The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation

In May 1992, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief, Sadako Ogata, predicted that the next 10 years would constitute ‘the decade of refugee repatriation’. That bold forecast proved to be an accurate one. During the 1990s, some 10 million refugees were able to return to their countries of origin, primarily to States such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and the former Yugoslavia, where armed conflicts and human rights violations had either come to an end or diminished significantly in intensity. Since that time, the scale of repatriation has decreased substantially, largely because persistent violence in major refugee-producing countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, and Somalia has made it impossible for exiled populations to contemplate a return to their own countries. Since 2010, less than three per cent of the world’s refugees have opted to repatriate, while major new refugee emergencies have erupted in Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela. In the words of a recent UNHCR report, ‘returns have not kept pace with the rate of displacement’.1

Democracy · Development economics · Displaced person · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Internally displaced person · Pace · Political science · Refugee · Refugee crisis · Repatriation · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Law

• Democracy and Exclusion

  P T Lenard•Democracy and Exclusion•2023

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