By Adrian Croft
The UNHCR sounded the alert as it issued a report showing that refugee numbers fell to a 25-year low last year but the number of people displaced by conflict inside their own countries remained high at about 25 million.
Basic principles underpinning international protection of refugees “have come under increasing threat”, it said.
“Core elements of refugee status … are being questioned. More and more, asylum seekers are portrayed not as refugees fleeing persecution and entitled to sanctuary, but rather as illegal migrants, potential terrorists and criminals — or at a minimum, as `bogus’,” said the report.
“The State of the World’s Refugees” said there was a tendency to criminalise migrants, including asylum seekers, by associating them with people-smugglers and traffickers.
States were responsible for controlling their borders, but they remained “obliged to provide basic safety and assistance to those deemed in need of international protection”, it said.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, states had increasingly invoked security concerns to justify new laws that restricted asylum seekers and refugees, the report said.
But the report said would-be terrorists would be unlikely to try to enter a country by seeking asylum.
“If I wanted to put a bomb in the United States, the most stupid thing I could do would be to arrive at New York’s JFK airport and ask for asylum,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told a news conference in London.
DROP IN REFUGEES
The report said there had been a sharp drop in the worldwide number of refugees and asylum seekers over the past five years.
The number of refugees — 9.2 million at the start of 2005 — was down from nearly 18 million in 1992 and was the lowest in 25 years, the report said.
This was mainly due to a drop in armed conflicts and several large-scale repatriations. More than 4 million people had gone home to Afghanistan in recent years and hundreds of thousands more to Angola, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Liberia, it said.
Even so, there were still millions of refugees for whom no solution was in sight, the report said, citing 33 groups of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five years or more.
The figures include large numbers of refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. They do not include millions of displaced Palestinians who are under the mandate of another U.N. agency.
Millions more people displaced inside their own countries — and who therefore do not fall under the 1951 Refugee Convention — remained in urgent need of help, the report said.
“They are under the protection of their own government and their own government is in many circumstances part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Guterres said.
The report said an estimated 1.4 million people had been displaced by conflict in Uganda, at least 1.5 million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and six million in Sudan.
Guterres said the UNHCR had agreed to take on new responsibilities to protect internally displaced people, but needed more funding to do so. He appealed to donors not to divert resources that would otherwise have gone to refugees to the internally displaced.
((London Newsroom, +44 20 7219 5389, adrian.croft@reuters.com; edited by Richard Meares))
Source: Reuters, April 19, 2006
