The sun sets over a village in rural Myanmar, where a group of men and women discuss a recent announcement they have seen posted in the distant Township Office. The notice refers to a company’s claims on certain parcels of…
During the 1990s, several thousand refugees fleeing civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone sought protection in the tiny country of the Gambia. Most refugees in the Gambia, however, are from neighbouring Senegal’s Casamance region, where a low-intensity independence conflict…
The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants of September 2016 is the first United Nations (UN) declaration adopted specifically for refugees and migrants and is therefore a critical agenda-setting document. It includes a clear reaffirmation of the principles of…
In March 2017, Italy became the first European country to legislate a comprehensive framework protecting unaccompanied children. Close to three years after the bill was first introduced, and following concerted advocacy by human rights organisations during the parliamentary process, the…
Indigenous people of the Pacific are increasingly expressing a preference to stay on their lands for cultural and spiritual reasons, even in the face of significant deterioration in health and livelihoods associated with climate change. In some cases, they say…
In Hong Kong it takes years to process asylum claims and during this time asylum seekers are not allowed to work to provide for themselves, and receive little assistance from the state. Compared globally, Hong Kong has the lowest recognition…
Immigration detention is often trivialised in government discourse. In 2012, for example, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney described Canada’s largest immigration detention centre as “basically a two-star hotel with a small fence around it” where “people have hotel rooms, with…
My title is ambiguous, unexplained, contradictory, even absurd – much like what is experienced in the quest of providing shelter for IDPs. Take the term ‘house’ and such related words as ‘housing’, ‘dwelling’, ‘home’, ‘residence’ and ‘shelter’. They all hold…
The case studies of SRPs cover three countries. In Azerbaijan, with 800,000 to 1 million IDPs out of a total population of 7.5 million, ECHO rehabilitated in the Fizuli region 550 houses, 12 schools and 3 health centres. In Rwanda,…
Housing destruction and forced expulsions were used as a method of ethnic cleansing during the war in Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH). Thirty-seven per cent of pre-war housing stock was partially or totally destroyed. When the Dayton Peace Agreement ended conflict in…