Visiting the United Nations

Last week I made my first ever visit to the United Nations.  Sadly, it was nothing like the picture above.  In fact, the nice driver from the hotel I stayed at in Pretoria didn’t even know which building it was.  And while we sat in the unmoving traffic and debated it, I decided I probably had a better chance on my own, so I jumped out of the van and walked.

My appointment was with a representative from UNHCR – the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  The impression I had thus far been given of UNHCR in South Africa was one of an organisation somewhat out of touch with the plight of refugees on the ground.  It was apparently not until last year that they even admitted refugees to their offices, and even then only on Mondays.  They rather infamously stated that Zimbabweans fleeing the 2008 Operation Murambatsvina – when Mugabe systematically demolished slums and informal settlement in major cities, forcing people from their homes and livelihoods – were not refugees, a position hard to understand from a government, let alone an organisation whose mandate is refugee protection.  An NGO worker I interviewed recently told me that the South African UNHCR office has little respect from refugees, and even less from NGOs.

The sign above the security desk at the entrance to the UN building stipulated no cameras or guns and I could see three separate screening points.  But when I approached one of the guards to explain the purpose of my visit, he pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket with my name on it.  On the one hand this seemed a rather informal admittance procedure.  But it was followed by airport style luggage screening, a frisk, and two more locked doors.  I was followed by the guard through each one, and then accompanied all the way to the 8th floor and the office of the woman I was to meet.  It wasn’t hard to see how refugees or asylum seekers might view this as a rather inhospitable welcome (if they even got past first base).

In fact, my meeting went really well.  UNHCR Pretoria is a regional office – it covers all of Southern Africa, not just South Africa itself.  (I can’t help wondering whether a misunderstanding of this role accounts in part for their poor record with some NGOs.)  The representative in Pretoria provided me with amazing insight into how refugee status determination works in other countries in the region, including Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.  Unlike South Africa, which has a specialised and fairly sophisticated refugee status decision-making process (in theory at least), in all other Southern African countries decisions about refugee status are made by inter-Ministerial committees, in which various governmental Ministers – usually from Departments such as Foreign Affairs and Security – hold hearings where they sit around a table and consider applications one by one.  Refugee applicants can attend these group hearings and are occasionally asked questions.  In most cases a decision is made on the spot.  It some, the decision is ‘deferred’.  This is usually because of the Committee’s concerns about potential security threats, but in practice these deferrals are more or less indefinite, so it is hard to see precisely what security they offer.

I found it hard to understand how one Committee could possibly get through all the refugee applications, until I learned that the number of asylum applications per year in each of these countries is only around 5,000.  That is less than Australia.  And of these applications, a huge number are abandoned, as people move on, usually to South Africa, in search of family, friends and better opportunities.

In some ways, these numbers are surprising, given that the political environment for refugees in places like Malawi, Mozambique and Botswana – which are far more inclined to approve asylum applications and extend the traditional African hospitality to refugees – seems far preferable to that in South Africa, renowned instead for xenophobic violence and unrelenting harassment of foreigners by police.  But South Africa was and is seen as the land of opportunity – to work, to start a business and, in some cases, to continue the quest for a new life further afield, in North America, Europe or even Australia.   

What is most interesting and exciting to me in my meeting at UNHCR is their genuine interest in my research into the expanded African refugee definition.  Governments in the region continually request more information from UNHCR on the definition’s scope, expressing their frustration that there is so little to given them guidance on its meaning.  UNHCR itself has not developed any such guidance, in part because the African Refugee Convention, unlike the international 1951 Refugee Convention, does not give them clear authority to do so.  And in fact, I later read that their reluctance to declare Zimbabweans as refugees under the expanded definition was largely due to a ‘lack of doctrinal clarity on the definition’s scope’.

While I hardly expect Southern African Ministers to be queueing up for a copy of my thesis, I have always hoped that my work will provide a tool for UNHCR, lawyers and even refugees themselves to advocate for the protection to which they are entitled.  My meeting with UNHCR is encouraging, because it suggests that those to whom the tool is directed might be actually willing to listen.

I left my meeting feeling very positive and with renewed faith in the research I am doing.  Not only that, but the UNHCR representative I met with even offered to put forward a research request to the relevant government on my behalf, should I choose to visit one of the countries where they work!  Now all I need to do is choose – I’ve heard amazing things about the Kalahari in Botswana, and Victoria Falls in Zambia sounds fabulous.  But Malawi sounds interesting too, so does Mozambique.