Iran's HR Council hosts Afghan migrants to mark Intl. Migrants Day
Yusef Jalali
Press TV, Tehran
House of Kabul is a small but cozy coffee shop in downtown Tehran. As it's name suggests, it's owned and operated by Afghan migrants.
The cafe hosted reporters along with officials from the Iranian High Council for Human rights for a friendly gathering to mark the International Migrants Day.
It was a chance to both have a cup of tasty Afghan Tea called Qeimaq and talk about the issues facing Afghan refugees in Iran.
This was also the case for the owner of House of Kabul café, who moved to Iran 35 years ago and studied fine arts, and then ran this café as a family business. His son Ali Akbar who works as a barista here says it was not an easy job to launch this coffee shop.
More than three million Afghans live in Iran, around one million of them are refugees who have fled the ongoing conflict driven by terrorism and the presence of foreign troops in their country.
Together with some 30,000 Iraqi refugees, they made Iran the 8th largest refugee-hosting country in the world in 2019.
The head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights did not ignore the issues migrants face in Iran and said he was here to listen to their concerns.
Based on the United Nations’ 2019 estimates, there are around 272 million migrants in the world; that’s 3.5 percent of the global population.
Each year on December 18, the International Migrants Day is marked to highlight the contributions made by the migrant communities and to address the challenges they face. This year, the occasion focuses on the issue of social cohesion as one of the major concerns of each migrant.
Afghan migrants here say dignity and respect is what each migrant needs to achieve social cohesion. This gains even more significance when the two concepts of migration and asylum-seeking intersect, where migrants are called refugees who seek new lives away from conflict and disaster.
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