The Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the highest award of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)the Nansen Prizein a ceremony where he defended the refugee reception policy that he championed in 2015 and 2016 against the “selfishness of wanting a Germany only for Germans”.
“Others, however, thought then that the important thing for the future was to be a country with self-confidenceopen to other human beings,” he stressed in a speech where he stated that “no refugee should be forcibly returned to countries where they suffer persecution.
Merkel acknowledged at the Geneva ceremony thate the massive reception of refugees in 2015 and 2016 mainly from Syria was “a tough challenge” for Germanyfor which he thanked the local governments of the country and the families that participated in the reception campaign.
“I hope that good examples spread, and that more and more people feel compelled to help people who need it,” said the former foreign minister, who recalled that “no person leaves their country frivolously, without having thought about it very well beforehand.” carefully”.
Merkel also reminded countries neighboring Syria at Monday’s ceremony that took on challenges “greater than Germany’s”, in the case of Lebanon or Jordanwith large Syrian communities despite the economic difficulties their countries are experiencing, or Turkey, with 3.8 million people fleeing Syrian territory.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, highlighted when presenting the award to Merkel that the former chancellor “showed vision, courage and strength when people knocked on the doors of Germany in large numbers”, establishing herself as “a moral compass who showed the way to others in Europe and the world”.
“These qualities are greatly needed in the leaders of today’s world, so full of divisions, in which more than one hundred million people have been forced to flee their homes,” said the Italian high commissioner.
Between 2015 and 2016, at the height of the war in Syria that generated a crisis of refugees arriving in Europe, Merkel made the decision that Germany would host 1.2 million refugees and asylum seekers.
On that occasion, Merkel justified the step she was taking by stating that Europe was facing a situation that was putting its values to the test in an exceptional way, that to act in this way was “a humanitarian imperative” y firmly rejected the nationalist arguments that tried to block the measure.
the former chancellor promised to split the prize money ($150,000) to the four winners of the regional categories of this edition: the volunteer fire brigade Mbera (Mauritania), the Nicaraguan humanitarian activist Vicenta González, the Burmese organization Meikswe Myanmar and the Iraqi gynecologist Nagham Hasan.
The UNHCR award takes its name from the Norwegian explorer and pioneer in the fight for the rights of refugees Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the first international high commissioner for the protection of this group (in the League of Nations, which preceded the UN).
In recent years this award has been obtainedamong others, the team of volunteers who in Greece helped to deal with the 2016 refugee crisis, the organization Mariposas de Alas Nuevas, for its assistance to displaced women in Colombia, and the Colombian activist Mayerlín Vergara Pérez, from Fundación Renacer.