UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

On 25 March 1997, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its first global policy relating to urban refugees. Though UNHCR had always worked in towns and cities since its establishment in 1950, the agency itself viewed this work as peripheral to its main mission. By the 1980s and 90s the organisation had become firmly associated with large rural camps on the borders of states. A landmark piece of global refugee policy, the UNHCR Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees put down on paper for the first time a single, though contextual, approach to working in urban areas. But the March 1997 policy came under immediate criticism, and lasted less than nine months.

Origins of the March 1997 policy

UNHCR has always worked in urban areas. But it was not until the 1990s that urban displacement began to be considered a worldwide issue requiring its own global policy response. In 1994, UNHCR’s Programme and Technical Support Section and Community Services produced a set of global guidelines on urban displacement, which acknowledged the growing presence of displaced people in towns and cities and called for a new approach.

In October 1995, UNHCR’s Inspection and Evaluation Service published a discussion paper on its policy and practice on urban refugees. The paper, which has been described as “probably one of the most controversial documents ever produced“ by UNHCR, was broadly negative towards urban refugees. It claimed that they tended to have a “culture of expectations, which, if not satisfied, often leads to frustration and violence”. The paper spoke of those in “genuine need” of being in an urban area, such as family reunion, while qualifying these as “exceptions to the general rule”. It contrasted them with “irregular movers”—a concept defined several years earlier by UNHCR’s Executive Committee as “refugees, whether they have been formally identified as such or not (asylum-seekers), moving in an irregular manner from countries in which they have already found protection, in order to seek asylum or permanent resettlement elsewhere” and who have a “destabilizing effect”. The paper also spoke of the need to break the “vicious cycle of assistance and dependence” in urban areas, which alongside notions of ‘genuineness’ and ‘irregularity’, reappeared in the formal policy. The paper was based on extensive interviews with Geneva-based staff, reflecting and perpetuating negative views of urban refugees held within the organisation at the time.

The discussion paper called for “a clear, rational and comprehensive policy, based on principles which are globally applicable and acceptable”, and in February 1996 a working group was set up under the high commissioner with the aim of bringing this to light. Six months later UNHCR’s senior management was presented with the working groups findings, and seven months after this the March 1997 policy was published.

The short-lived policy 

The March 1997 policy was 23 pages long and set out a definition of urban refugees, issues surrounding ‘irregular movers’, potential solutions, and a proposed training and information campaign. It emphasised the need for self-reliance among refugees living in towns and cities.

The policy rested on a number of largely negative assumptions about urban refugees. Although small in number (less than 2% of UNHCR’s refugee caseload and less than 1% of its total caseload), they ‘demanded’ 10-15% of the organisation’s resources. Urban refugees, the agency assumed, were often dependent on care and maintenance programmes, and a key goal for the policy was to cut UNHCR’s spending.

Urban refugees were also believed to be prone to frustration, aggression and violence, problems that had “become a feature of urban refugee programmes in all regions of the world”. As a category, the policy described urban refugees as falling into one of three sub-groups: irregular movers, prima facie refugees, and those who were part of what the organisation called a “legitimate” urban caseload. Tellingly, quotation marks were placed around legitimate, but not irregular. The three-part categorization was explained in a section that defined irregular movers and prima facie caseloads, but did not spell out its understanding of the questionable concept of ‘legitimacy’. The largest single section of the policy, the definition section, focused on the notion of ‘irregularity’, deliberately conflating urbanity with irregularity. In contrast, rural encampment was highlighted as preferable. The policy recommended that urban refugees should be moved to camps where possible, and even, when no camp existed in a country, to another country where they could be encamped. The policy also assumed that UNHCR’s donors—then, as now, dominated by countries in Europe and North America—would have little interest in supporting assistance programmes for urban refugees. Heeding this preference, it called for a much restricted approach to assistance in towns and cities, and advocated for the “containment of future irregular movement”.

The March 1997 policy formalised negative views of urban refugees that had existed within parts of UNHCR for decades. It reaffirmed UNHCR’s broader priorities, during the ‘decade of repatriation’, towards encampment. And it gave preference to the interests of donor states, and their desire to trim supposedly costly programmes, over the ability of refugees to decide for themselves where they should live, exercise their rights, and seek assistance. UNHCR’s response to urban refugees in the mid-1990s should be considered in the context of states’ interest in limiting the movement of people, as well as the organisation’s desire to expand the scope of its work.

What happened next?

A key piece of global refugee policy, the March 1997 policy lasted less than nine months. Those outside of UNHCR had had limited involvement in its creation, but NGOs immediately played a prominent role in critiquing it. Writing at the time of its replacement in December 1997, Assistant High Commissioner Sérgio Vieira de Mello acknowledged that it had been “redraft[ed] and refocus[ed]” following “concerns” expressed by stakeholders and some UNHCR staff. The new 1997 policy was much shorter, at five pages, and softened the tone of the original, though it retained a view of urban refugees as peripheral to UNHCR’s work, and a group whose growth should be deterred. The agency insisted that the policy would be “further revised” based on comments by partners and UNHCR field offices. But despite years of subsequent critique, and claims that a new policy was imminent, it was not replaced for over a decade. This gap exposes a lack of accountability and the organisation’s ability to make, and break, policy promises, particularly when there is limited interested from (donor) states in the issue under consideration. The  replacement global policy, more rights-based than its predecessors, finally emerged in 2009: “long-awaited, I appreciate!”, in the words of Erika Feller, assistant high commissioner for protection. By that time UNHCR had publicly stated that most refugees were now in urban areas. A far cry from the less than 2% of the 1990s.

The header image is an aerial photo of Nairobi in the 2000s, red-roofed buildings scattered among trees and green spaces with highways visible and the tower blocks of the city centre clustered further away from the camera in the upper part of the image. Source: Wikimedia Commons.