High School Model United Nations February 26-February 27, 2011 General Assembly 3 rd Committee Social, Cultural and Humanitarian Committee (SOCHUM) Topic Guide
The Third Committee: Social, Humanitarian & Cultural (SOCHUM) Providing Economic and Social Services for Victims of Conflict for Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) was created on December 4, 1950 to help deal with the problem of refugees. Under the mandate put forward by the General Assembly, they were to coordinate efforts to assist and protect refugees. A refugee is defined as a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country " 1 Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are displaced from their homes like refugees, but remain within their country of origin. The creation of this new grouping has largely been a product of the ethnic conflicts that have emerged since the end of the Cold War. Cases like Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq forced the UNHCR to begin to tackle the growing problem of IDPs. Drivers behind the displacement of people are no longer restricted to the narrow confines of war. Today people are displaced by internal conflict, poverty, human rights abuses, man-made and natural disasters, etc. The UNHCR provides assistance in many ways. Principally it provides what it calls a safety net, providing a certain degree of protection to the 34.4 million people that have been displaced internally, or are now refugees, by securing their basic human rights. Ultimately the long-term goal is to have refugees and IDPs either repatriated voluntarily, resettled in a third party country, or integrated into their country of asylum. The UNCHR provides key economic and social services that include food and nutrition, public health, water sanitation, hygiene, education, and a health information system. There are also programs to help ensure that IDPs and refugees have access to treatment and care for HIV/AIDS. The UNCHR plays a critical role in ensuring the well-being of refugees throughout their difficult ordeal, providing a whole range of social programs to help either in the safe return home of these refugees, or the local integration (or reintegration) of these individuals. These programs include income-generation projects, restoration of infrastructure and other assistance. 2 Given the staggering number of refugees, and IDPs, and the challenging environments they find themselves in, there is the two-fold challenge of the getting the aid to where it is needed, and then pursuing longer term durable solutions to try and move beyond this emergency relief to more long term durable solutions that help to restore the dignity, and reestablish the lives of these people. How can the distribution of aid and social services by UN agencies be improved upon? What can be done in cases where aid agencies are prevented from providing assistance to IDPs was the case in Burma (also known as Myanmar) following the devastation caused by a cyclone in 2008? What about when types of aid are limited as has been the case in Occupied Palestinian territories? How should the international community respond in those cases? 1 Article 1, 1951 Convention Related to the Status of Refugees 2 UNCHR Website: Assistance, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646cd4.html
Sources: 1951 Convention Related to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol: http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html The State of the World's Refugees 2006 - Human displacement in the new millennium: http://www.unhcr.org/4444afc50.html United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR, also known as the UN Refugee Agency): http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home UNHCR Global Report 2009: http://www.unhcr.org/4c08f2ee9.html UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East): http://www.unrwa.org/index.php
Addressing the Challenges of International Migration and Asylum There are various types of migrants. Migrants are different from refugees in that they choose to leave as opposed to being forced out of their countries. A good example of a migrant is an economic migrant. These choose to leave their country in the pursuit of a better life. The problem has been that migrants, like refugees have struggled to get into countries, leading them to use human smugglers and to travel by dangerous routes that can often lead to death. An asylum-seeker is someone who has applied for refugee status in another country and is waiting for a decision to be made on that application. The UN has been active, through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), in attempting to address the challenges facing international migration and asylum. In 2007 the Dialogue on Protection Challenges was launched by the UNCHR. This created a forum for experts to gather and discuss the challenges facing migrants and asylum seekers. The most recent meeting was held in Geneva on December 8th and 9th 2009, with another session planned for this December. In 2006, the UNHCR put out a 10-point action for how to deal with Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration. It has sought pragmatic ways in which it can help countries respond to the problem of migration and asylum-seekers. The plan outlined 10 areas in which the UNHCR could play an active role: 1. Cooperation among key partners; 2. Data collection and analysis; 3. Protection-sensitive entry systems; 4. Reception arrangements; 5. Mechanisms for profiling and referral; 6. Differentiated processes and procedures; 7. Solutions for refugees; 8. Addressing secondary movements; 9. Return arrangements for non-refugees and alternative migration options; 10. Information strategy. As the UNHCR prepares for its 2010 Dialogue on Protection Challenges, the theme is Protection Gaps and Responses. How can the burden be shared and cooperation increased amongst countries and the UNHCR? There are concerns that additional structures are needed for regional cooperation. Also full implementation of the statelessness conventions is key objective going into these talks. (This refers to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.) These key legal conventions extend to stateless persons only the most essential protections. Unfortunately very few countries have ratified either convention. A stateless person is an individual who is not recognized as a national by any state (this person could also be a refugee but the two terms have legal distinctions). There are presently about 12 million stateless people in the world. The challenge is balancing security needs (i.e. the need to secure borders from terrorists, and illegal drugs) with the needs of refugees and migrants who may otherwise have to return to an inhospitable state (potentially facing death upon return). This committee must assess the challenges facing these people and see how states can seek to accommodate those needs without doing undue harm to their border protections, and their refugee and citizenship policies.
Sources: Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration: A 10-Point Action Plan: http://www.unhcr.org/4742a30b4.html UN Conventions on Statelessness: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4a2535c3d.html United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR, also known as the UN Refugee Agency): Asylum and Migration http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4a1d406060.html UNHCR Global Report 2009: http://www.unhcr.org/4c08f2ee9.html United Nations Statistics Committee: International Migration: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/sconcerns/migration/default.htm
Women's Control Over and Access to Economic and Financial Resources The UN has recently taken a more active role in this policy area. In July 2010, the UN General Assembly unanimously voted to create a new UN entity known as UN Women (the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women). It will be fully operational by January 2011. The organization seeks to speed up the development of gender equality and empowerment for women. UN Women merged a series of existing groups to better coordinate the use of funds and resources. 3 Its goal is to fulfill the basic human right of gender equality. It helps states to implement standards set out by the International Commission on the Status of Women. It also works with civil society groups that pursue similar goals domestically. Finally UN Women seeks to hold the UN accountable to its goals of gender equality, and the global monitoring of progress on this front. These goals include: 1. elimination of discrimination against women and girls 2. empowerment of women 3. achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. 4 Economically speaking women have historically had poorer access to financial resources. While the number of women in the paid workforce has grown gradually, women still often remain in low-paid and low-status work, with few protections or rights in the workplace. Women have been seriously affected by the 2008 global recession, which has put close to 20 million women out of work. Women are also left with the majority of unpaid work in the household (e.g. childcare), limiting their ability to gain a proper education in some cases. In the twenty-first century women hold few executive and senior-level jobs. In order to address this, UN Women highlights a number of areas that require immediate attention including: education, health, violence against women, armed conflict, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms, human rights, media, and the environment. Perhaps most notable is education. Progress is being made on this front as demonstrated by the shrinking gender-gap globally, but some regions lag behind. In Northern Africa, girls not attending school still outnumber boys by a large margin. Women still make up two-thirds of the world s illiterate population. Action is urgently needed on this front to improve access to economic and financial resources. Similarly proper maternal healthcare and childcare would help the advancement of women in the developing world tremendously. There is no one single answer to this complicated issue. This committee must work to sort through the various hurdles women face in pursuing gender equality and determine what still impedes equal access to economic and financial resources. How can UN Women, as a new agency, serve to enhance the visibility of these issues affecting gender equality? How might the election of member states like Saudi Arabia, and Libya affect this process? How do the challenges facing women in their attempts to gain proper access to economic and financial resources differ from one region to another (e.g. what challenges face a female Afghan villager, versus those facing single mother in Detroit)? 3 Groups that were merged into UN Women include: the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI), and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). 4 About UN Women, http://www.unwomen.org/about-un-women/
Sources: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women New York, 18 December 1979: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cedaw.htm Saudi Arabia spot on UN women agency triggers outcry, Reuters, 14 November 2010, http://blogs.reuters.com/afghanistan/2010/11/14/saudi-arabia-spot-on-un-women-agency-triggers-outcry/ UN Women (the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women): http://www.unwomen.org/ UN Development Fund For Women (UNIFEM): www.unifem.org/