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Q. What is the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker?
A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, whereas an asylum-seeker is a person whose request or application for asylum has not been finally decided on by a prospective country of refuge or UNHCR.
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Legal Categorisation in Refugee Protection
In practice, questions arise about whether the legal categorization of individuals as refugees, or their exclusion from such categorization, is influenced by the preferences of host states. In the case of Sabah, despite meeting the criteria outlined in international law, Filipino Muslim refugees were not granted refugee status. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) remaining silent on this issue prompts inquiries into its willingness to navigate potentially challenging political situations to protect refugees. The categorical exclusion of Filipino Muslim refugees in East Malaysia from international protection and from UNHCR's data collection effectively erases their challenges and experiences from the narrative. Their absence in the data means that their struggles and the issues they face remain unknown, hindering effective responses to their needs.
The categorizations that underlie the legal classification figures can be vague. The historical, social, and material conditions of refugees' experiences, which are excluded from what is categorically quantified at the local level, take on a life of their own at the global level. For instance, the categorization 'others of concern,' despite its well-intentioned flexibility, served as a convenient loophole for the Filipino refugees in Sabah. It acknowledges a need for protection, yet without the legal obligations that come with formal refugee recognition. Filipino refugees, which fall under the estimated population figure of 80,000 with a sudden drop to 50,000 in 2019, does not receive the same attention or consideration as those falling under more established, legally defined categories in West Malaysia due to the ambiguity of this category. The Filipino refugees face a paradoxical situation: they are acknowledged yet ambiguously defined, counted in numbers but with their stories and hardships concealed by their loose categorisation.
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