Chloë Gilgan, University of York, ESRC Post-doctoral Fellow, uses this ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog to discuss UNHCR’s advocacy for refugee resettlement and its relationship with the Responsibility to Protect.

 

Introduction

This ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog is based on research that examined the link between the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the resettlement of refugees fleeing mass atrocities in theory and practice through a qualitative case study of the UK’s response to, and civil society’s advocacy for, Syrian refugees during 2014-2016. The period 2014 through 2016 was a critical phase in the conflict because the European refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015, was a consequence of the international community’s ineffective responses to Syria and the region. By 2018, over 12 million people—more than half of Syria’s total population—were displaced either within Syria or abroad helping to make Syria the ‘the biggest peace and security [challenge] in the world’.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the organisation with the mandate for protecting Syrian refugees. UNHCR accepts those fleeing violence as a result of internal conflict as refugees within their practice manuals, and refugee status does not have to be individualised as it can be recognised through group-determination procedures on a prima facie basis. Group determination of prima facie refugee status is used when large populations have been displaced for reasons generally known (such as mass atrocities) which require an urgent response.

UNHCR’s work involving asylum applications for such populations has been seen as R2P in practice. According to Barbour and Gorlick, the following cases are examples of R2P in practice where UNHCR protected populations fleeing mass atrocities by recognising their refugee status: Kurdish refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in Iraq under Saddam Hussein; Rwandese refugees fleeing in the 1990s; Cambodian refugees fleeing crimes against humanity; Myanmar refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing; Albanians (Kosovars) fleeing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo during the 1990s; Liberian refugees fleeing under the threat of war crimes and crimes against humanity; and Ugandan refugees fleeing under the threat of war crimes and crimes against humanity by non-state actors.

However, UNHCR’s broadened definition of refugees does not necessarily mean the organisation links refugee protection to R2P in practice. Crucially, UNHCR advocates to states to share responsibility for Syrian refugees, so how the organisation relies on R2P as a tool of advocacy is part of the inquiry to understanding the link between R2P and refugees in practice. The analysis in this blog is based on a discourse analysis of official documents and interviews with UNHCR officials, some who are in charge of implementing resettlement programmes for Syrians in the UK.

 

UNHCR’s Contestation of R2P

Bellamy’s research on mainstreaming R2P within the UN structure revealed that the entities within the UN had different understandings of the meaning of R2P and even though they considered their work related to R2P protection responsibilities, there was concern over the norm’s added value due to its political nature in complicating already sensitive relationships with states. This means a critical component for analysing refugee protection as a conceptual response to R2P involves looking at how UNHCR advocates for increased protection of Syrian refugees. UNHCR works with states to assist in resettlement to a third country while advocating for states to increase their resettlement places. Thus, how UNHCR uses R2P as leverage in advocacy is highly relevant, least of all in terms of how it may influence states’ views on the link.

UNHCR has not explicitly mentioned R2P when attempting to generate a cooperative response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Despite UNHCR’s consistent advocacy for both increased resettlement and the linking of large scale displacement with mass atrocities, R2P has not been referred to as a potential new approach or as a tool for bringing about this enhanced protection of refugees in official discourse. Interviews conducted by this author reflected this fact. In practice, rather than frame UNHCR’s repeated pleas to the international community in terms of R2P, the organisation continues to plead with states to take their fair share of refugees in the name of solidarity and through charitable donations.

The concepts of solidarity and responsibility sharing come from what UNHCR sees as an implicit agreement made by states when they signed onto the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The High Commissioner calls on states to provide protection of refugees because solidarity ‘is essential to the effective functioning of the international protection regime’. However, as many signatories have fallen short of this implicit promise, the High Commissioner envisions the need for an additional Protocol to the 1951 Convention, which would articulate member states’ agreed upon ‘commitments to responsibility-sharing, cooperation, and solidarity’. Rather than use R2P’s framework to leverage a commitment to refugees fleeing mass atrocities, UNHCR envisions this additional protocol as a better way to renew states’ implicit promises, which the organisation sees as the best way to get states to increase practical protection of refugees.

Since an additional protocol is not an immediate possibility, UNHCR sees the political commitment to the recent 2018 Global Compact as having a stronger potential (than R2P) for holding states to their responsibilities in terms of helping refugees fleeing mass atrocities. In May 2016, following the height of the European Refugee crisis, the UN Secretary-General put out a draft report calling for new global commitments in anticipation of a High-Level Plenary on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants. The report called on member states to develop a framework for interstate cooperation and requested that the High Commissioner put together a comprehensive refugee response plan. While the report states that responsibility sharing stands at the core of the international protection regime as reflected in the 1951 Convention, reaffirmed in General Assembly resolutions, regional refugee instruments, international human rights law and international humanitarian law; there is no mention of member states’ R2P despite the focus on large movements of refugees fleeing mass atrocities.

Following the Secretary-General’s 2016 report on Movements of Refugees and the United Nations General Assembly summit in September 2016, the subsequent outcome document referred to as the NY Declaration, was adopted by world leaders. The NY Declaration is a political commitment to the Secretary-General’s request for states to address refugee situations more comprehensively and equitably by reaffirming existing legal and global responsibilities for refugee sharing through a ‘Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework’ for formal adoption at the 2018 Global Compact.

Importantly, like the draft report of the UN Secretary-General on the Movement of Refugees, the NY Declaration fails to mention a responsibility to protect refugees even though the central theme concerns international protection and large-scale displacement of populations as a result of mass atrocities. R2P did not receive any focus in the subsequent Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework because the concept of solidarity ‘attracted the most attention at the UN summit’ and was considered to be ‘one of the core tenets of the Global Compact on Refugees’ (See statement by Volker Türk).

On 17 December 2018, the UN General Assembly endorsed the Global Compact on Refugees. Crucially, R2P is not perceived as a guiding principle for attaining any of its four key objectives. Instead, the ‘global compact emanates from fundamental principles of humanity and international solidarity, and…..burden- and responsibility-sharing’ along with the ‘relevant international human rights instruments, international humanitarian law, as well as other international instruments as applicable’. The Global Compact makes a point of stating that it is ‘entirely non-political in nature’ and that it is ‘grounded in the international refugee protection regime, centred on the cardinal principle of non-refoulement’ which stems from the Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol. While R2P could potentially be subsumed under ‘as well as other international instruments as applicable’, this is unlikely as the reference contains a list of legal agreements and R2P is not only a political norm, but is political in nature, which sets it apart from the aspiration of the Global Compact to be apolitical.

Thus, R2P does not underpin UNHCR’s drive for ‘ensuring more effective responsibility-sharing in response to significant refugee movements’, which are often a result of mass atrocities. While it is understandable to some degree that using R2P as a frame may be too narrow since the Global Compact includes climate and economic-induced refugees, there is a missed opportunity to remind states of their R2P of refugees specifically when discussing those fleeing mass atrocities. UNHCR has institutionally localised R2P as a separate framework from refugee protection. The question is whether this contestation of R2P is damaging.

There is a plausible answer to this question given the evidence from engagement with UNHCR officials during this author’s interview research. For example, advocacy around responsibility-sharing of refugees does not include R2P as leverage particularly when advocating to UK contacts because, according to one interviewee, ‘we have found that throwing that moral commitment at states is not effective due to the political climate… [R2P] is just not our narrative’.

 

Conclusion

For UNHCR, R2P is not the narrative because it does not add value and may risk the practical goal of increasing protection of refugees. Thus, the inherent conceptual gaps between R2P and refugee protection are not the underlying reasons for UNHCR’s failure to link R2P and resettlement. Instead, UNHCR intentionally delinks its practice from R2P for better policy traction with states.  This resonates with Jennifer Welsh’s study in 2010, which confirmed that those [UN] Council members committed to the Protection of Civilians (POC) wished to avoid any association with R2P in order to prevent it serving as the ‘lightning rod that would hamper progress’ on the POC.

The segregation and politicisation of R2P from other protection agendas continues almost a decade later despite consistent, explicit referencing in official discourse. The evidence suggests that R2P continues to be supported rhetorically as a stand-alone normative framework, but it is not integrated into practice, especially when it competes with other more established norms that are perceived as less controversial.

 

Bio & Acknowledgements

Chloë is an ESRC-funded Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of York where she completed her ESRC-funded PhD in 2018 at the Centre for Applied Human Rights. She holds a JD from New York Law School and is a member of the New York State Bar and she holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. chloe.gilgan@york.ac.uk, Orcid #0000-0002-9972-872.

This piece is based on a longer article currently under review at a journal: Gilgan, Chloë M. (2020), ‘A Tale of Two Norms: Locating the Responsibility to Protect Syrian Refugees in UNHCR and the UK’.  The author wishes to thank all the research participants for making time in their busy schedules to be interviewed and to several academic mentors at York Law School and POLIS Leeds. This work was supported by the generosity of the Economic, Social Research Committee (ESRC) under Grant number ES/T007400/1 and the York Law School, University of York.

 

Title image licensed under Ggia / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20151030_Syrians_and_Iraq_refugees_arrive_at_Skala_Sykamias_Lesvos_Greece_2.jpg

 

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