PHA-Exchange> Last CETIM Publication - Internally displaced persons

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

from CETIM <cetim at bluewin.ch> -----
    
  *To interested organizations and people
Geneva, June 6, 2007

The CETIM (Europe-Third World Centre) has just published the fifth 
number of its series of didactic brochures and critical analysis about 
certain human rights: the rights of Internally Displaced Persons.
This brochure is available for free in English** and can be ordered at 
the CETIM for organisations and social movements. For the moment, there 
are still many left.
It can be downloaded/printed on our website : www.cetim.ch
Please find above a short presentation of this publication.
In solidarity
The CETIM*


	*INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS
/Part of a series of the Human Rights Programme of the CETIM./*

*Although forbidden by international humanitarian law and defined by the 
Statute of Rome (the International Criminal Court) as a "crime against 
hu­manity" (art 7.2.d), forced displacements are still largely practiced 
in our time during armed conflict and in various other circumstances 
(huge development projects, catastrophes etc).

The magnitude of this phenomenon has prompted the United Nations to 
re­act by creating, as the beginning of the 1990s, the post of 
Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons, 
although some wanted to create a body comparable to that of the Office 
of the High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR).

Today there are some 25 million internally displaced persons in 40 to 50 
countries, whereas the number of refugees has diminished, from 17 
million in 1992 to 8.4 million in 2005.

The peculiar context obtaining after the Cold War certainly favored "the 
explosion of the number of displaced persons and the evolution of 
internation­al provisions".

Those mainly responsible for and/or complicit in population 
displacements on a large scale are often governments or 
para-governmental groups and, in certain cases, non-governmental 
elements such as transnational corporations or armed opposition groups.

Besides domestic armed conflicts, international armed interventions can 
also trigger internal population displacements (Afghanistan, Iraq, 
Lebanon, Somalia...).
This brochure aims to explore the evolution of this concern and the 
meas­ures taken at the international level, in particular within the 
United Nations, re­garding displaced persons.
It presents the mandate and the activities of the Representative of the 
Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons and the Guiding 
Principals that govern this question. One of the merits of the 
Representative is that he sets out the bases of the problem and 
acknowledges, without hesitation, that "internal displacement is not 
only a subject of preoccupation from the point of view of human rights. 
It is also a humanitarian, political and development problem".
Three related initiatives from the now defunct Commission on Human 
Rights and its subsidiary body, the Sub-Commission for the Promotion and 
Protection of Human Rights, deserved to be mentioned in the framework of 
this brochure. They have been briefly presented in the annex.* *

*/Editions du CETIM, 48 pages, 2006, URL: 
http://www.cetim.ch/en/publications_details.php?currentyear=&pid=144/
www.cetim.ch



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