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U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees speaks at Brookings Institution
April 23, 2008
By Beth Hearn
More than 200 million people are estimated to be living outside their own countries, with millions more internally displaced within their own borders. This poses significant challenges to the international community, explained António Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and former Portuguese Prime Minister, at an event hosted by the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement on April 23.
“The twenty-first century is becoming more and more the century of people on the move,” said Guterres. “But it is becoming more difficult to distinguish between economic migrants and refugees.”
He said that new patterns of forced displacement are resulting in blurring lines between refugees who are entitled to protection under international law, and economic migrants who do not come with the same obligations. War, economic deprivation and environmental degradation are increasingly linked to one another and all result in displacement.
This can currently be seen, he said, in the implications of rising food prices. While in the Western world there is some dissatisfaction over the rising costs, this simply means that “governments lose, oppositions win, but life goes on.” In newer democracies the problem is much more serious. “It’s a question of the sustainability of democracy,” Guterres said. Extreme deprivation triggers conflict, which in turn triggers displacement, and he stressed the importance of recognizing the role of access to resources in causing conflict.
Guterres said that this is at least part of the reason for the current conflict in Sudan. Not only are there political issues causing the genocide, but there is a very real conflict over resources, namely water, which causes mass violence and displacement. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees has a narrow definition of refugee status: an individual must have left their country and be unable to return due to a well founded fear of persecution. Therefore, he argued, the interlinked reasons for which people flee present significant difficulties in defining refugees. If individuals flee their country due to persecution or conflict, they have a legal right to protection from the international community, but if they flee because there is no water, or no food, or no economic opportunity, there is no instrument in place to protect them.
There has, therefore, been some debate about the need for an instrument of international law to cope with these different forms of displacement. Guterres cautioned against interfering with the documents already in existence, saying he is “not sure that if we were making the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today we would have such a wonderful document as was created after the Second World War.” But he emphasized the need for debate in order to find solutions to the growing crisis, particularly in terms of the role of the international community in protecting the victims of both conflict and extreme deprivation. The responsibility to protect and the concept of national sovereignty both have importance to this debate, but what must be sought, he said, is a balance between the sovereignty of the state and the sovereignty of the human being.
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