From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

Benchmark 1 Prevent Displacement and Minimize Its Adverse Effects
to likely disasters.” However, given the displacement of
8,000 people following a mudslide that killed some 300
people in the Mount Elgon area in March 2010, much remains
to be done to improve Uganda’s disaster response.
Kenya’s March 2010 draft IDP policy, the National Policy
on the Prevention of Internal Displacement and the
Protection and Assistance to IDPs in Kenya, “aims to
prevent future displacement.” In addition, Kenya’s 2009
draft National Policy on Disaster Management aims to
prevent disaster-induced displacement in the context of
disaster risk-reduction and management. By the end of
2010, disaster management had been mainstreamed in
all government ministries and staff in 80 percent of the
districts had been trained in disaster management. 26 In
the Central African Republic, the government recently
has been tasked with developing an IDP policy, which, in
line with the government’s regional legal obligations (see
below), should include provisions relating to preventing
displacement due not only to conflict but also to disaster
and to development projects. By contrast, in Georgia,
where a national policy was developed in 2006–2007
after more than a decade of a protracted displacement, it
was perhaps inevitable that the policy focused on durable
solutions to displacement. However, renewed displacement
in August 2008 underscored that greater attention
to preventing and mitigating the effects of any new displacement
would have been valuable. 27
In addition, a specific legislative measure that national
authorities can take toward preventing arbitrary displacement
is to criminalize it in national legislation.
Colombia has done so and has prosecuted a handful of
individuals on that basis. In Georgia, the criminal code
likewise criminalizes displacement that takes the form
of genocide or crimes against humanity. In the Central
African Republic, the penal code as revised in 2010 contains
a number of provisions criminalizing acts related to
26 Interview with a senior government official at the
National Disaster Operations Centre, 20 January, 2011;
training manuals were developed by a task force drawn
from government ministries, the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the
United Nations Development Plan, universities, and
NGOs. See OCHA Kenya, Humanitarian Update 48, May
2009, p. 6.
27 See further the Georgia case study in chapter 2 of this
volume.
27
arbitrary displacement, including by reaffirming that the
deportation or transfer of populations constitutes a crime
against humanity under international criminal law. 28
Conversely, both in Georgia and in the Central African
Republic, national legislation prescribes the conditions
under which it is not only legitimate but also an obligation
of the state to evacuate populations precisely in
order to safeguard them from danger. In Georgia, such
provisions are found in the Law on State Emergency and
the Law on State of Martial Law. In the Central African
Republic, the responsibility of government authorities
with respect to protection of persons and threats to
public order is set out in the Constitution; responsibility
with respect to environmental and natural disasters is
set out in the Environmental Code. 29
The role of national authorities to prevent situations of
mass internal displacement is affirmed in legally binding
instruments in Africa, at subregional and regional
levels. The International Conference on the Great Lakes
Region Regional (ICGLR) Pact on Security, Stability, and
Development, commits the eleven ICGLR member states,
including the Central African Republic, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kenya, Sudan and Uganda,
with respect to the countries surveyed in this study, to
taking measures to prevent internal displacement. One of
the pact’s ten protocols, the Protocol on the Protection
and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons, further
emphasizes the responsibility of member states to
protect individuals from displacement. An objective of
the protocol is that member states shall “prevent and
eliminate the root causes of displacement,” in addition
to incorporating the Guiding Principles into domestic
legislation. The protocol also obliges member states “to
prevent arbitrary displacement and to eliminate the root
28 Erin Mooney, Examen du cadre normatif de la République
centrafricaine relatif à la protection des personnes déplacées
à l’intérieur de leur propre pays : Audit juridique Brookings-
Bern Project on Internal Displacement, February 2011,
pp. 32-35 (www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/11_car_
audit_juridique.aspx).
29 Mooney, Examen du cadre normatif de la République
centrafricaine, pp. 32–37. See also pp. 37–41 regarding
the guarantees that must be met by authorities in order
for any displacement due to development projects to be
considered to be legal.