Newly Elected France terre d’asile President Calls for Action After Deadly Melilla Border Tragedy

"In France, in Europe, in the world, what can we do to be worthy of our fundamental mission of welcoming and therefore of our human condition with a capital H? So that the tragic events and the vision of horror of Melilla never happen again? So that our Mediterranean Sea ceases to be a mass grave? So that the lives of exiles cease to be a negligible quantity? What public policy should be conducted to get them out of makeshift camps and offer them life prospects?" she questions in a post on her Twitter account.

According to Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the right to asylum, so often challenged these days, needs to be mobilized for. "No one is immune from needing its protection one day. Today to flee misery, a conflict, the madness of men. Tomorrow perhaps simply to find water," she argues, also stressing that childhood needs to be protected.
"Whether it has the chance to thrive in a stable and secure home, or whether it is tossed about by events and tragedies to the point of ending up in exile, delivered to wandering. For this is what we are talking about behind this term ’unaccompanied foreign minors’ that has become like an insult and the so-called ’source of all our ills’ according to flyers and increasingly numerous voices in the public debate," adds the former French Minister of Education.