The Courage to Welcome: solidarity in a divided world

One People Oration, Westminster Abbey, London, UK

On Monday, Benesys had the immense pleasure of joining the UNHCR at the beautiful Westminster Abbey to hear the UNHCR High Commissioner, Filippo Grandi, deliver a moving speech as part of the church’s One People oration series. Grandi, who is approaching the end of his ten-year tenure in his role, spoke with an inspiring combination of heart and head on the moral, legal and political complexities of granting asylum.

Refugees, he noted, sit at the centre of a global increase in war and violence. There are currently some 130 active conflicts worldwide and roughly 170 million people forcibly displaced, including internally displaced persons, refugees, asylum seekers and stateless individuals, a figure that has nearly doubled over the past ten years. This proliferation of fragmented conflicts is accompanied by declining trust in institutions designed to uphold international law and shared norms. The loss of faith in these structures, combined with accelerating misinformation and the absence of a shared factual foundation, makes coordinated and durable solutions increasingly difficult to achieve.

Grandi addressed several challenging aspects of asylum: its occasional misuse, public anxieties, and the wider pressures bearing on host societies. He delivered a reminder that for most refugees, safe return is the ultimate goal, as is now being seen in returns to Syria. Mixed arrivals of refugees and migrants undeniably create administrative pressures for host nations, whose systems can become overloaded and perceived as being exploited when migrants, often driven by the absence of legal migration routes, turn to asylum procedures. However, Grandi made clear that asylum must not be viewed as a loophole; it is a life-saving legal right. He called for a careful balance between protecting host nations’ economies and states’ rights to manage migration while adhering to the principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Though often misunderstood as restrictive, the Convention was created to offer guidance rather than limitations. As its custodian, this is where the UNHCR is primed to offer support.

As part of the way forward, Grandi argued for the expansion and regulation of legal migration pathways and the sustained financing of lower-income countries hosting large refugee populations, such as Chad, which has received more than one million refugees from Sudan since April 2023. He further advocated for policies of refugee inclusion, urging the removal of restrictions that entrench dependence on humanitarian aid, including constraints on movement and access to employment. Only by enabling autonomy, he suggested, can societies build systems in which the protective purpose of asylum can genuinely thrive. It is, he asserted, “better to invest in the possibility of peace than the certainty of war.”

Rooted in the earliest civilisations and reflected across religious traditions, Grandi’s words positioned the act of welcoming strangers, of granting asylum, as one of the finest acts of humanity. What is needed is knowledge, patience and, above all, compassion. “The task ahead,” he concluded, “is one of solidarity.”