Global Compact Enabling Complicity in the Ultimate Crime against Humanity

Institutionalizing global myopia in anticipation of excessive population growth

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The UN's Global Compact for Migration (GCM) sets out nonbinding guidelines for an integrated approach to international migration (Refugees and Migrants, 2018). It is upheld as the first, intergovernmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner. As the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, the full text was finalized by UN Member States (New York, 13 July 2018) in preparation for the  Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration  (Marrakech, December 2018).

A number of countries have already indicated that they will not adhere to the provisions of the GCM. The following critique focuses on the total absence of any consideration of how the challenges of migration will become all the greater with the unconstrained growth in population of impoverished countries which are the primary source of migrants. The probability of ever increasing pressure to migrate is all the greater as the foreseen inability to cope with extreme shortages of food, water, land, shelter, health care, and other resources, becomes apparent.

Through the focus on the immediate logistical challenges to receiving countries posed by the arrival of migrants in ensuring their well-being and survival, the GCM is effectively an instrument of negligence with respect to the survival of those seeking to migrate in the years and decades to come. It also disguises the reality of the extreme levels of suffering and fatality which multitudes will experience in the future. At the same time the GCM obscures the nature of the pressures on populations and lifestyles in countries to which migrants seek to come. In that sense, as a legal framework, the Compact merits comparison with the legendary Trojan Horse, as argued separately (Humanitarian intervention as a Trojan Horse for Europe? 2018).

Framed as a global humanitarian commitment responsive to the tragedies of the present and the immediate future, the GCM totally fails to respond to the millions whose deaths are enabled by failure to address the process by which far greater numbers will be faced with such tragedy. As such it merits recognition as an act of global negligence, effectively a global crime against humanity -- which that future may caricature as a Global Crime of Man, since it is primarily by men that it has been formulated.

The GCM is a further instance of the inability of global governance to act coherently and effectively -- beyond token measures adapted to the public relations needs of the moment. The pattern is evident in claims for unquestionable urgency of action with respect to climate change by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN, The Guardian, 8 October 2018). Potentially more tragic, it is evident with respect to the astounding rate of extinction of wildlife, as part of the systematic process of degradation of the environment (Humans have caused wild animal populations to drop by 60% since 1970 according to WWF's Living Planet Report, BBC, 31 October 2018; Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN, The Guardian, 3 November 2018).

In both cases, as with the GCM, every care is taken to craft reporting such as to avoid any mention of the exacerbating consequences of population growth -- or any sense whatsoever that the planet may be overpopulated beyond any capacity to cope. The "crisis of crises" is also framed such as to neglect any implication that the planet has become ungovernable, and may become increasingly so as resolution is sought through conflict -- itself engendering migration (Ungovernability of Sustainable Global Democracy? Towards engaging appropriately with time, 2011). The deliberate failure to analyze the root cause of such crises in promoting instruments like the GCM is appropriately understood as an exercise in cultivating the Big Lie of global civilization (Existential Challenge of Detecting Today's Big Lie: mysterious black hole conditioning global civilization? 2016).

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