The British government has finally issued a response to the rapidly growing official petition against the United Nations Global Compact for Migration which was rubber-stamped in Marrakesh on Monday.
Petitions reaching 10,000 signatures are entitled to a Government response, while petitions reaching 100,000 signatures must be considered by the Backbench Business Committee of the House of Commons for a full parliamentary debate — the petition against the UN Compact for Migration has already passed 120,000 signatures.
Just days before the United Kingdom signed up to the controversial agreement, the Government finally issued its response. Curiously, the task fell not to the Prime Minister herself, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) which deals with international relations, or the Home Office which is tasked with managing immigration, but the unpopular Department for International Development (Foreign Aid).
The department has come under criticism in the past for doling out over £14 billion a year to countries including China, an arguably hostile superpower governed by a Communist dictatorship, North Korea, an unarguably hostile power governed by a Communist dictatorship, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state which is about to launch its own space programme.
The choice of DfID as petition respondent may do little to assuage signatories’ concerns that the UN Compact forms part of a wider globalist agenda on migration.
In its response, the Government is clear that its confidence in the compact has not been dented, and that it still has their full backing.
“The Compact is not legally binding,” the response assures, before adding vaguely: “It creates a framework to allow countries to work together to make global migration more beneficial for everyone.”
The Government also insists that the compact “respects the sovereignty of all states to decide who enters their territory” and “does not establish a ‘human right to migrate’ or create any new legal categories of migrant.”
This stands in stark contrast to the assessment of the United States, which pulled out of the compact last year: “We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country,” the Americans insisted. “The global approach in the [compact] is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”
The British government notes in passing that it is “aware that a small number of countries have chosen not to endorse [the Global Compact].”
This rather underestimates the scale of the revolt against the UN scheme, as the United States has been joined by Australia, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic in rejecting it, with Matteo Salvini’s half of Italy’s populist coalition government also declining to endorse it and the Belgian coalition government actually breaking up over the prime minister’s decision to back it.
All this would tend to suggest it is more than the non-binding, aspirational, and essentially toothless document that its proponents — including the British government — have sold it as.
The Backbench Business Committee is yet to announce when or if it will arrange for the compact — which the UK agreed to in Marrakech on Monday and will sign officially in New York on December 19th — to be debated.