Alum talks about challenges posed by refugee crises

Arafat Jamal
Jason Koski/University Photography
Arafat Jamal '92 speaks at the International Human Rights Clinicians Conference April 28.

“When an individual is forced to flee violence and persecution, that represents a failure of the international community, a failure to ensure respect for human rights and to maintain peace and security,” said diplomat Arafat Jamal ’92.

At the 2017 International Human Rights Clinicians Conference April 28 on campus, Jamal gave the keynote speech, “A Crisis of War and a Crisis of Will: Prospects for Responding to a Global Refugee Phenomenon,” in which he detailed how states should navigate an international commitment to protecting refugees while balancing security concerns.

Jamal has 25 years of experience working in the field and in policy, managing displacement emergencies in Jordan, Guinea, Libya, Afghanistan and Zaire, and as head of the Inter-Agency Service of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The number of forcibly displaced people today is massive, but it is not unprecedented,” Jamal said. “What is different today is both the lack of solutions and options for these people and the apparent lack of political will to resolve them.”

The result of this phenomenon is what UNHCR defines as a protracted refugee situation, a persistent state of exile. Citing past affected populations such as the Hungarians in 1956, Ugandan Asians in 1972 and former Yugoslavians in the 1990s, Jamal said most refugee situations in the past had clear beginnings and endings.

In 2015, however, 41 percent of refugees under UNHCR mandate were in protracted situations, and Jamal said these communities are almost permanently excluded from making a livelihood in their host countries.

This exclusion, along with dwindling international assistance and a lack of faith in an improved situation back home, drove the “mass exodus” of Syrian refugees to Europe, Jamal said.

“The thing about camps is that the very camps that initially preserve life are the same ones that constrain lives and prevent people from exercising their particular rights,” he said.

Jamal discussed several trends, such as the urbanization of the refugee conflict. “Today’s cities are both the theaters of conflict and the sanctuaries of safety for refugees; people flee from cities and they go to cities,” he said.

Jamal acknowledged the failures of multilateralism and weaknesses in United Nations partnerships but said these frameworks contain the elements for an effective solution and need to be “reinvigorated.”

In terms of policy, Jamal said the international community needs to address the strain on host countries, the majority of which are low- and middle-income, as well as the improvement of resettlement spots, as an example of “international solidarity” and “shared responsibility.”

Despite these shortcomings, Jamal perceives several signs of hope at the institutional level of the U.N. with the signing of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 and the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in 2016.

Jamal’s talk was presented as part of the conference’s theme of “International Human Rights Clinics in the Age of Authoritarianism” hosted by Cornell Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, the Gender Justice Clinic and the Berger International Legal Studies Program.

Amanda Kabonero ’20 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.

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