Antonio Guterres Quotes

The global movement of displaced people, many of whom end up in detention without hope, is one of the most pressing issues of our times.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity

I approached UNHCR because I believe in what the United Nations. I believe refugees are the most vulnerable people in the world. They are affected by everything, including landmines. They are vulnerable to everything.

Australia would play its role in taking displaced people from the Syrian conflict.

The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.

[Refugees] cannot be stopped, but they can and must be managed better, more humanely, protecting migrants' human rights whilst accepting states' rights to control their borders.

We have a human rights interest. Then there is the immigration problem. The human-rights violations have caused people to take to boats and flood not only the United States, but other countries in the region, creating great instability.

Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.

Can you really send back people to where they are fleeing from?

Every country in the E.U. should make a personnel and a financial contribution in that area. We shouldn't leave alone countries like Italy and Greece that have external borders; rather, we must make the external borders safe together.

When refugees are at a distance it's easy to be compassionate.

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

I hope that something can be done in our piece that reflects on the attention that needs to be paid to the most vulnerable people, like refugees in the world right now, that have to not be politicized, but saved, literally.

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

We pray for the many brothers and sisters who seek refuge far from their native lands, who seek a home where they can live without fear: that they might always be respected in their dignity.

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way, and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they'd passed.

In the global world, we have an unprecedented mobility of peoples, we are aware of the needs of refugees and asylees, and not to speak of the 30 million displaced persons as a result of civil wars within their own countries. And yet the map that we navigate literally is the map of the nation state, and so we have no way as a world community of addressing this problem of border movement and trans-border justice, except through the categories of nation state.

I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.

Migration is as natural as breathing, as eating, as sleeping. It is part of life, part of nature. So we have to find a way of establishing a proper kind of scenario for modern migration to exist. And when I say 'we,' I mean the world. We need to find ways of making that migration not forced.

I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.

We need not to just kill the boat-smuggling business model: we also need to get rid of this asylum-shopping in the European Union.

It shouldn't be the asylum seekers wondering which country they want go to. It should be Europe telling them where to be, be it Lithuania, Sweden, or wherever.

The twenty-first century will be characterized by the mass movement of people being pushed and pulled within and beyond their borders by conflict, calamity, or opportunity.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.