【明報專訊】On 10 November 1993 Sadako Ogata (shown in picture), who was then UN High Commissioner for Refugees (時任聯合國難民事務高級專員緒方貞子), published the first "State of the World's Refugees" (《世界難民狀况》) report.
1. Who is a refugee?
"Refugee" is defined in several United Nations documents including the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (《難民地位公約》). Article 1 of the document says a refugee is a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."
This definition was expanded in the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (《關於難民地位的議定書》) and regional conventions in Africa and Latin America to include persons who had fled war or other violence in their home country.
2. The UNHCR
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 聯合國難民署) was established in 1950. It was originally given a three-year mandate (授權) to help Europeans displaced by the Second World War and was supposed to disband afterwards. Nevertheless, it has since assisted refugees in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Yugoslavia, and is now the primary organisation for helping refugees. UNHCR, based in Geneva and financed with voluntary government contributions, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 and 1981.
The agency helps refugees in several ways. It ensures the basic human rights of uprooted or stateless people in their countries of asylum (庇護). It makes sure that refugees will not be returned involuntarily to a country where they could face persecution. In the long term, it helps refugees find appropriate solutions to their plight by carrying out voluntary repatriation (遣送) programmes, helping them to integrate in their countries of asylum or resettling them in third countries.
3. Refugees at a glance
When Sadako Ogata published the first "State of the World's Refugees" report in 1993, there were 18.2 million people regarded as refugees under international law while another 24 million people had been uprooted from their homes and were seeking refuge in their own lands.
Now there are more than 43 million uprooted people worldwide. UNHCR have dealt with 33.9 million people of its concern, including 14.7 million internally displaced people, 10.5 million refugees, 3.1 million returnees, 3.5 million stateless people, more than 837,000 asylum seekers and more than 1.3 million other persons of concern.
As of 2012, Afghanistan was the biggest source country of refugees (a position it had held for 32 years). One out of four refugees in the world was an Afghan, according to UNHCR. In the Middle East, the ongoing internal conflicts in Syria had caused over 200,000 Syrian people to flee their country by 2012.
Think and Study
Refugee influxes have troubled many European countries since the Syrian conflicts broke out. Italy, for example, has been spending 9.5 million euros a month to rescue thousands of Syrian migrants crossing from their country in smugglers' boats. What social problems have refugee influxes caused in these countries? What should UNHCR do to address them?
