Thanks for inviting me to talk with you about human rights and internal displacement. It's an important issue of international concern and I'm delighted that it is on your agenda. While I plan to address some of the substantive human rights concerns of internally displaced persons (IDPs), I'd like to do so by looking at the work of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement because it offers a fascinating example of the way in which human rights issues come on the international agenda, how civil society and the UN work together, and how national policies are made.
A word of background
There has been a long history of international response to refugees, with a UN convention on refugees which has been ratified by 150 or so governments, a clear definition of who is a refugee (people who have crossed a border because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution for one of five reasons) and a UN agency – the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees which was mandated to protect and assist refugees. While this system has been in place since 1951, there was no corresponding system to respond to the needs of the many people who were displaced by wars and civil conflict but who had not crossed an international border. In the mid-1980s a number of NGOs working with refugees began to hear from their partners or from field staff about the needs of these "internal refugees" or internally displaced persons (IDPs) as they came to be called. In fact, people who were internally displaced were often in far more desperate conditions than refugees living outside their countries. They were typically closer to the violence which displaced them and it was much more difficult to provide humanitarian assistance to IDPs as the conflicts were often still going on. NGOs raised this issue at the UN Human Rights Commission and spent a couple of years collecting information, raising awareness about the issue, lobbying governments, and developing a strategy. In particular, the advocates sought to use the special procedures of the then-Human Rights Commission and called for the appointment of a special representative on IDPs.
IDPs
There are currently an estimated 25 million IDPs in the world although the statistics are far from perfect. IDPs are defined in the Guiding Principles as:
Persons or groups of person who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.
They are people who have been forced to leave their communities but, unlike refugees, have not crossed a border. The definition is also broader than the definition for refugees as it includes those displaced by natural or human-made disasters. Also unlike the situation for refugees, the term "IDP" does not have a specific legal status. Governments may register IDPs as a tool in providing assistance, but statistics on IDPs are notoriously flawed. People are often fleeing repression by their own governments and thus have an incentive not to be noticed or counted.
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