Global

The Global Trends Reports represent UNHCR’s key tool to share information about annual developments in relation to displacement, primarily through numbers. Among the many subjects covered, they often also address different forms of accommodation. But how do such quantifications produce (non)knowledge and link with the humanitarian landscape? This article explores accommodation categories, quantifications, and local categorizations as presented in the Global Trends Reports published from about 2003 to 2020. While the numbers appear to display precise knowledge on refugees’ whereabouts, gaps prevail in the reports: accommodation categories remain undefined, calculations are partly unclear, and local recategorizations occur suddenly without explanation. This article argues that these issues produce nonknowledge, and that the reports’ continuous attention to accommodation data simulates refugees’ controllability and governability.

The Powerful (Vagueness of) Numbers?

Malaysia

Philippines

In 2015, 10 years after my first RSD interview, with work in 6 different operations, I was no longer an entry-level caseworker in UNHCR. I was heading all country level efforts in relation to UNHCR’s statelessness mandate. I had a 7-digit budget with a specific focus on the identification and reduction of statelessness within the Indian Tamil community who were brought to West Malaysia from India and Sri Lanka to work in plantations during the British colonial rule in the 19th century. We were moving closer to getting a reliable baseline figure and acquiring nationality for the stateless populations. But things were rather complicated in Sabah, one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo in East Malaysia where this Filipino refugee woman who sent an inquiry to the general e-mailing address of UNHCR was born and living 28 years of her young life. Having been born as the daughter of Pilipino Muslim refugee parents, she was living on an immigration pass she had to renew every month. She could not travel outside Malaysia. She did not speak any Filipino languages. With her dad’s passing away one month before, her mother with cancer, she was looking after her 3 siblings. In the absence of any official documentation that could prove her nationality, she could not get married to her partner. UNHCR’s public information and digital media catch all phrase that year in 2015 is “One Refugee without Hope is too Many” and she was one out of many 80,000 Pilipino refugees in Sabah without hope. Could we help? No. Pilipino refugees in Sabah were never categorized as refugees. UNHCR found the talk of local integration for Filipino Muslim refugees in Sabah too dangerous. Given the cross-border nature of these issues, there were some expressions of intentions to act, but the potential risks and resourcing consequences made it arduous to advocate for “the protection of refugees” with the government. The office did not want to make a move that would jeopardize its direct implementation work in West Malaysia with refugee populations. UNHCR’s decision to remain silent on Sabah and act to change the state behaviour was to protect its presence in the country rather than the Filipino refugees themselves. As we celebrated a landmark exercise for UNHCR’s statelessness mandate and continued access to the refugees in West Malaysia, we dropped another front line that emerged in the battle for the rights of refugees in East Malaysia. This decision of political kind in nature effectively shut off a path for this community to seek redress for the violation of their human rights as well as their protection rights as refugees. We maintained collateral relationships with the government and received extra funding the next year with all the success stories projected in the country operational planning, but did not engage in any protection activities in Sabah.

Pilipino Muslim Refugees in Sabah: Lost in Numbers

Kenya

South Sudan

Resulting from a chain of communication across the senior management at all levels from HQs to Kakuma, I, as the head of the registration unit, was tasked to plan and monitor the fingerprint verification exercise in 2008. UNHCR undertakes verification exercises to establish the size of the refugee population by certifying the registration records of every individual and household towards the rightful owners of the UNHCR identity document. During the exercise, UNHCR made it mandatory for the refugee head of the households to report to and have their fingerprints verified at the food distribution centres. This decision was justified with the intent to correct the camp population figures through the identification of missing or mismatching fingerprints. The actual aim, however, was to scale down the informal household economics of South Sudanese working elsewhere in Kenya by restricting their freedom of movement. They had to show up at the food distribution site, or else their UNHCR registration records would be inactivated, meaning they would lose their bi-monthly food ration. As part of the efforts to encourage return, essential assistance services in the camp, such as education and health centres, were reduced, effectively serving as push factors driving individuals to return to South Sudan.

Returns to South Sudan from Kakuma

Egypt

UNHCR shut down its office doors as a result of what is known as the "Mostafa Mahmoud demonstrations" that ensued in the last three months of 2005. The south and the north of Sudan had signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in early 2005, following a twenty-year-long civil war. UNHCR was preparing to sign the first tripartite agreement with the governments of Sudan and Kenya to assist the return of refugees mostly residing in the Kakuma Refugee Camps in Kenya to the south of Sudan. In Egypt, however, there were no camps. Instead, UNHCR stopped RSD for the newcomers from the south of Sudan who lived autonomously in urban areas. Around 2,000 demonstrators started camping in Mostafa Mahmoud Park near the UNHCR office in the Mohandessin District in Cairo. Being unable to register with the organization meant that the new arrivals to Egypt could not access employment, healthcare, and education. Most importantly, they remained at risk of detention and deportation in the absence of UNHCR's identity documentation that confirmed their legal status as 'asylum seekers' or 'refugees' in the country. The security measures and forces around the UNHCR office were doubled, and all communication channels with the demonstrators, who were referred to as thugs or illegal migrants by office senior management during staff meetings, were eventually cut. With the temporary closure of the office, I spent my time at work, together with the rest of the staff, clearing my backlog of pending RSD decisions and updating the data in UNHCR's population database called Profile Global Registration System (proGres) using log entries such as 'Applicant scheduled for an interview,' 'Applicant interviewed,' 'Assessment submitted for review,' and so on, to process the RSD case management data for each applicant. On the last working day and the last all-staff meeting of the year in 2005, the senior management wished us all a prosperous and happy new year. At the same meeting, they announced that some protestors were likely to die, with the police being instructed to enter the park that same night. And they did die. Egyptian security opened fire on the crowd while most protestors were asleep. I spent the next month, the deadline given to UNHCR by the government, with the RSD team rotating between three Egyptian prisons to establish who among the 627 detainees were refugees and who were not (Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Programme, 2006). Ajok, one of the survivors of Mostafa Mahmoud, uttered these words to me in a prison cell as I was switching on my laptop, getting ready to type the transcript of the RSD interview: "Now I have to talk to you about what happened to me in South of Sudan so you can let me out of prison. I saw people and children die that night. Three people committed suicide since we were thrown in here like animals. One was a close friend. How are you going to interview him to determine whether or not he is a refugee now? UNHCR did not have to wait that long. People did not have to die for you to come listen to us." These words of Ajok, I did not type, but I remember them. He was not an illegal migrant. Like all the other detainees, he was eventually granted refugee status and was released from prison. The Inspector General's Office (IGO), which is responsible for the assurance and oversight of UNHCR's activities and operations, initiated an internal investigation. I was one of the many staff members that IGO interviewed, but there were never any internal or external reports issued by UNHCR. If these existed, they were not made available to all staff or the public.

Mostafa Mahmoud Incident

Q. When UNHCR plays the state substation role, how do politically charged decisions come in relation to the collection or no collection of data to ensure nobody is left behind? I have been privy to similar discussions of big numbers in the last number of years, and exactly on this issue, that is why I’m quite interested in how our statistics is so fundamentally important. It's the baseline to everything that we do. Yes, they are numbers, often crude numbers. But it's the baseline to everything that we do. It's the baseline to us, having even jobs in the organization. I think it has improved how we quantify, calculate estimate people of concern. But what we're definitely lacking in is this issue of when we call a spade to spade and say they are not refugees, bearing in mind that there are political pressures context out there. States are overburdened. I get that. But internally we have a bit of a mismatch between the policies that have been set out, for example, the guidance notes on International Protection for many nationalities, for example, the other one recently that came out. I can't remember, but they're out there. These guidance notes that basically say, without necessarily UNHCR committing to that, these are people in need of international protection. Okay, what does that translate to them in terms of advocacy at national level, and also programs and support at national level is another matter. It has been quite frustrating to see, sometimes what I refer to as an old mentality and old school mentality of individuals saying, well, they're not asylum seekers. They didn't flee because of persecution. But again, the nature of what is persecution in 2022, and looking forward for the decades to come in this complex world, that we live in, it is not as it used to be. We need to rethink a way around that. My thinking would be is to have a very, very open conversation that moves away from that. Yes, the integrity of the legal framework that we have out there 1951 Convention etc, but we need to have a very, very honest conversation with ourselves beyond the legal frameworks into what does this mean in actual implementation? Us Mexico Southern border is a prime example. The Mediterranean is another. Do we have a role? How do we work with and engage with IOM? These are all bigger questions that we need to. We need to look at. Internally, and coming back to your question entirely, internally…I think it actually what I realized the data, the statistics, the registration, the surveys have a lot of power in being able to change that and for us to really sit down and take stock of these of these issues again, the example would be, and all that has happened previously in Europe with the Mediterranean situation, but also in and I am referring to mixed movements in Latin America, is these complexity of movements, third country nationals, all these different legal terms, coming up. What we really need to do is for somebody, or to have these proper consultations across the board, especially with, if I can say, like younger colleagues with a fresher perspective and fresher eyes. And what's been happening in the field to really say, look, this is what's really going on. This is where we can break this mould of these are our people of concern, and these are not. That dichotomy is not working anymore. And it's not going to work, and it's not fair for anyone. So, it's to have these proper stock takes and to be very, very open and sharing what we've seen, what we think, our frustrations at the lack of movements on even the categorization. And fundamentally when it comes to response, and again bearing in mind that I have seen other agencies and we're actually doing better than most, despite the many challenges. But somebody needs to grab the bull by the horns and say, this is what it is in 2022. And this is where we're going, and that's a global demand, and a global question.

Redefining Refuge: Navigating Political Pressures and Data Dilemmas at UNHCR

Legal categorization can often mask the complexity and nuance of real-life situations and experiences with systemic practices that lead to exclusions or misrepresentations within UNHCR's quantified data. Questions:<ol><li>What methodological challenges exist in the UNHCR's data collection and categorisation process that might lead to the under-representation or exclusion of certain groups from the refugee categorisation?</li><li>Are there mechanisms in place to document and respond to situations where individuals' rights are violated in the process of legal categorisation?</li><li>How do UNHCR's own policies or practices potentially contribute to exclusion or under-representation of certain groups?</li><li>How do governments concerns influence UNHCR's categorisation and reporting processes?</li><li>How does UNHCR account for intersectional factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, and nationality in its refugee categorisation and reporting? Are there ways that these intersectional factors can lead to exclusion or misrepresentation in the data?</li><li>What are the consequences for individuals or groups who are incorrectly categorised or excluded from the refugee categorisation altogether, and how are these instances addressed?</li><li>How transparent is UNHCR about its data collection, verification, and categorisation processes? What mechanisms exist for accountability when rights violations or omissions occur?</li></ol>

Interpreting the Population Trends

They are the cornerstone of refugee protection and the key legal documents that form the basis of UNHCR’s work.

The 1951 Convention provides the internationally recognized definition of a refugee and outlines the legal protection, rights and assistance a refugee is entitled to receive. 

UNHCR serves as the ‘guardian’ of these documents and assists governments in translating them into national laws to ensure refugees are protected and can excise their rights.

The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol 

What is the difference between "refugees" and "migrants"?

When you are in a foreign country escaping threats or persecution, you have the right to have your status recognized and confirmed legally. This means you are entitled to an official acknowledgment of your circumstances and protections in the host country. This recognition affirms your position and safeguards against being sent back to potential dangers. It's an essential right that establishes your place and rights within a new country.

Right to Legal Status Confirmation

Voluntary repatriation refers to your free and informed decision to return to your country of origin, in conditions of safety and dignity. This means that you should not be forced, coerced, or unduly pressured into returning to your homeland. Your decision to repatriate should be based on a genuine desire to return and an assessment that it is safe to do so. Repatriation should also ensure the protection of the rights of returnees, including access to land, property, and essential services, and should facilitate your reintegration into society.


The Principle of Voluntary Repatriation

The right to seek and engage in lawful employment in the country of asylum, enabling you to support yourself and contribute to society.

Right to Access to Employment

The right to access essential medical services and healthcare facilities in the country of asylum, ensuring your physical and mental well-being.

Right to Access to Healthcare

The right to access formal education or appropriate educational opportunities for children and adults, ensuring their right to learn and develop their skills.

Right to Access to Education

The right to move freely within the country of asylum and not be arbitrarily confined to camps or specific locations.

Right to Freedom of Movement

The right to be protected from arbitrary or indefinite detention solely based on one's immigration status, with detention only being used as a measure of last resort.

Right to Freedom from Arbitrary Detention

At the end of 2022, 108.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order. 

This represents an increase of 19 million people compared to the end of 2021 – more than the populations of Ecuador, the Netherlands (Kingdom of the) or Somalia. It is also the largest ever increase between years according to UNHCR’s statistics on forced displacement.  

More than 1 in every 74 people on Earth has been forced to flee.

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