Leoluca Orlando. Demotix/lucio ganci. All rights reserved.
The refugee crisis and the Palermo Charter
This October, Leoluca Orlando, Mayor of Palermo, visited Goldsmiths, University of London with a new pioneering initiative. He was giving his lecture entitled ‘Genocides versus human rights’ and presenting to the assembled staff and students his International Human Mobility Charter of Palermo 2015 – its first outing in the UK. The charter calls for a fundamental change in the treatment of displaced people, “from migration as suffering, to mobility as an inalienable human right.” International Human Mobility, Charter of Palermo 2015 (PDF).
To respond to the ongoing refugee crisis, Orlando is calling for the abolition of residence permits and a raft of other changes in European legislation that would include the simplification of legislation around employment, housing, healthcare and citizenship. The Charter holds that recent EU proposals to allow legal entry only to those with the necessary ‘qualifications’ and to outsource asylum to outside Europe, “cannot be accepted”. Instead, “Mobility must be recognised as an inalienable right” and, “Everything else, including the concept of ‘security’, too many times and improperly invoked, must be coherent with this approach.”
