The United Nations refugee agency will investigate the way its South African office responded to deadly xenophobic violence in May, a spokesperson said on Tuesday, following complaints by a local law group.
South African civic groups have assailed the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s (UNHCR) slow response to the attacks that left 60 dead and more than 100 000 displaced, demanding an investigation into the local office’s work.
”To ensure full objectivity and transparency, an inquiry will be conducted,” said Ron Redmond, the UNHCR’s spokesperson in Geneva.
”We will expect a report on their inquiry in the next few weeks,” he added.
The team of investigators will include one person named by the UNHCR’s own inspector general and one by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, he said.
South Africa’s Aids Law Project filed a formal complaint with the Geneva-based agency, accusing it of failing to provide leadership to deal effectively with the violence.
The attacks began in Johannesburg and spread around the country as South Africans accused immigrants of taking jobs and blamed them for high crime rates.
The Aids Law Project said its complaint was based on weeks of work to gather testimony and other evidence about the UNHCR’s work during the crisis, the project’s spokesperson Fatima Hassan said.
”Civil society groups, churches and concerned citizens were the first to respond to the crisis. It took the UN a staggering two weeks to organise a rapid assessment,” the group’s report said.
”From the outset of the attacks, displaced people constantly requested intervention from the UNHCR, which is the international body recognised and accepted as having the mandate and experience to deal with such crises,” it said.
”Unfortunately, to date, such intervention has been inadequate,” the report added.
South Africa built temporary shelters for people displaced by the violence, but began dismantling them in early September. — Sapa-AFP