The (un)protection of internally displaced persons under the Global Compact on Refugees

• Autores: Alfredo dos Santos Soares
• Localización: Current Issues On Human Rights / coord. por Alexander Sungurov, Carlos R. Fernández Liesa, María del Carmen Barranco Avilés, María Cruz Llamazares Calzadilla, Óscar Pérez de la Fuente, 2020, ISBN 978-84-1324-552-2, págs. 289-300
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Forced displacement of populations is per se an accumulation of human rights violations and, as such, is "one of the most tragic phenomena of our time". It is also the most prominent quantitative and qualitative change in the nature of forced migration in general and the refugee problem in particular, at least since the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950. Its victims, the internally displaced persons (IDPs), are those forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a consequence or to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, human rights violations, large-scale development projects or natural or man-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border. Although they are immensely more numerous and bear the same suffering as refugees, they are often condemned to the most hopeless helplessness, which is proportional to the exiguity or lack of a normative and political, humanitarian and institutional framework for an international response to this pressing problem.

    By promising to "leave no one behind" in the new path of sustainable development, Agenda 2030, adopted in 2015, seemed to illuminate the plight of IDPs by expressly recognizing their rights, systematized in 1998 in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, and crystallised, at the African Union regional level, in the Kampala Convention (2009). In line with Agenda 2030, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, adopted in 2016, highlighted, for the first time in the UN headquarters, the need for a global governance regime for human mobility which, to be such, must under no circumstances ignore the protection of the human rights of IDPs.

    On the basis of the foregoing, through an effort of reflection and analysis sustained by a review of the literature, this paper aims to assess to what extent and degree the Global Compact on Refugees, envisioned in the above-mentioned New York Declaration and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 17 December 2018, advances the arbitration of sustainable solutions that the dramatic situation of millions of IDPs demands.