Refugees, Regionalism & Responsibility
Are regional approaches to refugee protection really the best way forward?
by Erika Feller
As its title suggests, “Refugees, Regionalism and Responsibility” drills into the characteristics which define the refugee problem today but also over time, how states cooperate and share responsibility to respond to it, and what the evidence has to tell us about the relative merits here of more regionally focused arrangements or broader international initiatives.
It concludes that “responsibility-sharing is indeed a sine qua non for the proper functioning of the international refugee regime” and that “a ‘protection capacity assessment’ rather than the lottery of geographical location, should determine which states bear responsibilities to host and/or fund refugee protection”.
To this conclusion, though, the authors add the corollary that “wealth should not simply be treated as a proxy for protection capacity” and that it is important that “those who can, do” and that “wealthy countries do not avoid responsibility-sharing by failing to implement programmes that will assist in the integration of refugees”. They see the advantage of regional approaches, which can lead to agreement on higher standards than those found in the more watered down multilateral texts, even while clearly interregional cooperation is necessary to balance out responsibilities which might otherwise too heavily be determined by geography. The authors also throughout stress that refugees bring benefits, not only burdens, to host countries, an obvious fact which is often papered over, and they need to be enabled to be viewed “as valuable and valued people”. These conclusions are all very sound generally, and need to be much more out there in the public debate in Australia, I suggest!
A book as thoroughly researched and intelligently argued as this, dealing with responsibility sharing, region-wide or globally, could not be more timely. With 80% of the world’s population expected to live in conflict prone areas over the next decade, global strife is outpacing the humanitarian systems in place to deal with it.
Larger and more complex
Refugee and displacement situations are becoming ever larger, more complex and more protracted, with the costs trebling, or more, and there now exists the largest ever gap between needs and available resources. Such situations can prove a huge burden on the economy, infrastructure, security and society of affected countries and a destabilising force for regions, and globally, even while the displaced can also be a positive force for social change and economic development.
The displacement figure, all in, stands at around 65 million, including over 20 million refugees (inclusive of 5.6 million Palestinians), and almost 40 million internally displaced persons; global displacement figures had been increasing by about 1.6 million a year and from 2014 to 2015 the figure went up by 5 million; there are more than 160 refugee host countries, with the major ones being Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey [2.5 million], Jordan and Syria [and Palestine]; well over 80% of refugees arrive, and are hosted over the longer term, in countries struggling to meet their own development challenges, usually in remote, un-serviced regions, often in active conflict areas, sometimes together with persons internally displaced, and where education and self-sufficiency possibilities are virtually absent, if at all permitted.
It can safely be said, responsibility sharing is currently pretty skewed. To appreciate this, it’s telling to look at additional figures. Ethiopia is the biggest host country in Africa with over 730,000 refugees. Tanzania, a long-term refuge for Burundian refugees among others, has recently moved to naturalise over 160,000 of them so they can stay permanently. Some 92,000 asylum seekers reached Yemen in 2015, mainly by boat, and were allowed to enter, despite ongoing conflict, an already existing refugee population of 267,000, and some 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside the country.
Well before the headline-making influx into Germany of over one million asylum seekers and migrants, Germany had been regularly receiving and processing well over 100,000 asylum seekers a year, including more than 400,000 in 2015. This was on top of a resettlement intake. The US resettlement program, running together with a large intake of direct arrivals, is currently at 85,000 a year, with a pledge from President Obama to increase it to 110,000 in 2017. In 2015 the US took 60% of the 107,100 refugees who were able to access resettlement that year. Of the total, Canada took 20,000 and Australia 9,400.
Figures alone are, of course, not the only measure of generosity. Taking Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the starting point, by the end of last year the 30 countries with the highest refugee to GDP ratio were all developing countries, except for Russia. In 2015, Sweden and Malta were the only high income countries to appear among the top 10, with 17 refugees per 1000 population. Lebanon, with just over 4000 square miles of territory, is host to well over a million Syrian refugees. One in four residents of that country is now a refugee.
International community concerns
It is no wonder that responsibility sharing is the central concern of the international community at the moment. The two major refugee and migration focused summits which took place in New York in September made this clear. The outcomes included the 19 September 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants which, among other things, calls on the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to propose to the General Assembly, in his 2018 Report, a new Global Compact on Refugees. The intention is that this GRC should contain a number of initiatives, trialled first through a Comprehensive Refugee Response (CRR)to be developed by UNHCR over the next two years.
The hope is that the CRR will identify and consolidate arrangements which will: speed up and improve admission and reception of refugees; ensure their ongoing needs (protection, health, education) are met; galvanise support to national institutions and receiving communities; and expand solutions. Assuming these arrangements are found, supported, and work, the expectation is that together they will ease pressures on host countries, enhance refugee self-reliance, expand third country solutions and improve conditions in countries of origin so that people can more easily return. These are the overall goals of the Compact to be developed.
This Declaration, coupled with the more specific commitments made by States at a Leaders Summit on 20 September, which was called at the initiative of US President Obama, have together been hailed as a breakthrough in global responsibility-sharing for refugees. Seen as noteworthy in this regard was the affirmation by states of the enduring relevance of the international refugee protection regime, the recognition that responding to refugees is a shared international responsibility and the commitment to the implementation of the comprehensive refugee response. More specifically, commentators single out the commitments to provide predictable funding and better access for refugees to health and education services and to improve access to employment and livelihoods. One note of caution did, however, come into this upbeat assessment. Seemingly, at the Summit, the divide between developed countries and low and middle-income countries was evident, with the former setting off their commitments to do more when it comes to funding and resettlement and other forms of admission against their concerns about security, unmanaged or unregulated flows and absorption capacity, while the latter group stressed their own generosity, lack of adequate support from donors and their concerns about ever more barriers in the developed world.
The two days of meeting saw around 150 States (23 from the Asia/Pacific region) speaking formally on the issues and participating in a range of roundtables in tandem, as well as over 200 side events. The scope and participation figures have been hailed as indicative of “how much refugee issues have captured international attention, while also illustrating that the field is now populated by more and more actors (i.e member states, UN partners, international financial institutions, civil society and the private sector).” UNHCR’s assessment includes that:
“The traditional and largely UNHCR and donor funded response to refugees, which suffered chronic underfunding and left host states bearing most of the burden is shifting. It is giving way to a much more comprehensive and hopefully more sustainable approach that engages many more actors”.
Measuring progress
Turning back to the book, it will be interesting to measure progress with follow up to the NY Declaration in the light of the following observation of the authors (page 136) with which, I confess, I have a lot of sympathy. They state that “the aim of this book is not to generate a universal blueprint for responsibility –sharing. (Rather) it may be worthwhile experimenting not with massive schemes that try to deal with risk by drawing in as many partners as possible, but with mini-lateral arrangements that trial a number of different mechanisms…” They go on to suggest keys for responsibility sharing arrangements which would link states’ responsibilities variously to their respective capacities to absorb and protect refugees, and to pay. An outcome, in the view of the authors, would and should be that the developed world does more with respect to both the hosting of refugees and the funding (page 137), which would be a very fair outcome. The suggestion is that a set of agreed understandings and a toolbox of response options could be the way ahead. Perhaps that is the role the CRR and the GCR will respectively play.
If so there is much to be learnt from the book in the way the authors analyse past examples of burden-sharing arrangements and their observations on relative strengths and weaknesses. When it comes to tools, it is actually quite difficult to draw from them much that is not already out there on the table, whether it be more lawful entry pathways, more development-linked funding for humanitarian crises, or pooling or loaning expertise arrangements. There is value, though, as the book demonstrates, in bringing together the suggested tools with their origins and the rationale for them. The challenge, as I have said before, is how all these suggestions are pieced together in the response frameworks of the future.
In fact the book references a speech I made in 2015 at the Kaldor Centre at the UNSW where I made precisely that point. That presentation was in fact about responsibility sharing and where it needed to go. I concluded it with the comment that the “old order” when it comes to refugee protection is at a crossroads. There has been a lot of lip service paid to “new directions” for protection over recent years, but little to show for it. The current displacement situation, even as desperate as it is, may nevertheless offer a rare opportunity to build upon the foundations of the 1951 Refugee Convention, through a process to finally clarify the meaning of international solidarity and the general content of burden-sharing. Necessity has been driving countries in Europe to re-embrace the issues more creatively, going beyond funding arrangements. Countries in SE Asia have also been pushed into thinking through some proposals for how and where to enhance cooperation on asylum. In the Middle East there are tangible signs of a willingness to work multilaterally on refugee and migration issues. Better regional arrangements have been high on the agenda in Australia as elsewhere. When such a conjunction of circumstances has presented itself in the past, it has proved the opportunity for a global step forward, in part through initiatives like the CPA, which drove cooperation into interesting new directions. The absence of agreement around what burden and responsibility-sharing should actually lead to has been a serious loophole in the protection architecture and the opportunity to remedy this now has at least a fighting chance. The co-hosts of the Leader’s Summit on Refugees {Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, Mexico, Sweden, and the US} issued a Joint Statement at the end of the summit which concluded as follows: “We recognize that no routine mechanism exists yet to facilitate the kind of voluntary responsibility-sharing for refugees that was demonstrated today or to more comprehensively address other challenges arising from large-scale refugee crises. We therefore commit to working together in support of the development of the Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees and to develop tools and institutional structures to improve the international architecture and lay a foundation for addressing both the immediate and the long-term challenges of managing refugee flows effectively and comprehensively”.
My recommendation: Gift them the book!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ERIKA FELLER
From January 2005 to April 2013 Ms Feller held the post of Assistant High Commissioner {Protection}, one of the four top management positions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Her professional career has included 14 years and three international postings with the Australian diplomatic service, followed by 26 years of progressively more senior appointments with UNHCR, both in Geneva and the Field. As the High Commissioner’s Representative in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, she concurrently served as UNHCR’s Regional Coordinator for Status Determination for the Indo-Chinese refugee outflow. Amongst her accomplishments, Ms Feller initiated and managed the 2001–2 Global Consultations on International Protection, which generated the Agenda for Protection, an internationally endorsed multi-year “road map” for global refugee protection. Her accountabilities have ranged from running refugee camps to undertaking many protection advocacy, negotiation and oversight missions to major refugee emergencies. As Assistant High Commissioner, Ms Feller exercised oversight of the performance by UNHCR of its core protection responsibilities world-wide, in the some 127 countries where the office is represented. She had direct responsibility for ensuring age, gender and diversity mainstreaming and accountability throughout UNHCR’s global programs.
Ms Feller retired from UNHCR in April 2013. She is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and in July 2014 she took up her appointment as Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She was recently awarded the 2015 Arts Alumni Award for Leadership.
Ms Feller is an honours law graduate from Melbourne University, and holds an additional degree in the humanities, specialised in psychology. She is an academically acknowledged authority on refugee law, recognized as such in Who’s Who in International Law, has published widely in Journals, is co-editor of a book on Refugee Protection in International Law and has contributed to other significant book publications, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law.
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