Asia’s migrant crisis meeting unlikely to yield solutions

A meeting in Bangkok on Friday about Southeast Asia’s migrant crisis is unlikely to produce a binding agreement or plan of action to save thousands of people believed stranded on boats, participants said. The meeting will bring together 17 countries from across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and elsewhere in Asia, along with the United States, Switzerland and international organisations like UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. But many attendees are not ministerial-level and the meeting may not have the heft that organisers in Bangkok hope for. According to the Thai Foreign Ministry, at least three of the countries central to the crisis will not be sending ministers: Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia.

If [statehood] is not currently possible because of the law, making sure they are given an equivalent status, a legal status, is incredibly important to resolving the crisis.

Volker Turk, UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection

Greece has also asked the European Union for help in dealing with the thousands of migrants who have arrived on its shores in recent months. According to estimates by the Greek government, some 37,500 immigrants and asylum seekers have reached the country illegally so far this year. The Greek coast guard says nearly 12,000 were arrested last month, almost a seven-fold increase on the previous month’s total of 6,583, with nearly all of them on the islands facing the Turkish coast. Overnight on Wednesday, the coast guard picked up 216 people in the Aegean Sea after they tried to sail to the islands from the Turkish coast.

World Greece migrants