MIGRASYL

News on migration and asylum from around the region - Nouvelles de la région sur les questions de migration et d'asile

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

[EU]: RSDwatch - UNHCR Issues New Guidelines on Temporary Protection. They Need a Rewrite.



In February UNHCR  published new Guidelines on Temporary Protection or Stay Arrangements (TPSA), a document that is obscure  where it should be clear, explicit and broad where it should be narrow and conditional. It has the potential to make refugees’ lives worse.


Temporary protection, and its close cousin, prima facie recognition of refugee status, has a long history but also urgent current importance (see, e.g., Syria). These are essential mechanisms to provide immediate status to refugees in crises. But they are also useful for governments that want to avoid full protection of refugee rights. Because of this double edged sword, UNHCR could do much good by laying down clear guidelines. But it has probably made matters worse.


“Temporary protection” is a badly abused term in refugee policy, used to refer to a wide range of very different things. Sometimes it is used to refer to protection of groups above and beyond the international definition of a refugee (example: USA). At the other extreme it is used by governments to re-label confinement and detention of refugees and to defer their access to a stronger status (example: Israel). UNHCR offices have also used temporary protection to freeze cases by nationality (example: Sudanese in Egypt), cutting refugees off from access to resettlement and sometimes social welfare assistance.