Roughly 110,000 camp residents – mostly ethnic Karen – live in nine camps on the Thai-Burma border, where humanitarian programmes now focus on preparedness for return. The general consensus among the humanitarian community is that conditions in Burma are not…
From a statement made to the United Nations General Assembly, 20 November 1967.[1] I should like to return for a moment to the question of Africa, and to the comment I made at the beginning of my statement when I…
Following conflict in 1972, and then a decade-long civil war beginning in the 1990s, over a million Burundians sought refuge in neighbouring countries, predominantly Tanzania. After the signing of peace accords in 2000, subsequent ceasefires and changing regional and global…
Europe is experiencing the mass movements of displaced people in a way that it has largely been immune from for decades. The ramifications and manifestations of what is being called a migration crisis are extensive, intersecting with national as well…
Migration cannot be stopped, without massively violating the human rights of the migrants. It may be deflected and rerouted, for a time. But European efforts to stop irregular migration will fail on a massive scale given the push and pull…
It was in the nineteenth century that a recognisably modern form of mass migration was made possible by new forms of transport, colonial settlement and the expansion of the United States (US). Between 1846 and 1914, over 30 million migrants…
Hundreds of thousands of refugees, and smaller numbers of economic migrants, are arriving on the shores of south and south-eastern Europe. Most of those arriving in Greece and Italy have no interest in staying in either of these two countries.…
International law maintains that status determination is declaratory, which means that status determination does not make one a refugee but declares one to be a refugee. It means that many of those now on the move are refugees, in spite…
By the end of August 2015, improvised camps had been set up all over Mytiline, the capital of Lesbos, and outside the two designated areas. This created a huge pressure for the local population and authorities, already low on resources…
