The refugee problem - time for a “new order”

If there is indeed any future for international protection, then the issues of coordination and collaboration must also be revisited. The protection of fundamental rights should never again be subordinated to woolly thinking about humanitarian action, and lives no longer jeopardised in the name of pragmatism.

A long, hard look is needed at the responsibilities of other UN and non-UN agencies to see what they can and should contribute.

Funding mechanisms also call for an equally long, hard look. An agency’s dependency on voluntary contributions leads to institutional inefficiency, reducing its capacity for both strategic and contingency planning.

What states donate in the humanitarian field is still very much a matter of sovereign discretion, and changes are urgently required here as well.

Like so much else in the refugee world, however, funding refugee protection and solutions remains a “fundamentally political problem” which will resist merely technical solutions.

Year in and year out, refugee needs combine both emergency and relatively stable dimensions, calling for a new approach such as an “International Finance Facility”. This would include long-term donor commitments, the disbursement of funds in four to five-year programs, and replenishment at regular intervals. And it would provide the predictability essential for effective relief management and solutions planning.

If the UNHCR is to continue or an equivalent agency to be established, consideration might also be given to attaching an assessed financial contribution to membership of its governing or oversight body.

A “new order” will need to amalgamate both international and national elements. Experience, particularly over the last 10 or 12 years, has shown that the international community ignores the causes of forced migration at its peril.

Refugee movements can and do contribute to instability, and thus to apprehensions for international peace and security.

The evolving order will have to respond proactively, with solutions in mind, to the challenges of internal displacement, intra-state conflict, and the demographic and political pressures attaching to persistent underdevelopment.

While maintaining its position on issues of principle, the new order will need also to factor in states’ concerns about individual threats to security, even though the connection between forced migration and the movement of individual terrorists is tenuous.

Recent and current experience underlines the necessity for rule of law oversight, particularly where governments are inclined to act in disregard of human rights and internationally protected values.