[Episcopal News Service] Two people from the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe are attending the United Nations Global Refugee Forum Progress Review meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Dec. 15-17.
Bishop Mark Edington is an official participant, and Giulia Bonoldi, managing director of Rome’s Joel Nafuma Refugee Center and the convocation’s chief welcoming officer for refugees and migrants, joined as a guest.
The meeting takes place under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N.’s refugee agency, and comes two years after the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, the world’s largest international gathering on refugees.
The forum meets every four years to inspire support for refugees and discuss forced displacement around the world.
The review meeting is designed to expand support for refugees and work on implementing pledges made at the most recent forum.
At the 2023 forum, The Episcopal Church pledged its commitment to support refugees, noting resolutions adopted by General Convention in 2022 and 2018 that expressed full support of measures to protect refugees and asylum-seekers, including LGBTQ+ people, taken by the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration.
Edington, who also attended the 2023 forum, told Episcopal News Service by email that this review meeting highlighted for him what a crisis it is “that some of the wealthiest nations in the world are turning away from the needs of the most vulnerable people in the world at just the moment that there are more refugees fleeing violence, war and climate change than at any earlier point in human history.”
In response, he said faith communities can play a crucial role by stepping into a vacuum left by reduced public funding. “We cannot solve the whole problem, but we can do something — and we are capable of doing even more than we have been doing.”
For Bonoldi, the meeting offered “a shared commitment to deliver on pledges,” she said by email. However, she saw that “significant challenges” emerged around asylum and protection of displaced people “at a time when the gap between growing humanitarian needs and declining funding continues to widen.”
Across the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, which in Western Europe includes parishes and missions in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, congregations are serving refugees through its refugee grant program.
The convocation began serving refugees, with support from Episcopal Relief & Development, in 2022 at the start of the war in Ukraine.
Edington and Bonoldi were joined at the meeting by Tanzania Archbishop Maimbo Mndolwa, the Anglican Communion’s representative to the UNHCR Multi-Religious Council of Leaders, and Martha Jarvis, the Anglican Communion’s permanent representative at the United Nations.
Lynnaia Main, The Episcopal Church’s representative to the United Nations, in an email to ENS thanked Edington and Bonoldi “for their representation alongside the Anglican Communion and other faith-based partners” and prayed “for the safety and security of all asylum seekers and refugees around the world.”
— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.