For many years, reproductive health (RH) care was rarely regarded as a routine component of humanitarian medical response. More recently, humanitarian agencies have begun adopting practices that enable the integration of RH care into response strategies but there is still…
Armenia and Azerbaijan are technically still in a state of war. Their conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh halted with a 1994 ceasefire with the province and surrounding districts fully or partially remaining under Armenian control. There are 686,586 IDPs from Nagorno-Karabakh and…
Tens of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) from Georgia’s secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been waiting more than a decade for a solution to their displacement following conflicts which broke out in the early 1990s. Over…
In April 2001, UNHCR published a research paper on the local integration of refugees in developing countries. Its title was The Forgotten Solution. A year later, an NGO statement to the Global Consultations on International Protection made a very similar…
UNHCR first learned about the positive benefits of clowns when a local troupe was hired for World Refugee Day 2007 to perform in the tense and unhappy waiting room at the main refugee registration centre in Damascus. UNHCR staff noticed…
Historically, Thai officials overseeing the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border have assigned a fairly high degree of responsibility for handling some crimes or civil disputes to the refugee leadership. This excludes serious crimes, such as murder, rape, drug offences…
IRC is concerned that there are significant numbers of Burmese living in Thailand who qualify for and deserve international protection and assistance but who do not have access to proper registration processes. Without a transparent, humane and lawful asylum policy…
If there is one positive result from the Burmese junta’s brutal response to the peaceful demonstrations in Yangon in September 2007, it is the re-opening of registration by UNHCR for new asylum seekers from Burma. This comes after a hiatus…
In 1991 some 250,000 Muslim Rohingyas were recognised as refugees on a prima facie basis by the Government of Bangladesh. The vast majority were repatriated by the Government of Bangladesh to Myanmar in the following years, leaving only two of…
Refugees who have fled Burma can testify to the brutality of the regime. In January, I visited the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand, just five miles from Burma, and heard from dozens of the junta’s victims. When the camp…