Prologue
In this VIII Acampa International Meeting for Peace and the Right to Refuge, we want to address the delicate situation of children and youth, especially those who, for different reasons, are forced to relocate and claim refuge.
According to alarming data from UNHCR for the year 2023, the number of forcibly displaced people due to human rights violations already exceeds 114 million people. Boys and girls under 18 years of age make up half of the refugee population in the world due to wars, the climate crisis, natural disasters, hunger, and violence of all kinds. It’s a vulnerable childhood of being constantly in transit. In many cases, they arrive without family members, or lose them in the migration process; they are sick, in emotional shock; they are criminalized; for years, they lose their right to schooling, to learn, to a healthy life, to culture… in short, to grow up as all boys and girls ought to.
The dangers multiply exponentially. Humanitarian organizations that work with children and young people warn of the growing risks in those uncontrolled scenarios: kidnapping, sexual exploitation, organ trafficking, the deterioration of mental and physical health.
Thousands of boys and girls are murdered before the eyes of the international community. For months, we have been witnessing, in shock, the massacre that Israel is carrying out on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, littering the entire territory with dead and orphaned boys and girls. But it’s not just Gaza. Fifty conflicts are currently active in the world and, in each of them, the essential rights or the very existence of childhood and youth are being permanently threatened: Yemen, South Sudan, Mali, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine…
The Acampa Network for Peace and the Right to Refuge wants to be a loudspeaker, at an international level, for the collective voice that demands urgent and necessary action; that minimizes damage and eases the inclusion of children and young people, as soon as possible, into a dignified, respectful and healthy life to which they have a right, regardless of their origin… Every day, in each receiving country, we see how unaccompanied minors become bargaining chips, cornerstones, problems that nobody wants to solve seriously via the necessary and urgent public policies.
As a society, we must demand that governments guarantee specific legislation that ensures the protection of the rights of children and adolescents, within the legal and regulatory framework of Human Rights. We cannot allow illegal on-the-spot deportations or the externalization of borders by paying taxes to undemocratic and thuggish governments who violate Human Rights every day.
Acampa in Galicia and Brazil consider it essential to bring this discussion to an international level, as these refugee minors are starting their lives and need to be welcomed and integrated, requiring all social, legal and political justice in their favor.
Acampa for Peace prioritizes reflection, learning and knowledge of local people wherever it operates, so that it is they who seek the path within the framework of the Rule of Law and of Social Justice. Moreover, so they can do so regardless of social class, race, gender, creed, culture, or age; without denying the Other, embracing plurality without violence, xenophobia or hatred, in the permanent construction of peace.
The objective of this VIII International Meeting –held in June in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain) and in October in Piracicaba (São Paulo, Brazil)– is none other than to open a broad debate on the causes that give rise to the vulnerable situation of forcibly displaced children, as well as how their process of reception and local integration should be approached within the framework of social, legal and political justice, public policies and fundamental rights.
The fact is that we increasingly face a greater amount of inequalities, resulting from the social, economic and political transformations of contemporary capitalism, which have aggravated the ‘social question’ and its manifestations, forcing more and more people into a situation of necessary refuge. Let’s not forget, aswell, that we take on this challenge at a complicated time, as Yanis Varoufakis,economist and former finance minister of Greece, addresses when he states that “capitalism died, devoured by capitalism itself; and a new techno-feudal world is opening up where large technological platforms are the ones that dominate global economy because they manage data, information, and therefore have control over individuals. The concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, very similar to that of feudalism in the Middle Ages, means that nation-states matter very little.” A global problem that will have particular impact on childhood and youth.
In this context, from the Acampa Network, we believe in unity as the only effective way to face these challenges, with the certainty that, sooner or later, our world’s societies will wake up, for the sake of our own survival, with an unstoppable force capable of changing the course of a planet which as of today is sailing adrift.
