Refugee policy: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Last month, the United Nations Refugee Agency came out with a startling statistic: 100 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced. Think about that – it’s more than ten times the population of Switzerland.

Some of these people are newly displaced; two million Ukrainians are now living in Poland. Others have been born in refugee camps, and never known another life. Some have had to flee home, but remain in their own country, others end up thousands of miles away.

On June 20 each year the UN marks Refugee Day, it is designed to draw attention to the situation of refugees worldwide, and show support for them. In the latest edition of our Inside Geneva podcast, we decided to take a deep dive into the issue, looking at refugee policy, attitudes to refugees, and, perhaps most important of all, the experiences of refugees themselves.

The good

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. And Europe has responded with unprecedented generosity, offering visa free entry, the right to work, and in many cases, a home to stay in with host families from Finland to France, Switzerland to Spain.

Gillian Triggs, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection at the UN Refugee Agency tells Inside Geneva the UN views Europe’s reaction as “best practice”. The UN’s slogan for Refugee Day 2022 is “whoever, wherever, whenever”, and Triggs and her colleagues are certainly hoping that this gold standard will be extended to all refugees. “You’ve shown you can do it, so now do it in relation to other countries.”

Jeff Crisp, an expert on refugee policy with Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, also joins us on the podcast. He has been watching the huge welcome given by private citizens across Europe to Ukrainian refugees, and believes the crisis could lead to a growing awareness and understanding of refugee issues.

“The Ukraine crisis has really kind of humanised the refugee issue, people have been able to see women, children, men in extremely difficult circumstances,” he tells Inside Geneva.

The bad

But before Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Europe, as Triggs points out, couldn’t even agree on a pact to share responsibility for the few thousand asylum seekers who, at great risk to themselves, manage to make it to Europe’s shores by crossing the Mediterranean in fragile boats.

Nhial Deng, a refugee from South Sudan tells Inside Geneva “as someone who understands the horrors of war very well, I was so happy to see countries in Europe opening their borders to Ukrainian refugees, but the question is, what was happening before that.”

Nhial’s story is emblematic of what many refugees experience; years in limbo, with no perspective of how or where a normal life can be resumed. Although he’s from South Sudan, he’s never been there; his father became a refugee in Ethiopia before Nhial was even born.

Then, when Nhial was 11, violence came to their village in Ethopia, and the family had to flee again. Nhial was separated from his parents and siblings. He ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where he stayed for 11 years.

You can hear more about his experiences by listening to Inside Geneva. Nhial is now studying in Canada, but his focus remains on refugee policy, because, as he tells us, while he spent 11 years in the camp, “the shocking thing is that there are people who have lived in that camp for over 20 years and they are still there today.”

The other shocking thing, is that Nhial’s story is not an exception. Around the world millions of refugees wait in camps, or temporary accommodation, for years, even decades, unable to work, unable to go home, and denied the chance to settle somewhere new and try to restart their lives.

The danger now is that the war in Ukraine is creating a “first class and second class” system for refugees. Here in Switzerland, the Swiss Refugee Council points out that “when we have other war refugees, they go to a federal asylum centre, and they are waiting there for months. And now they see the Ukrainian refugees come in and out the same day of the same centre.”

Like the UN Refugee Agency, the Swiss Refugee Council thinks the “best practice” policy in place for Ukrainian refugees should be offered to all.

The ugly

But while it may be true that across Europe, the war in Ukraine has created a greater generosity towards all refugees among private citizens, many governments continue to craft policy aimed at the deterrence of asylum seekers, rather than the protection they are obliged to offer as signatories to the 1951 refugee convention.

The United Kingdom is the latest country to adopt a strategy of “outsourcing” asylum seekers who arrive “illegally” by taking small boats across the channel. The plan is to send these people to Rwanda, where, even if their claim for refugee status is accepted, they will not be allowed entry to the UK, but will have to stay in Rwanda.

“Outsourcing is definitely one of the most disturbing trends that we see in global refugee policy today,” says Crisp. As he points out, Australia was the first to try it, sending asylum seekers to camps on the remote island of Nauru, where human rights groups subsequently found widespread evidence of violations.

Triggs deems the policy more than “disturbing,”. “I can say categorically that we are firmly opposed,” she says. “To outsource in these ways is contrary to international law, and it’s also morally indefensible.”

So are governments and citizens now pulling in different directions over refugee policy? Or is the generosity offered to Ukrainians really only for Ukrainians, and not for Afghans, Syrians, or South Sudanese?

Deng hopes not. “If anyone has to flee their home because of war, because of violence, because of persecution, they should be welcomed, no matter where they come from, no matter the colour of their skin, no matter their social status, because people do not choose to become refugees until they are forced to.”