Humanitarian aid is traditionally seen as a logistical and practical activity and little attention has been paid to the need for analysis. However, things are changing. UNHCR, UNESCO and others have begun to collect examples of ‘good practice’ in the…
Hundreds are still dying each day in Darfur from starvation, disease and violence. With fighting continuing between rebel forces and government troops, more and more people are being driven from their homes, joining the ranks of the 2.4 million already…
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…