ZAGREB, November 16, 2018 – Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Friday that Croatia would be represented by Interior Minister Davor Božinović in Marrakesh where the United Nationals Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is expected to be endorsed. The Marrakesh Migration Conference is scheduled for 10-11 December.
Božinović will represent Croatia after Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović backed out from going, saying that the U.N. migration pact was causing disputes.
The Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, will be held in Marrakech, Morocco on 10 and 11 December 2018, the UN. has reported on its web site. “This Intergovernmental Conference is convened under the auspices of the General Assembly of the United Nations and held pursuant to the ‘New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants’ (19 September 2016) which decided to launch a process of intergovernmental negotiations leading to the adoption of a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.”
The Marrakesh agreement gives every state the sovereign right to define its own migration policy, protect its borders and decide who to allow into the country, and it clearly differentiates between legal and illegal migration, the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Marija Pejčinović Burić, said at a cabinet meeting on Friday. She presented a report on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.
Croatia was involved with the other 26 EU member states in negotiations on the text of the document, and it was important to all of them that certain fundamental principles were included in the document, which was eventually accomplished, the minister said.
“The Global Compact is not an international treaty, it is not legally binding and hence it is not signed. It is a catalogue of measures encouraging states to cooperate on issues related to regular migration,” Pejčinović Burić said.
“States sovereignly decide which measures they will apply in accordance with national law and existing international legal commitments. Every state will continue to sovereignly decide on its own national policy on migration and the stay of foreign nationals on its territory and this concerns only regular migration,” she said.
Pejčinović Burić welcomed the decision for Minister of the Interior Davor Božinović to represent Croatia at the Marrakesh conference. Božinović said that no country could deal with the problem of migration on its own, adding that it was a global issue that could not be ignored. “This document does not open the door to new migrants,” he said, stressing that any attempt at international level to alleviate the migration pressure deserved attention.
“Migration cannot be dealt with on anyone’s borders. It can be dealt with, or I should say alleviated, only through cooperation between states and by removing the causes at their origin, which the Compact addresses,” Božinović said.
The government will send Pejčinović Burić’s report and a translation of the Global Compact to parliament.
For more on Croatia’s migrant policies, click here.
