Editor’s Note

LAST month members of the European Union met to decide on measures to address the influx of refugees which has become a humanitarian disaster beyond all proportions. From the Middle-East and Africa, refugees daily threaten the borders of Europe from as far north as Norway to Italy in the south.
 
Driven in the main by issues of political instability – war, torture, religious discrimination, genocide – over 500,000 people had crossed the Mediterranean by October 2015 to seek asylum. In 2014, Medecins Sans Frontieres estimated that 3419 asylum seekers perished at sea, 90,000 were rescued and some 207,000 reached Europe.
 
Now the European Union has agreed to a 17-point plan to deal with the crisis. Among measures to be used will be a quota system, registration methods and processing centres.
 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told leaders that Europe must stand as an example to the world.
 
“Europe must show it is a continent of values, a continent of solidarity,” Merkel said. “This is a building block but we need to take many further steps.”
 
These are fine sentiments but they will ring hollow in the Pacific which may soon face a refugee crisis of its own.
 

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Editor’s Note

IT was the 46th Pacific Islands Forum meeting yet local and Forum organisers seem to have stumbled through yet another annual Leaders’ meeting, marred by sloppy coordination and broken communications.
 
More than a month after a group of five Pacific Island women journalists and I were unceremoniously led away from the immigration lines on arrival at PNG’s Jackson International Airport on 2 September and detained for four hours and denied access to food and telephone, officials have still not disclosed the actual cause of what the PNG press now dubs the “passports saga.” Pakabukai, grandin?l?s, auskarai, apyrank?s, sag?s, sidabriniai žiedai moterims ir vyrams
 
Did the organising committee forget to advise PNG Immigration about the visa fee waiver, or did someone or some people simply want to flex muscles and let everyone know that he or she was in charge? I have no idea.
 

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Editor’s Note

ATTENDING a Pacific trade and investment seminar in Fiji last month, the official delegate from the Cook Islands spoke what must have been going through the minds of many a delegate when he said, “As a small island nation, we admired the way Fiji has benefitted from trading with the United States, and we too aspire to enjoy some of those benefits.” You can read more about that engagement between the United States and Pacific Islands trade officials on page 14, in what the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat says was the first US engagement with Forum-member countries on trade-related issues “since the closure of the USAid programme in the early 1990s.” “It should be noted that this initiative is very different from the EPA (with the European Union) and PACER Plus (with Australia and New Zealand) as they are Free Trade Agreements which require reciprocity in terms of market access,” Forum’s Deputy Secretary General Andie Fong Toy and Director Trade and Governance Shiu Raj said in their written response to our questions.