The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2016 15 Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) intro- duced the Religious Persecution Relief Act shortly after the State Department’s announcement. The RPRA would confer priority status on religious and other minorities affected by ISIS in the asylum application process, and dedicate 10,000 spots exclusively to persecuted minorities fleeing Syria. —Shannon Mizzi, Editorial Assistant Ambassadorial Appointments Down Under A FSA’s ongoing interest in ambas- sadorial appointments led us to look at how the process works in other developed countries. It has been easy for us to look across our northern border to Canada, as the Canadian press writes about this issue regularly and with great interest, and AFSA maintains a good relationship with PAFSO, our Canadian counterpart. Suffice it to say, ambassadors from outside the Canadian career Foreign Service are fairly rare, and those who are selected are subjected to significant media scrutiny. But how about another close ally— Australia—which, by the way, routinely has non-career appointees sitting in the U.S. embassy in its capital city? Despite the fact that Australia is a constitutional monarchy, the process of appointing chiefs of mission for its embassies abroad is, in effect, like that in the United States in that the prime minister has the greatest say in who is appointed. Australia has a number of non-career chiefs of mission. Similar to U.S. practice, there are certain embassies abroad where such appointees are likely to be placed, such as London, Rome and Brus- sels. Also, non-career appointees are generally dispatched to locations where you do not need a second language, like Washington, D.C. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently came under criticism for his appointment of former treasurer Joseph Hockey—someone from outside the Aus- tralian Foreign Service—to the position of ambassador to the United States. But while the Australian and U.S. chief-of-mission appointment processes operate similarly, in Australia non-career diplomats comprise less than 7 per- cent of all chiefs of mission, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States. One explanation may be the fact that it is less expensive to run an election Take AFSA With You! Change your address online, visit us at www.afsa.org/ address Or Send changes to: AFSAMembership Department 2101 E Street NW Washington, DC 20037 Moving? I want to tell you that you are not alone. … You know the pain of having left behind everything that is dear to you and not knowing what the future will bring. Many others like you are also in camps or towns, waiting, hoping to build a new life on this continent. We have come to call the attention of the world to this grave humanitarian crisis and to plead for its resolution. We hope that the world will heed these scenes of tragic, and indeed desperate, need, and respond in a way worthy of our common humanity. … —Pope Francis addressing migrants living at the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on April 16. Contemporary Quote