The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) stands accused of subjecting refugees within its African camps to illegal collective punishment by withdrawing food rations for weeks at a time.
The organisation is also accused of allowing refugee elites to administer their own forms of ‘traditional’ justice, which typically see women locked up for adultery and ‘criminals’ flogged.
These allegations and others were made by a distinguished refugee scholar who claims she has witnessed such human rights abuses during her research at several UNHCR refugee camps in Africa.
The allegations, made by Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond, Founding Director of the Refugees Studies Centre at the UK’s Oxford University, are reported in an article published by the development research reporting service id21.
Jeff Crisp, Head of the UNHCR Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, said that he “would not try to discount the possibility” that miscarriages of justice and collective punishments had taken place in UNHCR refugee camps.
He admitted that the UNHCR’s own research had found that the traditional forms of justice practised within camps often flout international human rights standards.
Crisp went on to explain that the UNHCR does not have the capacity or expertise to manage the size of the refugee populations — up to 200 000 — which have fled to their camps in Africa over recent years.
Despite their inadequacy in providing for the basic rights and needs of refugees, camps cost millions of dollars in international aid. This money would be better spent, Professor Harrell-Bond argues, if instead of building separate camp infrastructures for refugees, the UNHCR enabled host countries to absorb refugees amongst their own populations by using international aid to expand and improve their already existing hospitals, schools and welfare services.
Harrell-Bond argues that such an approach — which is currently being pursued in Zambia — brings improvements in the welfare of not just refugees, but also of local communities in the host country. “If you think of all the millions that are spent on camps, if that were spent on schools, hospitals, and so on, I think it would transform many African counties,” Harrell-Bond said.
When id21 put these arguments to the UNHCR’s Dr. Jeff Crisp, he agreed that the local settlement of refugees was a policy the UNHCR should be pursuing more creatively. He argued that the UNHCR is currently hindered in its exploration of alternatives by the fickle nature of international aid. Even though it means they lose out on aid to improve their own infrastructure and public services, host governments in Africa often prefer refugees to be kept in camps, because camps make refugees more visible.
“If refugees simply go out amongst the local population, they become essentially invisible. And when refugees are invisible, it’s much harder to mobilise international support for them” Crisp explained.
Professor Harrell-Bond further explained that international governments and agencies strictly divide their budgets between ‘development’ and ‘relief’, considering refugees only under ‘relief’.
Initiatives which seek to use aid donations more sustainably, by combining better provisioning for refugees with infrastructural development in the host country, are thus currently ignored by many donor bodies: “if you go with an application to Echo (the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office) that smacks of ‘development’, you won’t get money,” Harrell-Bond complained.
Harrell-Bond and Crisp both argue that improving the lives of refugee populations in Africa now depends on whether or not international aid agencies and donor governments are willing to reconsider their assistance to refugees as part of a package of sustainable regional development. – id21