• protracted situations
• statelessness
• erosion of durable solutions – challenges to third country resettlement, local integration or even return

Panelists:
Jane Bloom, International Catholic Migration Commission (view notes on Challenges to Finding Solutions to Statelessness)
Dawn Calabia, Refugees International
Sara Feldman, Migration and Refugee Services, USCCB

Question:  What does it mean to speak about “protection,” given that we have protracted refugee situations, vast groups of people who are stateless and the “durable solutions” seem to be less than durable?  How do we speak meaningfully about protection given these realities?

PDF of  Session 7 Challenges to Finding Solutions Notes

SUMMARY

Four major challenges for protecting stateless are: money, political will, direction, and visibility.  In terms of durable solutions, a favorable protection environment is starting point, including a legal framework (stateless conventions, state law, and enforcement) and birth registration (51M children per year not registered at birth). As single biggest cause and effect of trafficking is statelessness, the issues of statelessness and trafficking prevention/protection should be interwoven. Registration for refugees/displaced people is challenging in terms of scale – 56% of children are born in camps, for instance. There is campaign in Thailand to register any baby born in Thailand—document issued doesn’t confer nationality, but this could be better than nothing. The Church has important role to play in promoting birth registration – linking to baptism and encouraging registration via Catholic health services.

For long term impact on protracted situations, underlying aspects of what caused and sustained displacement needs to be addressed, with the inclusion/input of those most impacted by the conflict (generally the IDPs and refugees). Underlying issues include:

• Land rights often central to conflict/displacement without effective mechanisms to address this in peace processes/ durable solution approaches.
• Issues left unaddressed in formal peace processes, as these can become drivers for subsequent displacement (e.g. El Salvador has higher rates of homicide now than during the armed conflict, widespread cross border migration).

As protracted situations are extremely complex and may be overwhelming in scale, it is important to be realistic of what is possible after years have passed and context has changed. For instance, refugees may have unrealistic expectations of what is possible in their home country. It may be possible to narrow the focus to durable solutions for individuals/groups most in need of protection even if a robust protection system is not in place. While it seems important to increase advocacy on durable solutions, there may be challenges to this, namely setting unrealistic standards (i.e. people should have a perfect life) that governments and other bodies will not/cannot achieve.

Integration into host communities and repatriation raise challenging questions:

• What ought to be our response towards refugees preferring/choosing to remain in their country of residence despite complete lack of support from any government or organization for them?
• Is there a continuing standard after a refugee’s situation has gone from intolerable to something less than intolerable?  For instance, Afghani refugee going back to Afghanistan and merely “surviving” as an IDP in Afghanistan.
• Voluntary repatriation often the most desired solution in a lot of ways – can we improve our advocacy around root causes of conflict to pave the way for people to return? But are there circumstances under which there are good reasons for displaced people to resist repatriation? Is funding affecting the choice between asylum and repatriation?

Some ideas on assisting displaced people are to make aid to host countries conditional to opening access to jobs, education, health, etc. for refugee populations; providing skills training for displaced people to assist in host country integration or finding new opportunities upon return. Ultimately, a more thorough understanding on how to address challenges may result if we unpack what the host population and government (e.g. in Iran, Thailand, Pakistan) are resistant to in terms of local integration (as well as what the  refugee population is resistant to in local integration) and use that as basis for advocacy and action.