Annual RFL Conference

The annual RFL (restoring family links) conference was held in the period of May 14 – 16, 2019 in Catania, Italy. The conference was attended by over 150 responsible persons for restoring family links/tracing service from the Red Cross/Red Crescent national societies from the Europe region.

The conference was opened with introductory speeches by the Francesco Rocca, IFRC President and President of the Italian Red Cross, and Patrick Vial, Regional Director of Operation for Europe and Central Asia, ICRC and Mr. Salvatore Pogliese, Mayor of Catania.

During the three-day conference the participants deliberated on many topics of interest related to the work of the restoring family links service. One of the main topics on the Conference was   RFL Strategy 2018+ / update on the development of the new strategy. Another important presented issue was the future regional preparedness for a RFL/DM integrated approach in the new DM response framework.

Among the discussed topics were the Foreign Fighters & Families and the restoring family links work, coordinated by ICRC. The Dakar ICRC Delegation presented the RFL Assessment Migration Europe / RFL statistics & trans-regional trends.  

The conference participants also deliberated on FLEXTRANET, FLA, SFE, Online TA service, icrcfamilylinks.org, TTF, RFL algorithms…).