This June 20th is another opportunity to celebrate World Refugee Day. Established by the United Nations, it aims to honour the strength and resilience of millions of people uprooted by conflict.
In 2025, the event is dedicated to solidarity with refugees and serves as an urgent reminder of the international community’s moral and political responsibility. This solidarity, however, is questioned by a logic in which those who claim to uphold it are the same people who fuel the fires of war.
Displaced Victims Without Refuge for Warfare Financed from a Distance
The war industry hides a tragic irony. The powers that fuel global conflicts, often knowingly, are the first to complain about the migratory flows they have helped create. The United States, the European Union, certain NATO countries, and their economic partners, through their thriving arms industries, are pouring billions into wars they observe from their capitals while civilian populations flee the bombs.
According to the United Nations, by the end of 2024, about 42.7 million refugees are among the 123.2 million people forced to flee their homes worldwide due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or events seriously disturbing public order. In addition, there are 8.4 million asylum seekers and 73.5 million internally displaced persons.
From Gaza to Ukraine, from Somalia to Sudan, via the DRC, millions of people are forced into exile due to conflicts often exacerbated by external interference or geopolitical rivalries transposed onto their soil.
The Hypocrisy of Selective Reception
While Western foreign ministers express outrage at the influx of refugees, they fail to acknowledge their direct or indirect role in the crises. After militarily supporting the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, Western powers opened a now uncontrollable security vacuum for thousands of African migrants. They are then criminalized at the gates of Europe, through no fault of their own.
On one hand, many refuges and asylum seekers are frustrated explaining that “Ukrainian refugees have received a more favourable reception worldwide than others,” proof that political will exists where there is strategic or cultural affinity.
For the other hand, people fleeing equally destructive wars, Europe is shouting, closing its borders, erecting walls, revising laws, outsourcing detention to countries in the Global South, or applying arbitrary quotas.
Host countries have successfully differentiated refugees through the type of treatment they receive. Today’s refugee is a total victim. They have lost everything: their home, their land, their civil rights, their family, sometimes their language. And in host countries, they are accused of threatening local employment, of “taking the place” of the national, of weighing on public finances (etc.).
What is the point of creating wars or supporting them if it is difficult to accept their human consequences? These conflicts did not arise in a vacuum. They are the result of economic, strategic, or energy interests. They report to arms manufacturers, to powers that secure their spheres of influence, and to governments that justify their domestic policies by exporting chaos, among other things.
A structural crisis versus a facade of diplomacy
Major international forums, from the G7 to the UN, debate figures, but rarely structural solutions. Yet, welcoming a refugee is not just a question of quotas; it is an act of justice. It is recognizing that those fleeing chaos seek neither luxury nor comfort, but security, dignity, and a minimum future.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said: “Solidarity must go beyond words” and translate into solutions and sustainable integration. This is where real meaning will be given to the compassion extended to refugees.
Rather than issuing a generic message of compassion filled with hypocrisy, states should face up to their responsibilities. Refugees are neither a danger, nor a burden, nor an intruder. They are the visible consequence of a global system that produces instability to serve its own interests. Their place cannot be on the sidelines. It is at the heart of debates on peace, justice, and humanity.
If global diplomacy operates at two speeds, with alliances that bombard on one side and non-binding resolutions on the other, refugees will remain the collateral damage of a cynical world order.
