U.S. Statement at the IOM Council
December 2, 2004
Linda Thomas-Greenfield
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees

IOM COUNCIL, NOVEMBER 2004
USG STATEMENT

Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Colleagues:

Introductory Remarks

Let me first congratulate Madame Ndioro Ndiaye on her second term as Deputy Director General. We appreciate your tireless work on behalf of trafficking victims and survivors, as well as on your continued emphasis on the need to mainstream gender issues throughout the organization. We applaud your efforts to resolve the growing problem of the arrearages of Member States. Your patience and commitment have led to the conclusion of repayments by several Member States and pledges made by others.

Let me also welcome Ambassador Alba of Mexico as Chair and Ambassador Umer of Pakistan as First Vice-chair, Ambassador Ayalogu of Nigeria as Second Vice-Chair, and Mr. Verheyden of Belgium as Rapporteur. We join others in welcoming four new member states (Bahamas, Brazil, Estonia, and Turkey) as well as one new organization (Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as observer to the Council Session.

DG and DDG Statement

I would like to thank the Director General and Deputy Director General for their comprehensive statements, which both highlighted the excellent work of IOM and the challenges that lay ahead. We appreciate IOM's work, from activities dealing with migrant movement processing and assistance to capacity-building and anti-trafficking efforts. IOM has proven to be a very good partner in sometimes very difficult situations around the world.

Managing Growth

We note that reflection and focus on mandates and core service areas are keys to properly managing growth. IOM's first priority should be to provide quality performance in its core service areas. IOM should guard against broadening its programs too widely over the spectrum of humanitarian activities and should continue to focus on mandate and professional competencies. At the same time, IOM historically has been a service-driven organization, and indeed that is one of its great strengths. We appreciate IOM's flexibility and responsiveness in environments where other organizations do not have this ability and may take months or years to become fully engaged.

Arrears

The USG supports the IOM Administration's ongoing efforts to encourage Member States to settle their arrears promptly; in particular, we support efforts to encourage those Member States that currently are subject to the provisions of Article 4 of the constitution to agree to a satisfactory repayment plan as soon as possible. We encourage Member States to take their membership seriously - there are certain benefits, as well as obligations linked to membership of IOM.

Management

On management issues, we continue to urge the IOM leadership to review the IOM internal management and organizational structure, with an eye toward improving the work of the organization. We welcome Dirk de Winter to the position of Director of Management Coordination and hope that he will focus on several issues, including closer collaboration with the Staff Association Committee (SAC), especially in light of some of the allegations made by the SAC at Subcommittee on Budget and Finance (SCBF); continued coordination on a regular basis with other multilateral organizations, including UNHCR; and working toward increasing representation of women at senior levels within IOM through recruitment and staff development.

International Migration and IOM's work

(We thank the representatives of the independent Global Commission on international Migration for their interesting presentations during our first day of Council. As was noted, migration is a vast field, which continues to grow. Unfortunately, financial and human resources will always be limited. Thus, there must be an ongoing, two-way dialogue between Member States and IOM's leadership.) At the SCBF, many speakers praised IOM for improved transparency, and that must continue. But we as members must also contribute our time and ideas to help set IOM's priorities and provide policy guidance. Therefore, we must be active in working with IOM's leadership in setting the international migration agenda, as well as IOM's role within it.

The U.S. position on international migration issues is straightforward. We support - and advocate for - humane, orderly, and legal migration. We believe it is beneficial to both sending and receiving countries, as well as to the migrants themselves. We remain a strong supporter of IOM's work to promote regional dialogues worldwide, as they offer the most practical opportunities for addressing shared region-specific migration challenges and developing concrete shared responses. We congratulate IOM's continued work in these efforts and value IOM's experience in facilitating regional cooperation. We also commend IOM's technical assistance programs to strengthen national migration management capacities, including through the provision of model legislation and training.

For the United States, one of IOM's greatest values is its work to promote migration as a win-win phenomenon for both sending and receiving states. Therefore, we encourage IOM's initiatives on migration and health, the facilitation of legal migration, the promotion of integration, and the protection of migrants from exploitation, as they are consistent with IOM's mandate and international law.

IOM has proven to be a very compatible partner with the U.S. government and other Member States around the world. We believe that IOM is an appropriate center of multilateral migration debate and dialogue and look to IOM to take a leading role in these discussions. We believe it is time for the organization to craft a Strategy Paper, which would take a retrospective look at the work it has accomplished in the past ten years, how it has evolved in that time, and its vision for the future. IOM's work in migration is important and unique, and we should try to preserve IOM's role as a central body providing policy advice and services on migration. As migration becomes an increasingly important focus for the international community, IOM should take a proactive approach in crafting its Strategy Paper and use that paper as a starting point for future consultations.

The United States supports IOM's continued collaborative approach with the UN, including UNHCR, and other international organizations, as well as NGOs. Strengthening these partnerships through dialogue and coordination is essential to any successful operation. An excellent example of this partnership was the recent IOM-UNHCR joint seminar, graciously hosted by the Government of the Bahamas on "Contingency Planning for Mixed Migratory Flows in the Caribbean." IOM and UNHCR brought together officials from immigration and foreign ministries, natural disaster planners, and UNHCR honorary liaisons from 20 Caribbean countries. This very successful joint effort provided participants with region-specific guidance in contingency planning for mass migration in the Caribbean.

We praise IOM's ongoing work in both Afghanistan and Iraq. IOM continues to provide valuable advice and assistance to the Iraq Property Claims Commission (IPCC), aiding the resolution of remaining legal disputes, claims processes, and public information campaigns. In Afghanistan, IOM successfully assisted with the out of country registration and voting of more than one million Afghans living in Pakistan and Iran during the October 9 election. IOM will use this expertise in Iraq, where it has recently signed an agreement with the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq in order to implement an out of country voting program for the Transitional National Assembly Election scheduled for January 2005. The out of country voting program will be conducted in 14 countries, where eligible Iraqis will have the opportunity to vote in a free and fair democratic election.

Conclusion

Mr. Chairman, we are living in a time of great change, in which the dialogue and interest in migration is ever expanding and in which protection and security of both beneficiaries and humanitarian workers continue to be a concern. We also know that IOM faces many challenges in the years ahead, as it responds to attendant international policy issues and the ever-increasing complexity of humanitarian work. However, we are confident that IOM can meet those challenges, and we look forward to continued close collaboration in the coming year.