MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Joel Charny, of Refugees International, discusses the challenges of today’s refugee response system.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is Joel Charny who is the Vice President for Policy at Refugees International. Thank you for joining me.
JOEL CHARNY: You’re very welcome.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So I wanted to speak with you today about refugees and help give our audience a large picture about what are the definition and also the challenges of tending to refugee populations around the world. This is in honor of the June 20th recognition of World Refugee Day. Can you start, for those who may not know, what is the precise definition of a refugee?
JOEL CHARNY: The precise definition is in the 1951 Convention relating to refugees, and it basically states that a refugee is a person who has to flee because of persecution based on race, ethnicity, political beliefs, and so on. Now, the original definition has been expanded a little bit just almost through the operation of, you know, natural law or looking at circumstances as they’ve taken place around the world. So that now fleeing conflict, even if you’re not directly targeted is something that’s recognized as a qualifier for refugee status.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And what sort of rights or entitlements or protections do refugees have under international law?
JOEL CHARNY: Well, they are a lot more minimal than you would think and that you would hope for. I mean, even though there’s talk, for example, of a right to asylum, technically you don’t even see a right to asylum elaborated in the Refugee Convention. I mean, basically the clearest right, the one that’s most definitively stated is actually a negative one which is the right not to be returned to a place where the refugee would be persecuted or subject to further harassment or whatever. So that’s the fundamental underpinning. The French word for being sent back is refoulement. The idea is there’s a protection against refoulement in the Refugee Convention. Beyond that there were rights elaborated to work, to education and so on, but those rights have been breached more than they’ve been upheld. There’s a lot of reluctance of host countries, for example, to give refugees the right to compete with local residents for employment.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And whose responsibility is it to adhere to even that minimal right of not being returned to a place where they would be at risk? Who is responsible for upholding those or for monitoring the status of refugees?
JOEL CHARNY: Yeah, there are two ways to look at that issue. I mean, one is at the time of the Refugee Convention an office was established called The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and that office, which has since grown tremendously to be both a rights protector as well as an agency that tries to meet the basic material needs of refugees. That office is kind of the global oversight agency to make sure that refugee law is adhered to.
Now at the same time you can look at it from the standpoint of the states in the world, look at states that have signed onto the Refugee Convention. Many have, but there are some major countries that haven’t signed on: India, for example, Thailand, Malaysia, there are a number of others. So the respect for refugee rights has, though, become a part of what’s accepted as international law. So I would say, for example, if Thailand sends back Burmese refugees, Burmese asylum seekers into Burma they could still be admonished for doing so if those people were fleeing conflict or fleeing persecution because it’s considered a violation of international law even though Thailand isn’t necessarily a signator of the Refugee Convention itself.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And how do some of those rights or the status of the international law change for people who have been displaced but they’ve not crossed an international border? So they’re internally displaced people.
JOEL CHARNY: There are many differences and I think the main one is precisely that there’s no formal convention protecting them. So people who are displaced that haven’t crossed an international border first and foremost they have to rely on the state law of the nation state in which they live. You can tell the obvious problem from the outset is that often it’s that state that is taking actions that are resulting in their displacement in the first place.
I’m sure many listeners to the podcast would be familiar with the Darfur situation. I mean, internal displacement in Darfur is fundamentally the result of actions of the Sudanese government, yet first and foremost under international law, it’s the Sudanese government that’s responsible for protecting them. Now there’s been an attempt to elaborate what are called the guiding principles on internal displacement, an initiative started by a Sudanese named Francis Deng in the early 1990s. The guiding principles are just that, guiding principles. They’ve never gained the status of a convention, and therefore to protect the rights of internally displaced people we have to rely on international humanitarian law and international human rights law. There’s no dedicated convention.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Where do we find today some of the largest, or depending on where your work and expertise is, are some of the more vulnerable refugee populations?
JOEL CHARNY: Well, I want to actually start with internal displacement in Pakistan. I mean, that’s probably the situation that’s most urgent right now as a result of the fighting between the Pakistan government and militant groups in the country. Some three million people have been displaced just in the last six weeks and it’s proving to be a tremendous challenge to respond to their needs. So that’s a situation that I would highlight immediately.
There’s still a lot of vulnerability among Iraqi refugees and in Syria and Jordan. There are Afghan refugees remaining in Pakistan. I alluded earlier to the Burma situation in Thailand. There are Burmese refugees at the Thai-Burma border who’ve been there for a long time, but there are also many Burmese in Thailand who probably deserve refugee status that are not recognized by the Thai government.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The Pakistani displaced people -- I was actually astonished when some of the reports came out of the numbers. Those are numbers that are enormous, three million over a very short time period, but I haven’t seen a lot of news about their plight and who is taking care of them. I’ve seen some of the local populations have been able to absorb a good deal of them. Are you working there and do you know more about the situation?
JOEL CHARNY: I mean Refugees International isn’t an operational agency so when I say we’re working there it means we’ve had a team there that’s looking into the situation. Then we make recommendations to governments and international organizations that can respond, hopefully immediately, with greater assistance. And I think when you have displacement on this scale in a short period of time it does tend to overwhelm both the-- whether it’s a host government in the case of refugees, or the government which is the case here in Pakistan and the international agencies as well, especially in a situation of ongoing conflict.
I think all things being equal agencies don’t have quite the reach that they would have normally because of concern about agency’s security. There was the bombing at the hotel in Peshawar about ten days ago where many international organizations had their staff staying. So as always in these kinds of situations, and I really stress this, often it’s local people themselves who are either the first responders, if you want to use a jargon term, or just the people who are faced with the displacement; they find ways to act and to respond with the governments and the agencies playing catch up. And I think there’s been some attention to this, but it clearly hasn’t captured the imagination of the world, and when you have displacement on this level and you don’t have public engagement that’s when the relief effort tends to fall short.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You mentioned, obviously, some rather significant challenges to refugee protection and aid to refugees. Security, you just mentioned, also public attention and the willingness of governments. Are there other challenges to the system, the international system of refugee response?
JOEL CHARNY: Yeah, a couple challenges that I really want to highlight. One is working in a post. I mean, the Refugee Convention was articulated and first agreed in 1951 at a time when the world was kind of divided into these two neat blocks, the Soviet block and the block of democracies affiliated with the United States, and I think there was an assumption that the natural flow would be from oppression in the Soviet block into the democratic world in that there would be a kind of default reaction in favor of refugees, the idea being refugees are noble people fleeing persecution.
What’s happened since 9/11, and also because of the level economic migration, is that there’s much greater suspicion and fear now of the refugee as a foreigner than I think there was in the ’50s and ’60s if you want to take a really long view. And that’s kind of eroding the commitment to asylum. And I’m not talking about commitment to asylum by Tanzania or by Kenya. I’m talking about commitment to asylum by the United States, by governments in Europe, by Australia and so on. There’s just been a general erosion of the commitment to refugee asylum and refugee rights. It’s a global phenomenon that makes it very-very difficult. I’ve said, I mean, this is a much worse time to be a refugee than almost any in the last 40 or 50 years.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So what work is Refugees International doing to try to help respond to that or at least provide an alerting function too?
JOEL CHARNY: Yeah, I mean, that’s our role and that’s why I’m grateful that you’re doing this interview today. I mean, we basically try to focus on whether it’s a breaking situation like Pakistan or a long term situation as say Burma or Somali refugees in Kenya. We try to witness what’s going on, speaking directly to refugees and internally displaced people, talk to the agencies that are trying to assist, and then do all we can to push first and foremost the U.S. government, because we’re based in Washington, but sometimes other governments and then of course the agencies of the UN system. Basically get information that’s credible into the hands of decision makers so that they can respond more effectively.
Our method is predicated on the idea that people want to do the right thing. In other words we don’t believe that despite the obstacles that those obstacles are overwhelming. We believe if we find the right person at the right time who can make a decision, that they’ll make a decision in favor of refugees. And we’ve seen that frequently whether it’s the eventual large scale response to Iraqi refugees, or hopefully we’ll see a much greater response to the situation in Pakistan largely because of contacts that we have in the U.S. government, and that other agencies have as well, that can push a response on the global level.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you’ve been working on the issue of refugee response and policy issues, but also in the field for some time. How have you seen this field change over that time period? And, of course, you’ve also worked, as I said, in the field in Cambodia and other places, so you have both the office and the ground perspective.
JOEL CHARNY: Yeah. Well, in a way I want to say unfortunately the experience is rather continuous. I mean, in the 1980s when I started to get involved in this it was a time of the polarization between East and West, proxy wars in places like Cambodia and Mozambique and Ethiopia, and the situation for vulnerable people then was in a way just as precarious as it is now.
I think probably the biggest change that I’ve seen is the way humanitarian work itself has become a target, and humanitarian workers themselves have become vulnerable. I think there are forces in the world who know that a way to stop outside involvement, or to stop engagement, or to stop solidarity is unfortunately by attacking some of the most vulnerable members of the humanitarian community who are the unarmed humanitarian workers. The whole way since 9/11 we’ve had to think so much more about our own security, and I mean collectively. In other words, I got involved in this at a time where it was almost this naïve let’s go out, let’s help people, the very fact that I’m trying to help people is something that will protect me, and I think it’s basically impossible to take that view, at least to take it easily now because of the level of vulnerability that humanitarian workers are experiencing.
But, again, I would say the vulnerability of people themselves who are caught up in these conflict situations unfortunately that’s been rather continuous. I don’t see a fundamental change there. There’s a pattern of powerless people being caught up in conflict and being manipulated by politicians and by armed groups, and that was true in Cambodia in 1980, and it’s true in the Congo and in Pakistan today.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you very much for speaking with me. For people interested in learning more about the work of Refugees International you can visit their website at www.refugeesinternational.org. Thank you.
JOEL CHARNY: You’re very welcome. Thanks.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
