Since 2014, when refugees started arriving in Trieste, in north-east Italy on the Balkans route, every day between 30 and 100 people have camped in tents and cardboard boxes with makeshift beds inside the building known as Silos. This is…
At the height of the war between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, close to 90% of the Acholi population was displaced and living in more than 150 forced encampments known as ‘protected villages’, many within a…
The UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda adopts human rights language, with repeated references to the principle of non-discrimination “regardless of their migration status”.[1] Unlike its predecessor Habitat II, the Agenda calls for inclusion of urban refugees within existing city structures; however,…
Successive French governments have responded to the large undocumented migrant population in the northern port of Calais by heightening security around the border and by controlling migrants’ access to shelter in the immediate vicinity of Calais. There has been a…
Refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in informal settlements or in rented housing are among those most at risk of eviction.[1] Traditional humanitarian shelter responses in urban areas have tended to favour ownership or collective centres, often lacking means…
Hosting of displaced families by local families might be spontaneous or planned, a first or an intermediate step in a multi-stage process of accommodating the displaced, and often starts before humanitarian actors arrive and lasts long after they leave. The…
The war in Ukraine has left 1.6 million people displaced inside the country and uprooted another 1.4 million who have fled to neighbouring countries since the conflict began in 2014.[1]This displacement began slowly and then exploded, with the first wave…
There has been a growing realisation that resolving housing and property claims forms a key element of any successful repatriation, and a determination that ethnic cleansing, arbitrary displacement and unlawful secondary occupation of homes must be reversed and not allowed…
Between 1992 and 1995, conflict displaced half of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population of 4.4 million. While a million people fled to other countries, principally to other republics of the former Yugoslavia, at least a further million were internally displaced. In…
These contentious projects, implemented by the American Refugee Committee and the International Relief Committee, have had far reaching implications. In an ideal world, conditions conducive to return would have been established prior to return of the displaced. Donors, however, were…