lack of funding it had to cut food assistance to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in the region.
This dire situation in combination with the on-going violence and destruction in Syria has caused a large increase of refugees arriving in Europe, with 100,000 people arriving in Germany in the month of August alone. Many European countries have not stepped up sufficiently to address the crisis and together with Salma Hayek global citizens have called on the UK and French governments to take their fair share of refugees. But in addition to that there is also urgent need to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees in the affected regions surrounding Syria. The commitment from the European commission will support at least 1.5 million of these refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, focusing on education, livelihoods and food assistance.
Even more importantly, the European Commission guaranteed that this funding will not be at the expense of the existing development budget but will be additional to the budget. Throughout the past months we have seen a worrying trend of many European governments reallocating money from life-saving aid programmes towards addressing the refugee crisis at home. While it is encouraging that governments are mobilising funding for the refugee crisis this should not come from the development budget.
An adequate response to the refugee crisis can’t come at the cost of those very programmes which are tackling the root causes of poverty and instability. That’s why the pledge from the European Commission sends a strong signal to European governments: protecting the most vulnerable shouldn’t be a zero sum game. First Vice President Timmermans is calling on the European member states to match the funding from the European Commission to reach €1 billion for the trust fund. This is what leadership looks like, and we hope that many other governments will follow this move by the European Commission. They need to step up and make additional funds available to address the refugee crisis, without decreasing their aid budgets.
Join us in applauding First Vice President Timmermans for his leadership! Go to TAKE ACTION NOW and thank the European Commission for committing €500 million of additional funding to help Syrian refugees, encouraging other countries to follow.