Thank you, co-chair.
Norway underlines the importance of increasing the access to and quality of education for refugees as well as their host communities, and in this regard, we see a clear link to the sustainable development agenda.
The zero draft proposes to explore innovative financing mechanisms to increase investment in education. Norway would propose to use already existing mechanisms such as Education Cannot Wait and the Global Partnership for Education instead of establishing parallel initiatives.
Norway also underlines the importance of protecting education from attack and we would propose to include a reference to Safe Schools.
We value the zero draft’s gender perspective, the promotion of meaningful participation of women and girls and the call to prevent and respond to sexual and gender-based violence.
We welcome the idea of establishing an asylum capacity support group.
As a longstanding resettlement country, Norway would like to see more states contributing with resettlement programs and/or complementary legal pathways. Norway supports a resettlement pledging process. Multi-year pledges on resettlement may, however, be challenging since the resettlement quota is part of the national budget, adopted on a yearly basis.
We support the establishment of a resettlement core group in specific situations. Such core groups already exist and Norway participates in them. We would like to understand if the proposed core group will be different in nature or scope from those that we already have.
Norway has unallocated resettlement places for emergency cases, including people with urgent or serious medical needs, but the proposal of dedicating at least 10 per cent of resettlement submissions for such cases raises some questions that we would have to discuss further.
Thank you.