WE NOW know that by a majority vote the European Union has achieved a refugee agreement of sorts, a very limited “arrangement” for the possible resettlement of 120,000 people.

Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania voted against, Finland abstained.

Denmark and Ireland, which could have exercised their opt-outs, have opted in. The UK has chosen to remain out.

Meanwhile, the UN’s funding flow for emergency relief for displaced people(s) and for resettlement programmes has become an arid riverbed.

In Brussels this week civil servants, advisers, politicians, and journalists have continued to mouth the phrase “economic migrant” as a stigmatising catch-all for the vast numbers of people-on-the move who won’t qualify under the 1951 UN convention as refugees.

Instead of “economic”, Professor Alexander Betts and his colleagues at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre apply the term “survival migration” to explain the plight of these dislocated men, women, and children.

As Prof Betts wrote in last Sunday’s Observer, increasing numbers of “people fleeing fall into a neither/nor category … If they cannot achieve the basic conditions for life and dignity in their country of origin, then, ethically, they are in an analogous situation to refugees”.

It must be doubted whether the adverb “ethically” has featured much in Brussels this week.

From 1921-30 the League of Nations coordinated relief and rehabilitation for 10 million people.

Since World War II the UN and related organisations are estimated to have helped to resettle 50 million people.

And now? Perhaps a change, certainly from Poland, but the 120,000, as Peter Sutherland, the UN special representative on migration has noted, is negligible when set against at least 10 times that number currently in desperate and degrading limbo. Perhaps a beginning? Perhaps is a fragile word.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford