When High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers resigned, Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General, promised that the process of selecting a new UNHCR head would be “transparent and rapid”. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN Secretary-General’s Chef de Cabinet, wrote to a…
Grateful for fully-funded appeals and gushing media coverage, hundreds of international agencies have descended on tsunami-affected countries.[1] This is despite the fact that in the main the region has functioning governments, military forces and emergency services, active Red Cross and…
Since 2002 more than three million refugees have returned home to Afghanistan, mostly from Pakistan and Iran, in UNHCR’s largest assisted repatriation exercise. Unfortunately, some 75% of them have returned having never received any formal schooling, either prior to becoming…
Since 1999 Europe has embarked on a long – and often painful – process of policy harmonisation designed to deliver a common European asylum policy. The recent history of European migration policy has been dominated by two objectives that are…
The adoption of the Amsterdam Treaty by the members of the European Union in 1997 marked the beginning of a new era for asylum policy making in Europe. Title IV, Article 63 of the Amsterdam Treaty refers to the adoption…
Refugee integration is a dynamic two-way process, in which individual refugees, governments and society work together towards building a cohesive society. This process begins from day one. Integration relates both to the conditions for and actual participation in all aspects…
On 1 May 2004 ten new countries joined the European Union,[1] increasing the EU’s overall membership to 25 countries with a combined population of around 500 million. This date also marked the end of the five-year ‘transitional period’ for the…
When asylum seekers and refugees were relatively few in number in the UK, RCOs were considered to be prime movers in facilitating their integration. ‘Integration’ is the process of ‘getting used to’ the new environment, of individual adaptation, but also…
The European Union’s Hague Programme[1] aims at “strengthening freedom, security and justice” within the EU in the next five years. What is likely to be the impact of this and other European policy developments on separated children? Separated children are…
The civil war that raged in Angola until 2001 displaced millions of people. From August 1998 until April 2001 the Netherlands granted temporary status to all Angolans seeking asylum. Over roughly the same period, some 11,000 Angolans – of whom…