That was what the Chair of the Milli Majlis Mrs Sahiba Gafarova said whilst speaking at the international conference ‘Protection of Migrant Children and Rescue of Missing Children’ organised today upon the joint initiative of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons.

The Chair of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey Mr Mustafa Sentop and the PACE President Mr Ric Daems who attended the conference, too, spoke of the importance and timeliness to the international community of the subject that the Chair of the Milli Majlis had brought up. Mrs Gafarova recalled her having kept the problem of migrant children in the focus and called for greater international attention to the matter during her chairmanship of the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons in 2016-2018.

Citing a few figures spelling out the gravity of the problem at hand, Madame Speaker mentioned that 31 million children had been evicted from homes by the end of 2018, adding, ‘As many as 1,600 migrant children lost their lives between the years 2014 and 2018 alone, which means a child having died every day. I am certain that the real figures are much more horrifying because the deaths of many migrant children were not put on record.’

Then, Madame Chair referred to the UN report released in May 2020 and saying that 19 million children were forced out of their homes by conflicts and violence during 2019 alone. Consequently, children account for 12 per cent of the migrants world-wide now; put in other words, one out of every eight migrants is a child.

‘Those figures are appalling, they do knell. The recent spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has made the matters yet more alarming,’ Mrs Gafarova summed up.

Whilst expressing satisfaction with the increasingly close attention that the PACE and other international organisations are paying the problem of migrant children, Madame Speaker, however, stressed with regret that the situation was not changing for better. She remembered that she was one of the 22 PACE members to sign in October 2017 the draft resolution on refugees and migrant children gone missing in Europe. In her opinion, the low efficiency of the work done in this field is due to the ‘struggling with the consequences’ whilst the causes – wars, armed conflicts, climatic challenges, poverty and other global problems – are not being tackled effectively.

The Chair of the Milli Majlis told the conference participants of the numerous refugees and displaced people in Azerbaijan, too, and of the country having had to cope with this problem for long years. She mentioned that Azerbaijan was subjected to the impact of the occupation policy of Armenia in the early 1990s. As a consequence, Azerbaijan also ended up facing the problem of 1 million refugees and displaced people whose sheer numbers meant that 1 out of every 8 citizens of the country was either a refugee or a displaced person.

‘And yet, the silence of the international community and the fact that Armenia went unpunished for all that resulted in the Armenian occupation that had lasted for 30 years, the years during which 20 per cent of the territory of Azerbaijan remained captured. The occupation had continued until Azerbaijan freed its lands during the 44-day Patriotic War,’ Mrs Gafarova continued.

Madame Speaker was thus suggesting that the quiet of the international community and, especially importantly, of the international organisations as well as their inefficiency had only led to aggravation of the global issues including the problem of migrants.

Sahiba Gafarova also remarked that the absence of stability in such countries as Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen and, in general, around the Mediterranean, and the difficulties that this instability posed for Turkey, too, were consequent to the inefficient efforts made by the international organisations. Turkey is harbouring 3.6 mn people from Syria alone right now, which is very commendable; still, the international community truly ought to think things over thoroughly, according to Mrs Gafarova.

At the end of the event, the Chair of the Milli Majlis thanked the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and Mr Mustafa Sentop personally as well as the PACE President Rik Daems and the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons for their help in holding such an important conference and for having invited the Speaker of the Azerbaijani Parliament to the conference as a guest of honour.

The Press and Public Relations Department
The Milli Majlis