All tagged UNHCR

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Jeff Crisp
Refugees Today

It is impossible to think about refugees, write about refugees, advocate on behalf of refugees or provide refugees with practical support without the use of statistics. And yet scholars and practitioners working on the refugee issue were surprisingly slow to examine the complexities associated with the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative data. As I pointed out in a paper published in 1999, “while all of the standard works on refugees are replete with numbers, few even begin to question the source or accuracy of those statistics.” The issue of refugee and displacement statistics is now taken a great deal more seriously than was the case two decades ago. Even so, the issue of displacement data remains problematic.

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Bríd Ní Ghráinne
Then & Now

Relative to other forced migrants, refugees are in a privileged position in international law: they have legal status, rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and a specific organisation dedicated to their protection (UN High Commissioner for Refugees). Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs, have a much less developed protection framework, even though the global population of IDPs is 59.1 million. So what explains this difference of treatment between these two categories of forced migrants?

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

Neil J.W. Crawford
Then & Now

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.

Exploring the foundations of Philippine refugee policy towards Vietnamese refugees

Exploring the foundations of Philippine refugee policy towards Vietnamese refugees

Ria Sunga
Then & Now

From the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975 through to the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled from what had been Indochina. Their exodus triggered an international response. The Philippines, like other Southeast Asian states and Hong Kong, was a country of first asylum. Refugees were allowed to stay temporarily until resettlement elsewhere. Under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), the Philippine government laid the foundations of the country’s refugee policy: the extension of temporary asylum ‘on humanitarian grounds’. The Philippines at this time was not party to the UN 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

A Recent History of Refugees in Saudi Arabia

A Recent History of Refugees in Saudi Arabia

Charlotte Lysa
Then & Now

Saudi Arabia is not a party to the main global refugee protection instrument, the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor does it have any specific domestic legal framework pertaining to refugee issues. Thirty-five percent of Saudi-Arabia’s roughly 30 million inhabitants are not citizens – and many come from important refugee-producing countries.