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?

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