A strong call to the international community to “protect migrants and refugees”, while avoiding “deportation and forced repatriation”: it has been made today by Caritas internationalis and the Jesuit Refugee Service, which are organising an event in New York to coincide with the first World Summit that the UN will be holding today to discuss migrants and refugees, 65 million of them in the world, a record-breaking number that has no precedents. The two Catholic organisations ask to “respond to the needs of migrants and refugees”, and give priority to women and children. The UN member states, they say, “must clearly commit to protecting evacuees” and must act upon such commitments “by implementing domestic policies”, so that “migration will be a choice, not a need”. Basically, the member countries are asked “to respond to the long-term needs of migrants, especially those who live outside the camps, providing subsistence, education and employment” as well as “welfare services”. In addition, on a local and international scale, “fighting people smugglers is a priority in emergency programmes and long-term measures”. Caritas and Jrs also ask the UN to “change the current facilities” and be more “transparent in the allocation of funds”. In addition, they warn these countries that they “must not affect the donor countries’ aids to migration-related priorities”, then they denounce the “deportation and forced repatriation of people, and the rewording and reinterpretation of international humanitarian laws on refugees”. Today’s Summit, they conclude, “is and epoch-marking opportunity to strengthen the international response to migration, and to create a system to protect the rights and respond to the needs of a vast movement of refugees and migrants”.