"Refugees in Europe. Looking from the present to the future"

Turkey has received 1.8 million refugees. Lebanon, 1.2 million. Jordan, almost 630,000 and Iraq almost 250,000. In the European Union there is on-going debate about taking in 120,000 refugees. Spain will take in 15,000, buy to date only 11 have officially arrived.

While negotiations and procedures are being settled, European governments have set up barriers at the entry points of refugees, who are mainly fleeing from the war in Syria, including the temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement in Germany, frontier controls in Austria and the implementation in Hungary of a law on foreigners that includes prison sentences for those who illegally enter a country.

The "Refugees in Europe. Looking from the present to the future" event is being organized by the Solidarity Autonomous Foundation (FAS) and Cultura en Viu to encourage critical thinking about this crisis and to analyze its causes and consequences. The event will be held on 10 December at 14.00, coinciding with International Human Rights Day.

The event will be attended by Pamela Urrutia, a specialist in the analysis of armed conflicts, sociopolitical crises and peace processes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She will discuss the conflict that the refugee crisis and the war in Syria have created and will analyze it from a gender point of view. Andrés Mourenza, a freelance journalist in Istanbul and Athens will also take part, by presenting an analysis of the media's work in specific situations in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Finally Miquel Pajares, a member of the  Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR), doctor of Social Anthropology, member of the Research Group on Exclusion and Social Control at the UB and the author of several books will talk about the specific reception context in the EU and Catalonia today. The meeting will be moderated by Xavier Giró, a professor of political journalism at the UAB and director of the Research Group Observatory on the coverage of conflicts (OCC).

The meeting forms part of the #UniversitatsRefugi initiative, organized by all Catalan public universities and ACUP, which promotes events and activities to raise awareness and also help and take in refugees.

The round-table conference will be held in the Àgora building theatre, and will be open to the whole community by advance registration, on this form. The event will encourage a juridical and legal approach to the receiving of refugees, a sociopolitical view of the armed conflicts that have caused the refugee crisis and an analysis of what the media reports about this situation and how.