The humanitarian crisis can only be tackled with coordination, cooperation and solidarity, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Monday, while addressing heads of state and government at the U.N. World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. Thanking the U.N. and the summit hosts Turkey, the Greek prime minister said the meeting was more essential than ever at a time when the number of people needing humanitarian aid was increasing daily.
“We have a strong conviction that, in order to deal with this challenge, we need a new vision relating to humanitarian aid,” Tsipras said. “We will not be able to unfold this new vision without also creating a new vision for humanity as a whole,” he added.
“In Greece we are facing two major crises simultaneously: the economic and refugee crisis,” Tsipras said, noting that Greece was at the center of a neighborhood also facing major security issues. The discussion underway at the Istanbul summit on Monday and Tuesday was very important in order to “enrich our reactions to the crisis that lies behind all the rest: the humanitarian crisis,” he added.
“Seventy years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights underlined the need to protect the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all people. Since then, significant steps have been made in order to ensure that human rights and humanitarian law are standards on which all countries are judged but we still have some way to go,” Tsipras said, pointing out that the challenges were growing and had multi-sided humanitarian consequences.
(source: ana-mpa)
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