David Miliband has called on the British government to take in its fair share of refugees fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts, and said continued failure to do so would represent an abandonment of the UK’s legal and humanitarian traditions.



The former foreign secretary, who now heads the International Rescue Committee (IRC) aid agency, has told the Guardian that the strict limits Britain has placed on the acceptance of refugees represented a double standard that would ultimately undermine Britain’s influence abroad.

“When I hear people say we’ve got to firm up our borders, it makes me think of the message we’re sending to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, which is to keep their borders open for Syrians,” Miliband said in an interview in New York.

“People in Britain have got to understand that these countries notice the difference between what we’re saying and what we’re doing.”

The UK granted asylum to roughly 10,000 refugees last year, significantly fewer than most other wealthy western European countries. On a per capita basis, Britain’s record is one of the meanest on the continent. Miliband, who was Labour’s foreign secretary from 2007 to 2010, said that performance represented a turning away from the country’s more welcoming past.



“Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK,” he said. “The reasons we did so were good in the the 40s and 50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others.”

The IRC is helping to meet the immediate humanitarian needs of the thousands of desperate refugees arriving daily on the Greek island of Lesbos. An estimated 4,000 arrived on Saturday alone. According to the agency, with 80% fleeing war in Syria and 14% escaping chronic conflict in Afghanistan.



Miliband said the language used by British government, and much of the UK media, to describe the crisis, referring to migrants rather than refugees (although the majority arriving on Europe’s shores are fleeing war or persecution), reflected a conscious effort to deny them their rights enshrined by international convention.

“It is a misnamed crisis, and it seems not misnamed by accident. It’s been too convenient to misname it as a migrant crisis, because it suggests these people are voluntarily fleeing, whereas in fact – if you’ve been barrel-bombed out of your home three times, life and limb demand that you flee,” he said. “It’s not about being politically incorrect in using the term migrant. It’s simply incorrect.”

Germany, France and the UK have called for a meeting of EU interior and justice ministers in mid-September to work out new responses to the crisis. The US has said it would open its doors to more Syrian refugees, having taken in less than a thousand so far, but its plan is to take in only 8,000 by the end of next year.



Miliband said: “There needs to be some burden-sharing ... bigger countries taking more people than smaller countries, richer countries taking more people than poorer countries. Historically the US has taken about 50% of the world’s resettled refugees. It would certainly help the European debate if the Americans were seen to be stepping up.”

