Vatican newspaper: refugee camps manifest ‘historic overthrow’ of human rights

June 01, 2017

In a front-page op-ed in the June 1 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Silvina Pérez argued that the plight of the world’s 65 million refugees calls into question the international community’s commitment to universal human rights.

Pérez, an Argentine journalist, writes that some refugee camps are places where refugees lose their basic rights, making it “increasingly evident that the set of rights that make up the heritage of each person is linked to their membership of individual states rather than to the international system.”

Refugee camps thus manifest an “historic overthrow of the relationship between state and individual that has characterized the formation of the modern state … Migrants become non-persons, forced to live for years in a legal limbo” in places that sometimes do not even appear on maps.

 

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Further information:

• Da emergenza a penosa normalità (L’Osservatore Romano, p. 1)