INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE PROTECTION

Statement of the United States

Arthur E. Dewey, Assistant Secretary

Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM)

Department of State

Thursday, October 7, 2004

I would like to make five key points about refugee protection, and then elaborate on why they are important:

Protection means presence.

Protection is for everyone.

Protection means having an identity.

Everyone needs to understand protection.

No one knows protection like UNHCR.

Starting at the top:

Protection means Presence.

We all know that an international presence in refugees' midst helps to protect them from physical harm. It is no guarantee, but our experience tells us that UNHCR's eyes and ears have served to thwart abuses of refugees in many cases. The United States has worked hard and imaginatively for several years to bolster UNHCR's protection presence in the field. We are very pleased to see an expansion of UNHCR's protection presence in 2004, owing in part to extra funds we provided for 27 additional protection positions and the inclusion of the flexible Protection SURGE Capacity project in UNHCR's Operational Reserve Category 2. We were extremely pleased to see other donor interest expressed via financial support to this project in 2004. The SURGE project is included in the 2005 Annual Program, but the U.S. will continue to provide direct support for the additional field positions in 2005. By 2006, we expect most of these protection positions will be mainstreamed into UNHCR's budget.

Despite these advances, a major challenge for UNHCR, however, is deploying its own senior, experienced protection officers to the field during a crisis. Our disappointment with UNHCR performance in this area in the Chad operation is well known. We are seeing improvement now, as I can attest from the trip that I just made with the High Commissioner. We will keep a close eye on protection presence, however, as we all know that there is a long way to go before declaring the mission accomplished, whether in Chad or elsewhere.

Protection is for Everyone.

All refugees and asylum seekers, until their claim has been rejected, require protection. Refugees do not all face the same risks, however. We are pleased to see substantial progress on UNHCR's means of identifying refugee vulnerabilities, figuring out how to address them, and then budgeting for the programs needed. That is mainstreaming - and it applies to children, whether in families or unaccompanied; women, especially single women and heads of households; adolescent girls, for whom sexual violence is particularly a risk; adolescent boys, who may be used as child soldiers; the elderly; and the disabled. We have long supported UNHCR efforts to address Sexual and Gender-based Violence, and have been impressed with the level of staff knowledge and awareness that exists now of the breadth and depth of the problem. Protection staff are important as focal points on cross-cutting issues such as sexual and gender-based violence, as coordination with social, legal, and medical services is crucial to providing adequate support to survivors of violence. There is still an enormous problem in countless refugee situations, however, and refugee girls need our creativity and energy to stay focused on protecting them effectively.

All refugees and asylum-seekers deserve protection. There are sometimes persons mixed within refugee populations who must be excluded from such protection - those who are armed elements or combatants. The conclusion we will adopt on Mass Exodus points to the need for the international community to support host governments in separating combatants from refugees to maintain the civilian and humanitarian character of refugee camps.

We need to be careful not to label whole peoples as a result of terrorist acts by some in their midst, hi some countries of the commonwealth of independent states of the former Soviet Union, There has been deterioration in the protection of ethnic Chechen refugees and asylum seekers. Political sensitivities and the lack of comprehensive refugee legislation leave these refugees and asylum seekers vulnerable to detentions, deportation, receipt of deportation orders and other forms of harassment. We encourage the governments in the region to take the necessary action to establish protection for all refugees and asylum seekers, and, as necessary, to establish and promote refugee laws in their countries.

It is also important that refugee protection not be undermined by its being extended to those who do not, or who no longer, merit it. We agree with the Kenyan Vice President who, in his plenary statement, called for UNHCR to invoke the cessation clause for Rwandan refugees given that the conditions that engendered their flight no longer pertain. As always, we understand that individual claims could still be heard.

All refugees should be protected effectively, and sometimes that means resettlement of refugees out of their country of first asylum to a third country. The United States is pleased to have seen the interest generated among traditional and non- traditional resettlement countries by the paper on the strategic use of resettlement. We join others in calling for a larger and more visible role for refugee resettlement within UNHCR. As the world's leading refugee resettlement country, the United States is proud

to have overcome most of the serious challenges to our refugee resettlement program that resulted from 9-11, and to have provided a new start in America to nearly 53,000 refugees in the past 12 months!

Protection means having an Identity.

For a refugee to be able to prove to local authorities that she or he is legitimately in the country is extremely important no matter where in the world the refugee lives. When UNHCR has demographic information on refugees it assists, programs can be designed to meet needs in the asylum country or to identify an appropriate durable solution. Protection is permanent when it is achieved through durable solutions; the aggressive pursuit of durable solutions for refugees is facilitated by demographic information. The United States supports the registration and documentation project known as Project Profile and is very impressed with the progress that has been made on this issue in two short years. There is a lot of work ahead of us, and we will continue to advocate to UNHCR to keep this a high priority.

Everyone needs to understand Protection.

The Agenda for Protection guides us in establishing greater understanding of protection issues, and indeed, this year, our work on a conclusion on Legal Safety in Voluntary Repatriation of Refugees covered new ground with which EXCOM has not dealt before. Issues such as property claims are crucial for refugees to resolve and lead to sustainable reintegration at home. So we, as States, are learning and understanding more about protection this year. On an ongoing basis, we find such UNHCR products as RefWorld and background papers on countries of origin extremely valuable.

UNHCR staff also need to understand protection - not only at the senior management level, but also at the level of locally hired staff who have such a high level of contact with refugees themselves. We appreciate UNHCR's need for "basic training", and have funded induction training to be piloted in November for new protection and community services staff. UNHCR will be also develop a compulsory computer-based self-training on UNHCR's mandate for refugee protection. All staff in UNHCR will get that training, which will also connect UNHCR's mandated protection activities to the Code of Conduct that was adopted two years ago. We think this practical kind of "basic training" is a good means of ensuring accountability for protection in UNHCR, and we applaud the effort. We also commend the High Commissioner's recent statement on Protection Partnership, which provides guidance to field staff on the important role its implementing and operational partners can play in refugee protection.

Refugees, themselves, need to understand their rights as well, to protect themselves and their families. They must understand that they do not have to trade sexual favors or money for food, documentation or any other type of assistance - refugee assistance is provided for their use with "no strings attached." Monitoring teams have reported that in many refugee camps, signs have been posted to this effect at distribution centers - this practice should be universal.

No one knows Protection like UNHCR.

Although as States, we have primary responsibility for protecting refugees, all of us in this room rely on UNHCR to guide the international community's contribution to protecting refugees. UNHCR is the sole agency with a specific mandate for refugee protection. However, UNHCR's implementing and operational partners play a crucial supporting role without which UNHCR would not be able to do its job effectively. We encourage UNHCR to continue to work with other humanitarian agencies to share protection expertise and to build on their partners' increasing awareness and interest. We are pleased to see that UNHCR's substantive Protection Learning Program has been extended to include places for partners this year, which is an important step.

UNHCR has a unique expertise in protection, and most of its work is equally applicable to refugees or to those who have been displaced by civil strife or human rights abuses but who have not crossed an international border. There are, in fact, critical protection activities in the context of forced displacement for which UNHCR has the preponderance of experience; its work on behalf of internally displaced persons in Iraq, Colombia, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and Russia has been critical to the international community's ability to do its job. I am pleased to see UNHCR collaborating with, and hope that it will impart its protection skills to, its sister agencies in Darfur as we address the humanitarian trauma both there and for the nearly 200,000 refugees in Chad.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I would stress that our vision for UNHCR's handling of its protection responsibility is first, for us to recognize UNHCR's unique mandate, experience, and capacity to protect victims of humanitarian crises, and second, to press the agency to develop its own capacity further, to spread the word more broadly and to share its expertise with us as governments, with its implementing and operational partners — and certainly not least with refugees themselves. As I said at the beginning,

Protection means presence.

Protection is for everyone.

Protection means having an identity.

Everyone needs to understand protection, and

No one knows protection like UNHCR.