From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

CHAPTER 1 Assessing National Approaches to Internal Displacement: Findings from 15 Countries
return efforts in its Peace, Recovery and Development
Plan for Northern Uganda, development actors have not
yet fully engaged to support the plan. 3
An important way of demonstrating openness to the
international community on IDP issues in particular is
to invite the Representative of the UN Secretary-General
on the Human Rights of IDPs (RSG on IDPs) to visit the
country. The RSG on IDPs has visited all of the fifteen
countries included in this report except for Myanmar and
Pakistan and has made multiple visits to most countries. 4
As noted in the introduction to this study, the visits by the
RSG have proven to be valuable in raising national awareness
of internal displacement and the protection needs of
IDPs; assessing the national and international responses
and making recommendations for their improvement;
and providing support to governments and to international
actors to enable them to take concrete steps to
protect the rights of IDPs. For instance, in the Central
African Republic, Kenya and Yemen, the RSG has been
invited to provide expertise in drafting those countries’
national laws or policies on internal displacement.
Turkey is an example of significant change over time in
the government’s openness to international cooperation
on internal displacement. Throughout the 1990s, the
government denied the existence of internal displacement
and rebuffed all requests, including by the RSG, to
engage on the issue. 5 However, when the government,
under pressure from the European Union, finally agreed
to open its doors to the RSG in 2002, that led to a change
in national policy and, more belatedly, to engagement
by international actors when RSG Deng called on the
3 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC),
Uganda: Returns Outpace Recovery Planning: A Profile of
the Internal Displacement Situation, 19 August 2009 (www.
internal-displacement.org).
4 For a list of all country missions undertaken by the
RSG on IDPs, see the website of the Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (www.ohchr.org).
5 Bill Frelick and Virginia Hamilton, The Wall of Denial:
Internal Displacement in Turkey (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Committee for Refugees, 1999).
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government to explore areas of cooperation with international
agencies. At the same time, Deng also called on
the United Nations to expand its support to the government
vis-à-vis IDPs.
An especially important way of engaging with the international
humanitarian community is through participation
in the cluster system, which has become the
standard way of organizing the international response
to emergency situations. The UN cluster system provides
a means through which international and local
actors can share information on and coordinate their
activities. Adopted in late 2005, the cluster approach
was piloted in a handful of countries, including the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, in
2006; it now is applied to every new humanitarian
emergency for which a UN humanitarian coordinator is
appointed. The cluster approach has been applied in all
of the countries surveyed by this study with the exception
of Turkey, and in several cases (Afghanistan, the
Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda
and Yemen), it is still applied today.
The clusters are intended to support national governments’
efforts to address humanitarian concerns; however,
in practice, the level of national government involvement
in the clusters has varied significantly. In one
of the cases reviewed in this study, Kenya, the government
ensured that it had a leadership role in the cluster
system. In 2008 the clusters were reviewed and refocused
to enable stronger Kenyan government leadership, and
government ministries took over as the chairs of the
clusters. In Uganda, leadership of the protection cluster
has been handed over to the Ugandan Human Rights
Commission. In the Central African Republic, the government,
specifically the National Standing Committee
(which is charged with relating to international actors),
participates in protection cluster meetings. In Georgia,
the cluster approach was introduced at the outbreak of
new conflict in August 2008, with the government as
co-chair; by the spring of 2009, the clusters had been
replaced by government-run coordination mechanisms,
in which the international community participated. A