STATEMENTS

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2001

Background

The WCC central committee adopted a major policy statement on uprooted people in 1995, emphasizing the increasingly grave plight of refugees and migrants in a time of escalating conflicts around the world. Over the past five years the situation has become much worse still. The pressures of globalization and the persistence of intractable conflicts are leading ever more people to leave their communities or their countries. Of the 150 million people living outside their country of origin, only about 17 million are recognized as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or by the UN Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees. In fact, the number of recognized refugees has slightly declined in the past five years. However, the number of people displaced within the borders of their own countries has increased dramatically as governments make it more difficult for refugees to find safety in other countries. Presently they number close to 35 million.

In every region around the world, racism and xenophobia are on the rise. Refugees and migrants are viewed more as threats than as human beings in need and are used as scapegoats by political leaders under pressure to protect jobs and national economies. Uprooted people often find borders closed when they manage to get to them, and are frequently expelled if they succeed in crossing them. Governments in all regions are increasingly putting asylum-seekers into detention or prison, as a way of deterring others from coming. People who are desperate to leave their countries are victimized by traffickers and migrants are increasingly treated as criminals.

Assistance to refugees

Uprooted people very often turn to the churches for assistance, as they have for centuries. For more than six decades the World Council of Churches has provided a focal point for the churches' response. Even before its formation in 1948 churches related to the WCC (in process of formation) worked together to help refugees escape German-ocupied Europe. Later, they played leadership roles in seeking solutions for those displaced in the aftermath of the second world war and the 1948 war in Palestine. They advocated for the creation of, and cooperated closely with, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. By the late 1960s, WCC member churches responded to refugee crises throughout Africa as wars for independence and political conflicts generated new refugee flows. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the globalization of the refugee phenomena, with massive refugee outflows from Afghanistan, Indochina, Sri Lanka, Latin America and the Caribbean. In the 1990s, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and later in Chechnya, made it clear that refugee issues in Europe were far from solved. In all of these cases, many churches responded generously and often courageously to the needs of refugees. In these cases, as it did from the beginning, the WCC's service with uprooted people included a strong advocacy component.

Internally displaced people

At the same time, churches began to realize that the problems of displacement went far beyond traditional concerns for refugees. Growing numbers of people were uprooted because of violence but unable to leave their countries. They fled for the same reasons as refugees and often had greater protection and assistance needs, but there was no international institution like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to which they could appeal for help. It was the WCC, in cooperation with the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), that first placed the issue of internally displaced people on the international agenda by documenting their needs to the UN Human Rights Commission.

Migrants

The needs of migrants, most leaving their countries for "voluntary" economic reasons, were always considered differently from those of refugees fleeing persecution. Yet in a globalizing world of increasing inequality, growing numbers of marginalized people simply can no longer survive in their home countries. While international law draws a clear distinction between refugees, migrants, internally displaced people and returnees, the churches' mandate is to reach out to all those in need. Thus in its 1995 statement the WCC referred to "uprooted people" to encompass everyone forced to leave their communities, regardless of the labels they are given by the international community.

Protection

At the international level, international protection standards are under attack on many fronts:

* Governments seeking to restrict the number of asylum-seekers arriving at their borders apply increasingly narrow interpretations of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and its 1967 protocol. Some maintain that asylum can only be granted to individuals who are persecuted by their own states, rejecting those persecuted by non-state actors or who live in a country without a functioning state.

* While some governments have found that women persecuted because of their gender have legitimate asylum claims, others do not acknowledge gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum.