Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, warned yesterday that refugees “have especially suffered the consequences of the pandemic” and announced, therefore, that Spain will allocate two million doses of vaccines to “humanitarian contexts”.
“Spain is no stranger to the reality of refugees because the Spanish people are a people of solidarity, who do not ignore the suffering of others, even if it happens far from our borders,” said Sanchez during the global event commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, held at the headquarters of Casa de América and in which also spoke the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi. The event was held in Madrid in recognition of the role of Spain, the first global donor to UNHCR with more than one hundred million euros in 2020 alone.
“We are aware that the cooperation mechanisms are not managing to reach everyone,” admitted the head of the Executive. “Refugees have particularly suffered the consequences of the pandemic and many of them have suffered it trapped in areas of enormous vulnerability, outside any conventional health care network,” he continued. For this reason, he announced, “the Government will set aside two million of the vaccines already committed against the coronavirus for humanitarian contexts and will work with UNHCR and other institutions to ensure that these vaccines reach where they are most needed”. This allocation will come from the 50 million doses already committed by Spain for the first quarter of 2022, within the framework of the objective set by the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure that 70% of the world’s population is immunized by the middle of next year.
Pedro Sánchez also announced that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, EU and Cooperation (whose head, José Manuel Albares, attended the event, together with the Ministers of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska; Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá; and Justice, Pilar Llop) is finalizing what will be its “first Humanitarian Diplomacy Strategy”, which will have among its “priority lines of action” the “attention to refugees” and which will provide “a timely framework” to “respond to humanitarian needs” in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Sahel and Latin America. The strategy is included in the draft General State Budget (PGE) for “the second half of 2021”.
During yesterday’s event also intervened the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau (via video), as rotating president of the Platform to support the Regional Comprehensive Framework for Protection and Solutions to Forced Displacement in Central America (MIRPS); the soprano and honorary goodwill ambassador of UNHCR Barbara Hendricks (also virtually), the honorary president of Spain with UNHCR, Antonio Garrigues Walker; the journalist Rosa Montero and two refugee women in Spain: Somali Amal Hussein, an activist against female genital mutilation, and Afghan Sadaf Rahimi, whose family was evacuated last August on one of the Spanish repatriation flights from Afghanistan. The meeting was moderated by TV presenter and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Jesús Vázquez.
For his part, Filippo Grandi denounced at the same event that, “during the pandemic, 200 countries closed their borders and 60 did so without exception with asylum seekers”. For this reason, he thanked the “generosity of Spain and Spanish citizens, who are the main private donors to UNHCR in the world, with more than half a million donations on a regular basis”. After the event, Pedro Sánchez and Filippo Grandi held a bilateral meeting in which they discussed the asylum situation in Spain, the Diplomatic Humanitarian Strategy and access to vaccines in humanitarian contexts. The UNHCR leader also met with Albares and Grande-Marlaska.
