Increasingly Hostile Environment Hampers UN Efforts To Protect Refugees
An increasingly hostile environment marked by violence, endemic human rights abuses and waning generosity among
traditionally hospitable nations is hampering United Nations efforts to protect millions of uprooted people around the
world, according to a senior UN refugee agency official.
Addressing an Executive Committee meeting of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva yesterday, the
agency’s Director of International Protection Erika Feller recited a litany of abuses ranging from banditry and murder
in a Tanzanian camp to the arrest of lawyers defending raped women in Sudan to the cold-blooded executions of teenage
boys in Colombia.
“Abuse of children, violence against women, refoulement (return to the country of origin) of refugees and restriction of
basic rights, such as freedom of movement, are endemic in many displacement situations,” she said, noting “numerous
obstacles,” many beyond the agency's power to ameliorate, which impede effective delivery of protection.
Giving specific examples Ms. Feller cited banditry and murder in Lukole refugee camp in Western Tanzania, and a major
deterioration in security in Sudan’s strife-torn West Darfur region, with the most recent large-scale destruction of a
camp for internally displaced persons in Aru Sharow leaving over 30 dead and 10 persons seriously injured.
“The environment is also one of arbitrary arrest of lawyers UNHCR has been sponsoring to take up cases - such as those
of women in Darfur, raped and made pregnant, then imprisoned by a system which does not want to acknowledge this for the
crime that it is,” she said.
In Colombia, irregular armed groups have executed teenage boys to intimidate communities fleeing violence and
insecurity, while in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aden decomposing bodies have washed ashore, some with hands bound
as the guarantee of no escape, even from drowning, she added.
“Finally, let me not leave out of the context the very disturbing accounts of people being denied entry in a state where
they had previously resided, and blocked from entering the state where they had been born, raised and lived, only
because they were deemed stateless,” she said.
Ms. Feller reiterated that protection is not a choice, but an obligation, and said governments should not misconstrue
the provision of asylum as a hostile act. “States have conferred on [UNHCR] quite a specific mandate, one that allows
for no choice in whether to implement it; it is obligatory, not discretionary in its character,” she added.
While many of the external obstacles were beyond UNHCR's control, she said the agency was implementing various internal
reforms, ranging from increased emphasis on training and strengthened staffing and resourcing to ensuring greater access
to durable solutions, especially refugee resettlement.