Farah, a young refugee girl from Iraq is applying for asylum in Sweden, together with her mother and younger sister. Her father is still in Baghdad and Farah follows closely the news from Iraq on tv. Photo: UNHCR/R. Vikström

Black and white protection in the grey zone

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, December 19 (UNHCR) – Whether and how to protect Iraqis and others fleeing armed conflict is the burning issue discussed in today’s Nordic NGO conference in Stockholm, featuring top officials from all Nordic countries, as well as the UNHCR Regional Representative.

“People fleeing conflict are at risk of being rejected as asylum-seekers in the Nordics and either left in legal limbo for years or sent back to countries marred by violence. There is great human suffering going on before our eyes and this is what we are responding to”, says Lise Bergh, Secretary General of Amnesty International, Sweden.

The conference concludes the Nordic campaign “Keep Them Safe”, in which twenty NGOs from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, jointly urge regional governments and practitioners to reconsider their policies and legal practice towards asylum seekers fleeing conflict.

Lise Bergh is pleased to have the Nordic top officials in the conference:

“It is essential to engage Nordic decision-makers in the question of how to ensure the protection of persons fleeing conflict and violence. But Governments resist committing, because they fear larger-scale arrivals and pull-effect. This, however, does not change the fact that persons fleeing for these reasons are in urgent need of effective international protection.”

Contrary to UNHCR guidelines and recommendations, both Iraqis, Somalis and others fleeing conflict have in Denmark been left in legal limbo for years. In Norway, Somalis in need of international protection are in certain cases held on temporary one-year residence permits, while Finland insists on asylum seekers having to prove "individualized persecution" to be recognized as refugees and strictly applies the Dublin regulation. In Iceland, only one asylum seeker has been granted Convention refugee status since 1984.

Sweden, on the other hand, has generously granted most asylum-seekers from Iraq protection, and so far this year received over 17,000 Iraqi asylum-seekers, or more than the rest of EU taken together. This line may however be changing in Sweden. The two avenues of protection, Convention Status or Subsidiary Protection, may be closing to Iraqis and others, because lower courts have started to require a high showing of so-called “individual risk or threat” and deem the accounts of violence in Iraq not to meet the threshold applied.

“This is basically a struggle over “who is a refugee”. Who has not only the need but also the legal right to our protection. What we see in the Nordics is basically the adoption of an increasingly narrow misinterpretation of the refugee definition,” argues Kim Kjaer, Senior Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and spokesperson for the Danish NGO group.

The Refugee Convention states that the term “refugee” shall apply to any person who has fled his or her home country due to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.

And with the majority of conflicts being rooted in differences caused by one of the Convention grounds, the logical conclusion is according to Kim Kjaer that most people fleeing such violence would receive effective protection and convention status if we saw a change of spirit in the application of the definition.

“In the case of Iraq, for example, people are obviously targeted because of belonging to a certain ethnic, religious or other group and still we refuse to recognize them as refugees. There is definitely an urgent need to review Danish practice.”

Hans ten Feld, the refugee agency's regional representative, believes the question raised by the Nordic NGOs to be critical, adding that this remains an essentially unresolved global protection and humanitarian question.

“Despite the generosity of Nordic countries, the situation today is one where persons fleeing armed conflict by and large end up in the neighbouring countries. Millions of Iraqis are thus in Syria and Jordan, challenging fragile economies and social systems. There is definitely a need for further dialogue on a global response and responsibility sharing.”

While stepping up the provision of assistance in the immediate region is critical, refugee camps do not constitute a long term solution, ten Feld points out, referring to the millions of refugees stuck in refugee camps for decades in for instance Thailand, Nepal, and Algeria.

By Anna Leer