Holy See-Mexico Conference
“We ask all media outlets to contribute, to the extent possible, to disseminating reliable and verified information on migratory flows and to ignore information that conveys only negative perceptions of migrants”. This appeal was made at the end of the Holy See-Mexico Conference on International Migration that took place a few days ago in the Vatican. As reported in the final statement released by the Holy See Press Office today, “justice, solidarity and compassion” are the keywords that Pope Francis highlighted in his message to the participants, in which the Pontiff also called for a “shared and global responsibility for international migration”, based on a “fundamental attitude”, that of “reaching out and meeting the other, to welcome, to know and to appreciate him or her”. The Government of Mexico, for its part, reaffirmed its commitment “to ensuring that the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is a tool to transform short-sighted and introspective visions into broad and human perspectives”. The Catholic Church in Mexico, in particular, decided to “commit herself to supporting migrants, by putting into practice the 4 verbs suggested by Pope Francis on the World Day of Migrants 2018 – to welcome, to protect, to promote, and to integrate -, while also fostering a culture of encounter”. “Understanding the complexity of today’s migratory flows which originate from multiple causes and are often due to situations of conflict, natural disasters, poverty and the search for better living conditions and opportunities” – this is the first imperative on which the Holy See and Mexico agree. “Children are those suffering the most from the consequences of forced migration”, according to the statement, in which both parties pledged to “insist on the centrality of the human person in each political exercise, including those aimed at regulating migratory flows, and to reaffirm the inviolability of human rights and the dignity of every human being on the move”. The second imperative is a commitment “to a global governance of migratory flows, based on the co-responsibility of all institutional and private actors, in order to ensure safe, orderly and regular migration that benefits all the people concerned, and helps to create the conditions to make migration a voluntary decision and not a necessity”. Hence the intention to “continue contributing actively to the process that will enable the United Nations to adopt a Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration sometime this year”, with a view to harmonising this Compact with the Global Compact on Refugees. “We commit – the statement also reads – to promoting the creation of the necessary conditions so that all migrants may enrich their host societies with their talents and abilities while also contributing to sustainable development at the local, national, regional and global levels”.
