Honduras: towards a comprehensive migration policy

 
Honduras
10 October, 2019

Tegucigalpa. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) organized the meeting Towards the creation of a comprehensive migration policy, in which national and international experts met in the capital of Honduras as a starting point for developing a National Migration Policy that address immigrant, emigrant, migrant in transit, and returnee flows.

During the meeting, former general directors of Migration from Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia presented the best practices and common elements that have enabled the consolidation of migration policies in those countries.

“Thanks to the development of this new comprehensive migration policy, Honduras will get closer to achieving orderly, safe, and regular migration,” stated Salvador Gutierrez, Deputy Chief of Mission of IOM for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras during the opening of the event.  “According to the migration governance profile of Honduras prepared by IOM in 2018, one of the areas identified with potential for improvement in the country is precisely the need to create a national migration strategy that assigns general control of migration policy to a single entity,” he added.

In order to address this need, IOM is providing technical advising on migration policy to the Secretariat of Governance, Justice, and Decentralization (SDJD) through Sergio Bueno, Senior Migration Advisor, who has over 25 years of experience in migration and consolidation of public policy. He led the team which created, consolidated, and modernized the institution “Migración Colombia” and was its director for three and a half years.

Currently, Bueno is conducting interviews in Honduras and surveying representatives of senior governmental leadership, international bodies, NGOs, civil society organizations, industry, and multidisciplinary professionals at the leadership level of different institutional areas. The information collected will help SGJD in the process of developing this new comprehensive migration policy.

Both the meeting and the technical support to SGJD are part of IOM’s Regional Migration Program: Mesoamerica-The Caribbean, financed by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the Department of State of the United States of America.