Shortly after independence, many states in Africa were faced with the challenge of nation building along with the need to protect, assist and find durable solutions for refugees displaced by the wars of liberation and the struggle against apartheid in…
In recent years, urban violence has worsened the living conditions of people in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Very often, men, women and children leave not in search of a better life but simply in order to survive. Territorial conflict…
“Work is important for me. I have always worked. Work is my baby!” says Misrak (aged 36). Eleven months ago she moved from Eritrea to Sweden to join her husband, also from Eritrea, who had had to leave the country…
In the 1990s nearly 250,000 people, mostly Kashmiri Pandits, were displaced by violence in Jammu and Kashmir state in India. More than 20 years later the question for them is whether the responses to their displacement so far can form…
There are an estimated 160,000 displaced persons in our country. Until 2007, this phenomenon was the result of land disputes, local conflicts, religious intolerance, large-scale building projects and projects of enforced urbanisation, the building of dams, natural disasters and the…
On 26th July 2013, the High Court of Kenya delivered a judgment in a remarkable vindication of the rights of refugees. The Court struck down a government policy that, if implemented, would have fundamentally violated the freedoms and dignity of…
The recent crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR), with its roots in political power struggles, has threatened to destroy the underlying social fabric that was for so long a source of religious tolerance. In the process, nearly a million…
Despite sharing common humanitarian values and principles, and common interests in providing protection, faith-based and secular humanitarian actors have often operated in somewhat parallel universes. At the national level, it is not uncommon to see two sets of humanitarian actors…
Jesuit Refugee Service is an international Catholic organisation founded in 1980 to respond to the plight of the Vietnamese boat-people, with a mandate of accompaniment, service and advocacy for refugees and other forcibly displaced people.[1] In accompaniment work, we move…
Local faith communities are able to offer assistance to asylum seekers in ways that faith-based organisations (FBOs), constrained by eligibility criteria, are not, andthey play a critical role in the reception and resettlement of refugees and asylees in the US.…