COURIER ONLINE

THE STANLEY FOUNDATION

Resources
Web sites:
The State of the World's Refugees: Fifty years of Humanitarian Action
report

World Refugee
Survey 2000
report

Common Ground
radio program(s):
"Afghan and Serbian Refugees"
Transcript
RealAudio

When people flee their homelands to escape persecution, they evade immediate danger only to find new vulnerabilities in their places of refuge. Forced to abandon their homes, neighbors, livelihoods, and often family members—in other words, nearly all that is "normal" about normal life—refugees are robbed of their ability to be self-reliant and find themselves at the mercy of others.

International media attention usually focuses on the urgent survival needs of refugees who have just fled, usually to areas that are ill-equipped to support them. We are all familiar with the images of tent cities, food distribution, or medical treatment for new refugees. But food, shelter, and medicine are merely the basics for the millions of people displaced by conflict and oppression around the world. As their time in limbo drags on, refugees need much more than the bare necessities to reclaim a measure of dignity and self-sufficiency.

The various treaties on international human rights and refugee law outline the rights of refugees and, therefore, the responsibilities of international governments to provide protection. Indeed, the international community bears a special responsibility for refugees. Having left their homelands, by definition refugees no longer come under the protection of their own governments (which, in most cases, were the original persecutors); the job of safeguarding refugee rights thus shifts to the international community.

Erosion
Yet as the world's governments have confronted a succession of complex human rights and humanitarian crises, their commitment to uphold the full rights of refugees has flagged. There has been a distinct erosion in recent years in the level of protection provided by governments, particularly by those playing host to refugees.

Refugees require protection in three main ways:

• Refugees first need to be able to escape into another country without being forcibly returned to danger. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding document of modern human rights, affirms that "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."
• Refugees need to be protected from violence and other abuse in their place of refuge.
• Refugees must enjoy the same rights and freedoms—including economic and social rights, such as work and education—as everyone else. While refugees have some special rights in recognition of their predicament, for the most part they are covered by the fundamental human rights to which all are entitled.

The threats to refugee rights similarly come from a variety of quarters. States that border on countries from which refugees are fleeing sometimes forcibly push them back, in direct violation of basic norms. Meanwhile, some wealthier nations, such as the United States, have also chipped away at the principle of political asylum by erecting procedural barriers that prevent refugees from even asking for, let alone obtaining, protection. Some armed combatants infiltrate and use refugee camps as rear bases for their insurgency campaigns, usually accompanied by extortion, intimidation, and often rape. Even when countries provide a relatively safe haven, local governments frequently deny economic and social rights, such as access to work and basic education.

US Role
Like so many other countries, the United States is a destination for thousands of people seeking asylum from persecution every year. To get a sense of the scale of the global refugee problem, compare the roughly 80,000 refugees whom the United States welcomes each year to the worldwide total of 13 million refugees, the great majority of whom remain in their own regions.

Nor does this tell the whole story, for there are another 20 million people who are displaced within their own countries (known as internally displaced persons) and are not considered refugees because they haven't fled across a border. The lack of legal protections or practical mechanisms for these internal exiles, who are often in the worst of living conditions, is one of the major issues facing the international community today.

America's posture toward refugees consists of two sets of policies. Asylum policy, a component of immigration control, governs the granting (or denial) of political asylum for those who have arrived in America and seek such protection. Meanwhile, US diplomats work closely with the United Nations and other governments in responding to the needs and rights of refugees around the world. The United Nations' refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), attends to the front lines of humanitarian crises, but it is important to remember that governments provide the key material and political resources for this effort.

While the immigration and foreign policy spheres are separate, they are also closely related. As a leader of the international community, the US asylum policies attract attention from other governments looking for signs of what is considered acceptable. In this way, American regulations and practices take on a symbolism far beyond their practical effect. The United States and the industrial powers do a great deal to host refugees and provide for them, but there are significant blots on their record of protecting refugee rights—failures that lower the bar for refugee protection globally.

Closing the Door
Refugees are often domestic political scapegoats, and the governments of wealthy states have increasingly taken active steps to keep refugees from their borders. Whether through the blunt instrument of border closures or more insidiously through restrictive laws and procedures, host states are developing mechanisms to deflect asylum claims.

The United States, for instance, has an unrealistically short deadline for asylum seekers to file their claims and also frequently incarcerates asylum seekers for long periods, partly in hopes of discouraging others from coming. In 1996 Congress enacted an immigration reform law that created a summary deportation mechanism called "expedited removal." The new procedure gave relatively low-level immigration inspectors the power to deport anyone arriving at an airport with false or insufficient travel documents. The problem is that the failure to produce valid documents is often a direct result of the repression that the asylum seeker is trying to escape.

Compassion fatigue is often cited as an explanation for the weakening commitment to refugees and the internally displaced. A focus on refugee protection can serve as a reminder that the dispossessed are not merely unfortunate victims deserving of charity, but they are essentially the same as people everywhere, with rights that represent the world community's agreed principles. Any failure to uphold these rights comes at a significant cost to the international rule of law.