On International Migrants Day, 18 December, 2018 Advocate Marijana Savic (center, back row), the Executive Director of NGO Atina welcomed H.E. Anne Lugon-Moulin, the Swiss Ambassador to Serbia, to a conversation about power, protection, and whose voices shape migration policies. Marijana reported that at the meeting were 11 women with lived experience of migration, who spoke clearly and collectively about the following:
*Without women’s voices, migration policies are not neutral; they are unjust.
*Equal education is not an “integration measure”; it is a condition for safety, dignity, and real inclusion.
*Lived experience must be at the center of migration and protection policies, not on the margins.
*Migration is profoundly gendered, and ignoring that reality sustains violence, control, and exclusion.
*Migrant women are not numbers or beneficiaries, they are experts, advocates, and agents of change.
Meeting participants concluded that the meeting reaffirmed a simple truth: migration policies alone cannot be designed for women on the move; they must be shaped with them.
