The 2025 International Refugee and Migration Health Conference (IRMHC) convened 614 health professionals, scholars, students, advocates, artists, and community leaders in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada—a historic site of migration and refuge. The conference addressed critical themes in the health of forcibly displaced people, including mental and physical health, reproductive justice, infectious diseases, primary care innovation, child and adolescent health, and health equity.
The Halifax Declaration emerged from the conference as an urgent response to escalating structural inequities and restrictive refugee and migrant policies globally, worsened by recent sweeping policy changes in the United States. It builds on the Edinburgh Declaration (2018), the Lancet Commission on Migration and Health (2018), and key global frameworks, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Global Compact for Migration, and the WHO Global Action Plan on Refugee and Migrant Health. Critically, the Declaration was co-created through an inclusive process involving a diverse group of people with lived experience of displacement.