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The Afghan Crisis: The Humanitarian Response Emergency Roundtable
On the 2nd November 2001 the Refugee Studies Centre held a 1-day emergency round table to provide an opportunity for over 60 experts on forced migration, humanitarian aid and Afghanistan to discuss the causes and consequences of the humanitarian crisis in the region. Rather than focus on the September 11th terrorist attacks and the consequent military action, the round table addressed the challenges for and the barriers to effective solutions. This constructive exchange of experience and expertise was aimed raising issues of importance and areas for further consideration for actors involved in the provision of assistance. This document summarises the main points raised in the discussions under five broad and raises a number of key areas for consideration when approaching the humanitarian response to the crisis
Mobile Peoples and Conservation: Crossing the Disciplinary Divide
In April 2002, nearly 30 experts from around the world, with various professional backgrounds, attended a five-day conference in the Dana Nature Reserve, Jordan. They came together to address a difficult and sensitive issue, the relationship between mobile peoples and conservation. After intensive debate, in which contrasting perspectives were offered, common ground was successfully developed around an agreed statement – the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation. This report gives a brief summary of the background to the meeting and the proceedings and introduces the Declaration. Annexed are the programme for the meeting , a list of participants and an action plan to carry forward the work.
Protection through participation
This paper is intended to provide background reading for the Cumberland Lodge Conference, “Voices Out of Conflict: Young People Affected by Forced Migration and Political Crisis.” It considers the situations of youth and adolescents affected by war and displacement throughout the world, and provides a summary of some of the key issues to be explored with regards to their protection. It draws upon insights and experience from researchers, practitioners and war-affected young people themselves in an attempt to better understand the challenges they face during war, and the resulting implications for policy and practice.
Environmental change and forced migration: a state of the art review
Interest in the link between environmental change and human migration has grown in the last five years, principally due to the mounting body of evidence on the likely impacts of anthropogenic climate change. This growing concern has led to widespread discussion of the potential for climate change to induce population movement. The drivers of such movement include the inundation of settled land due to sea-level rise, accelerated desertification among currently cultivated lands (leading to migration in search for food), and more frequent and severe climatic disasters such as drought, floods and tropical storms. This paper was prepared to compliment and develop earlier work of the Refugee Studies Centre on this subject (Boano, Zetter and Morris 2009) and to provide background analysis to the recent RSC Workshop on ‘Environmental Change and Displacement: Assessing the Evidence and Developing Norms for Response’ held from 8-9 January 2009. The aim of this paper is three-fold. Firstly, it seeks to outline the current debate on the relationship between environmental change and migration. Secondly, it outlines and interrogates the existing empirical data on the relationship between environmental change and migration. Finally, it highlights some existing gaps in the literature and considers methodological issues, making some suggestions for future exploration of the issue.
Environmental Change and Displacement: Assessing the Evidence and Developing Norms for Response
On the 8-9 January 2009 the Refugee Study Centre (RSC) and the International Migration Institute (IMI) of Oxford University convened a two-day workshop on Environmental Change and Displacement, with the support of the UNHCR. Attended by about 50 participants, the conference examined current research evidence on the relationship between climate/environmental change and migration, and the role the academic community should play in providing policy makers with guidance in forming policy in preparation for potential large-scale migration. The majority of participants were either academics or representatives from organisations engaged in research in the field of environmentally induced migration. Participants also included representatives from intergovernmental and international organisations and research students from various universities. The first day of the workshop focused on evidence and case studies as well as broader questions concerning the prediction of environmental migration and addressed methodological challenges. The second day moved on to consider legal and normative responses. The wide ranging discussion addressed many significant issues for future research and policy responses, yet clear answers were hard to reach.
UNHCR Ideas: Open innovation inspiring collaboration and new ideas within the UN
Since 2012 UNHCR and the Humanitarian Innovation Project (HIP) have been actively collaborating in several areas of thinking around innovation for the humanitarian world, and in this context HIP were invited to carry out an independent evaluation of the UNHCR Ideas pilot. ‘UNHCR Ideas’ is a tool for creating new ideas amongst an online community. Powered by SpigitEngage, the online platform is specifically designed to enable collaborative problem solving and idea generation. The platforms’ online community contribute ideas, solutions and discussion to a common problem statement posted on the site. The UNHCR Innovation team launched a pilot ‘challenge’ on the platform in August 2013 – intended to empower the participants to innovate for the organisation. The pilot involved 318 participants from over 50 counties – including employees from UNHCRs offices, partner organisations, and refugees. The platform aims to start building a culture of innovation within and around the organisation, and to help find new solutions for longstanding challenges in their global work with refugee communities. This pilot was used by UNHCR Innovation to learn whether, and how, the platform can be used more widely within the organisation, and beyond. This report summarises the set-up, output and inside workings of the pilot 'launch challenge'. This report specifically looks at the relationship between UNHCR and Spigit, and provides an overview of how UNHCR Ideas supports the wider process of innovation for the organisation. Future opportunities and recommendations for use of the platform, and collaborative innovation, within UNHCR and more widely for the humanitarian sector are discussed.
Revisiting therapeutic governance: the politics of mental health and psychosocial programmes in humanitarian settings
Over the last several decades, humanitarian programmes have increasingly sought to preserve not only physical life and health, but also to address psychological needs and to promote the social well-being of conflict-affected populations. This growing prioritisation of psychological issues in humanitarian settings can be seen in the development and widespread use of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programmes. Such programmes have taken many forms, including the deployment of psychiatrists to emergencies, promotion of trauma counselling, establishment of supportive spaces for children, and longer-term community development and peace-building initiatives. Despite this proliferation, MHPSS programmes have been widely criticised, and the field marked by intense debate. In this paper, the author discusses the evolution of MHPSS programmes and the associated debates by analysing Vanessa Pupavac’s critique of psychosocial programming as constituting 'therapeutic governance', or the homogenisation, pathologisation, controlling and depoliticisation of affected communities. She then mobilises this framework to analyse current practice as represented by the 2007 IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support. She argues that the field has made significant progress toward a culturally-appropriate and empowering model of psychosocial programming within humanitarian interventions, but that individual programmes would still benefit from situation-specific evaluation. Though the critiques of homogenisation and pathologisation have been addressed by the IASC guidelines, she argues that there remains the potential for MHPSS programmes to contribute to the controlling and depoliticising nature of broader humanitarian programming.
Introduction: continuity and change in global refugee policy
This special issue of the Refugee Survey Quarterly brings together a selection of thepapers from the conference on “Understanding Global Refugee Policy” organized by the Refugee Studies Centre to celebrate its 30th anniversary. One of the many notable themes to emerge from the conference was the extent to which that period hasengendered continuity or change in global refugee policy. How has the agenda changed? Has the nature of the challenges facing policy-makers shifted over the last three decades? Has refugee policy become more politicised? Has finding solutions to refugee situations become more difficult? To what extent are main actors different? Is it still a fundamentally state-centric policy field? How have the main forums and institutions within which policy is made changed? The papers in this collection offer a window onto that question of continuity and change. In doing so, they address a range of important emerging themes and cover a wide set of geographical regions.
Reflections on an anniversary: EU citizenship at 20
I am writing this 20 years to the day after the Maastricht Treaty entered into force on 1 November 1993. ‘Economic and monetary union’ and ‘political union’ (coordinating foreign policy and ‘justice and home affairs’) were the main events. The Treaty also grandly announced: ‘Citizenship of the Union is hereby established’. The status was for those ‘holding the nationality of a Member State’. The rights attached were largely pre-existing and politically underwhelming. Without great fanfare, the weightiest of political concepts was uploaded into the EU Treaty, apparently an afterthought.
Asylum: principled hypocrisy
In January 2014, The Guardian newspaper reported that UK Border Agency (UKBA) staff received financial rewards for winning appeals against asylum seekers challenging negative decisions. This generated public controversy, because it suggested that the Home Office had a systematic bias against individuals being granted refugee status. No one who has followed asylum’s travails in western states could have been surprised. Academics have long described a ‘culture of disbelief’ pervading the UK government’s asylum decision-making processes, in which asylum claims are met with incredulity and cynicism. This culture seems merely an extension of the battery of measures and mechanisms – including visa regimes, carrier sanctions, and interdiction – that western states have put in place over the last three decades to stop forced migrants from places like Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria arriving to access asylum. If the UKBA’s offer was remarkable, it was only as the reductio ad absurdum of states’ current restrictive responses.
Security and protection
A concern with security can undermine protection in important ways, though the discourse of protection can be manipulated by those with a security agenda. War (especially a ‘good war’) confers a degree of legitimacy (and legality) for various kinds of violence. The more ‘legitimate’ a particular military endeavour appears to be (and the more the enemy has been demonised), the more opportunities there are likely to be for violence and exploitation under the cover of this legitimacy. The positioning of a civil war within some kind of ‘global war’ (the Cold War, the ‘war on terror’) helps to create ‘windows of impunity’ for powerful local actors, many of them governmental. At any given moment in any given place, a particular ‘enemy’ (perhaps more than one) will be identified, and protection problems are likely to accumulate around this definition of the security problem. There is also likely to be a favoured instrument (or perhaps more than one) for addressing the crisis (defeating spoilers, deploying peacekeepers, delivering relief etc.). The designation of enemies and the commitment to favoured solutions may both create major protection problems as certain kinds of violence are tolerated in the interest of some ‘wider’ or ‘more pressing’ goal. Weighing advocacy against relief delivery is always difficult. But we should consider the possibility that de-emphasising advocacy emboldens abusive parties on the ground so that humanitarian space shrinks over time. Abusive parties are learning lessons fast about how to manipulate information flows surrounding conflicts; the international humanitarian community needs to speed up its ‘lesson learning’ accordingly.
The administration of refugees in Zambia
This paper will briefly discuss the legal system and refugee situation in Zambia. The paper will then highlight the various international and regional refugee and human rights instruments to which Zambia is a party. Domestic legislation that addresses refugees will be analysed and pertinent provisions will be emphasised. The Refugee Bill 2008 which is draft legislation will also be examined to determine whether it improves on existing legislation or not. Zambia has two parallel RSD procedures, and both will be explained. Furthermore, there will be an examination of select refugee rights and durable solutions. The paper will conclude with recommendations.
Refugee status determination and refugee rights in Tanzania
Tanzania gained its independence from British colonial rule on 9 December 1961. Since her independence, Tanzania has been an independent territory having a common law legal system similar to the British one, which has been undergoing modifications from time to time to suit local circumstances. In addition, Tanzania is a dualist state, meaning that all international instruments to which Tanzania accedes must necessarily be ratified1 by the parliament to form part of the domestic legal system. Under the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania of 1977 (hereinafter, the Constitution), the rule of law concept is clearly reflected in the principle of separation of powers.2 Whereas, the fundamental principles reflected in this concept are the supremacy of parliament, independence of the judiciary and observance of human rights by the executive. These are the bases that form the three pillars of the state, i.e., the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. In practice, however, the executive is de facto more powerful as compared to the rest, which, more often than not, makes the executive override the powers of the legislature and the judiciary. Nevertheless, the judiciary enjoys enormous powers that are guaranteed by the Constitution. And, in practice, the judiciary has been at the forefront of defending the fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, as part of guaranteeing the right to access to justice. The right of access to justice is a fundamental right, which is also part and parcel of the rule of law.
Refugee status determination in South Africa
This paper outlines the situation in which the asylum system operates in South Africa and its connection to the immigration system. It raises certain challenges within the asylum system and recommends policy changes, which could be used to address these challenges.
Refugee status determination and rights in Malawi
Malawi has been both a producer and recipient of refugees from its neighbours in the last three decades. In the early 1960s and 1970s, followers of the Jehova’s witness religion were forced to flee the country, mostly into Zambia after their religious beliefs clashed with the ruling Malawi Congress Party ideologies. Scores of people also left Malawi fleeing political persecution to neighbouring countries during the same period of one party rule under the Malawi Congress Party. On the other hand, Malawi has been receiving refugees from Mozambique, initially during the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, and hosted over one million Mozambican refugees between the 1980s and early 1990s when the Frelimo government and Renamo opposition movement were engaged in a highly destructive civil war. The influx of Mozambican refugees is believed to have forced Malawi to rush the process of ratifying the relevant international refugee instruments as well as drafting the Refugee Act, which came into force in 1989. Currently, Malawi continues to receive refugees, mainly from the Great Lakes region and the horn of Africa, and issues of refugee rights which were relevant during that period when it hosted over a million refugees remain important. This paper highlights the situation of refugee rights in Malawi, including the refugee status determination (RSD) mechanisms and process. The first part of the paper presents an introduction including country background and a brief overview of the legal system. Section two focuses on the refugee conventions and international human rights instruments that Malawi has ratified. The section also discusses the impact of international law on the domestic legal system. The domestic refugee framework is discussed in full detail in section three. The section highlights the provisions of the 1989 Refugee Act as well as RSD mechanisms. It also discusses the impact of reservations to international instruments and the outdated Refugee Act on the enjoyment of rights by people who seek protection in Malawi. Section four submits recommendations and conclusions.
An overview of refugee status determination and the rights of refugees in Kenya
This paper details the workings of Refugee Status Determination (RSD) and the protection of refugee rights in Kenya, beginning with a broad outlook on the development of refugee law in Kenya and then critiquing the current laws and practices in place that affect the success or failure of RSD and the protection of refugee rights.
Responsibility to protect
In 2005, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that world leaders at the United Nations World Summit had unanimously pledged, “to act if another Rwanda looms.” Specifically, they agreed that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. They also concluded that if a state is manifestly failing to protect its population, the international community has a responsibility to protect, including through the use of force should peaceful means prove ineffective. Their adoption of the responsibility to protect (R2P) offered a vision of a new international norm premised on state responsibility and nonindifference towards populations at risk of mass atrocities. This July, the General Assembly debated R2P for the first time since 2005. Member states signaled their enduring commitment to the goal, as well as some of the political and practical challenges that lie ahead. The successful debate marked another milestone in making this vision a reality even if R2P in many ways remains an emerging norm. The task ahead is to consolidate the achievements to date and instantiate the norm, thereby filling gaps in capacity, will and imagination and moving from rhetoric to saving lives. This paper examines the political evolution of R2P, and recommends strategies to ensure that practices and policies are put in place that will prevent and halt mass atrocity crimes.
Protection, human rights and forced migration
The keynote address begins with a discussion on the role of the international human rights system in the protection of people who are displaced either within the borders of a country or forced to cross national borders in order to seek refuge from conflict situations. It explores the extent to which protection premised on the international human rights system has been streamlined within international mechanisms for protection. Some of the jurisprudence of human rights bodies relating to such protection is highlighted. The address then turns to the problem of non-compliance with international human rights norms by States Parties to international treaties and conventions. By implication this raises the question of the effectiveness of the current protection system in the face of impunity by governments and when fundamental political, economic and social problems inherent in conflict situations have not been resolved. A brief account of the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan is given as an example of such impunity. The last part draws attention to the challenge of providing protection in an urban setting in South Africa in the context of xenophobic attacks and the ensuing displacement of refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, labour migrants and undocumented migrants.
Protection: the new humanitarian fig-leaf
The human rights-based approach (HRBA) has filtered into humanitarian action over the past decade. In tangible fashion, this shift has provided guidance and standards for aid itself. Beneficiaries have become something greater than populations in need of assistance – they have become sets of individuals possessing rights. HRBA thinking thus transforms the wants/needs of people in crisis into obligations demanding a response. Given that we humanitarians are often the only ones on the ground interested in or in a position to provide such a response, the impact of HRBA has radically changed the discursive framework under which humanitarian action is performed.
The politics of protection
The dramatic progress of the global relief system in recent years has meant that generally we no longer have massive causalities, as we did only a decade ago, from lack of basic food, shelter and medicines. But millions of vulnerable civilians from conflict areas continue to remain gravely at risk as humanitarian protection remains a major weakness of the international response system. The author1 argues that, despite all the efforts that have been made, the international system has been unable to substantially improve effective protection for civilian conflict victims. In this paper, the author suggests some reasons why he thinks this is so and what might be done about it. He approaches the subject by highlighting issues such as responsibility and intervention, the protection architecture with its different actors, as well as the challenges of implementation. He suggests that although the protection of civilians is fundamentally linked to political and security issues it is frequently dealt with as a separate aspect of this broader equation. There was also a need to deal more effectively with non-state actors who are party to many current conflicts. UN peacekeeping mandates and resources for civilian protection needed to be strengthened and UN protection agencies needed to be more proactive. He concludes that there has been major progress in the last decade regarding civilian protection at the international level but this has not led to more effective protection in the field. However, progress has provided an exceptional window for much more effective implementation of basic safeguards than we have seen to date.