Ministers from 27 nations met in Lima, Peru's capital, on Monday
to discuss methods of regularizing international migration, Peru's
Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The International Ministerial Conference for Developing Nations
with International Migrant Flows, aims to create agreements and
recommendations together with developed nations which receive the
greatest number of migrants, according to the statement.
"Informality is one of the central characteristics of today's
migration," Peru's Foreign Minister Oscar Maurtua said in an
opening speech. "And for this reason thousands of men and women
from poor countries are the object of ill-treatment, abuse and
illegal trafficking."
The conference, which ends on Tuesday, has brought together
officials from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and east
Europe -- the regions witnessing a total emigrant flow of more than
1 million people each year.
The conference is expected to reach an agreement called the Lima
Declaration, which will be an important premise for a UN migration
and development conference due in September in New York.
Because of the large number of emigrants from Latin America and
the Caribbean, some nations from these regions receive as much as
10 percent of their gross national product in remittances,
according to data from the Inter-American Development Bank.
(Xinhua News Agency May 16, 2006))
