ZAGREB, November 6, 2018 - Foreign and European Affairs Minister Marija Pejčinović Burić said on Tuesday that she still could not see what President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović found disputable in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and expressed regret at the nervous reactions from the Office of the Croatian President to this document.
Minister Pejčinović Burić, who was attending an international conference on building democratic security at the Mediterranean in Dubrovnik, responded to the criticism which President Grabar-Kitarović voiced against the foreign ministry accusing it of failing to do its part of the job concerning the Marrakesh document. "The Foreign and European Affairs Ministry has done its part of the job well. I, as the person at the helm of the ministry and somebody who has an insight in it, can say that the job in the negotiations has been well done," the minister said today.
The Global Compact is actually not a treaty and is not meant to be signed, it is not a legally binding document and enables each country to regulate the issue of regular migrants the way it sees fit, removing all insinuations that something could be imposed on Croatia, the minister reiterated.
"This is the first document since the establishment of the United Nations that is intended to regulate the important matter of migrations and regular migrations. It offers a catalogue of measures and best practices that can be applied and facilitates the efforts of countries to handle regular migrations," the minister said.
The point is that the document can enhance the communication and cooperation among countries so as to lessen migratory pressures. After the finalisation of the Global Compact document, Croatia can choose what corresponds to its national interests, the minister added.
She said that Croatia had been already implementing some of the measures from that catalogue and that it would like also to contribute to the establishment a better system to address the issue at the global level. "We are persistent in our position when it comes to this issue," the minister underscored, adding that countries that have scrapped the document, have done that for their specific reasons.
On Monday, the President said the foreign ministry that coordinated the negotiations, failed to do its job. "Instead of releasing my correspondence to the media, they had an obligation to inform the public what this is about. They did not do their job," Grabar-Kitarović said.
Although at first she, in her own words, had "enthusiastically" accepted the invitation of the UN Secretary General to take part in a Marrakesh conference on the adoption of the Global Compact in December, her position now is ambivalent. Grabar Kitarović said: "I neither support nor don't support the document."
During the Dubrovnik conference, Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković also commented on this topic saying that the disputes in the Croatian politics regarding this topic were not the first conflict of this kind. He said that he wondered who was generating those disputes. "First we had conflicts over the Istanbul Convention, that over the Vukovar rally, and now Marrakesh document, and all those matters are not meant to cause disputes," he said, warning that the topics on which social consensus should be made, seem to trigger off discussions from the ideological points of view.
Somebody is intentionally sparking off such conflicts and is trying to provoke disputes between the president and the government, said Jandroković.
Grabar-Kitarović's participation in the Marrakesh conference has caused a new disagreement between her office and the government after a controversial TV host published on his Facebook wall an alleged reply from the Office of the President saying that she would not sign the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in Marrakesh and that her office was not involved in talks on the document.
Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said this past Friday that the Global Compact regulated only legal migration and that he had been informed that President Grabar-Kitarović would go to Morocco in December for the ratification. He would not comment on media reports that the president would not go to Morocco, saying that, as far as he knew, she planned to attend the Global Compact ratification conference in Marrakesh because she was invited by the UN secretary-general.
Foreign Minister Pejčinović Burić told a news conference last Friday that she was surprised by announcements that Grabar-Kitarović would not attend the conference, and on that occasion cited Grabar-Kitarović's speech in the UN in which she expressed clear support for the Global Compact.
That prompted the Office of the President to say the president supported the completion of talks on the Marrakesh agreement but that she would not attend the ratification conference and that she had informed the Foreign and European Affairs Ministry of her decision.
To read more about the controversy, click here.
