25 March 2014

Assessing UNHCR Policy and Guidance

UNHCR's recently launched Protection Manual makes it much easier to access - and assess - a wide variety of the organization's policy documents.  Two of these documents have been the subject of recent critiques:

UNHCR Issues New Guidelines on Temporary Protection. They Need a Rewrite (RSDWatch.org, March 2014) [text]
- In this blog post, Michael Kagan takes a close look at the "Guidelines on Temporary Protection or Stay Arrangements."  He concludes with "So, let’s please agree to call these Guidelines a rough draft. I’m sure the intentions were good. But please revise."

"The Dynamic of International Refugee Law," International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 25, no. 4 (Dec. 2013) [extract]
- On pp. 658-61, Guy Goodwin-Gill provides an analysis of "Claims to Refugee Status related to Military Service within the Context of Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Convention and/or the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees," similarly determining that "it is perhaps best to see these December 2013 Guidelines more as a work in progress... ."

Note: IJRL has published other articles that analyze UNHCR guidance; recent examples have focused on sexual orientation (see preprint on SSRN; also note that this guidance has since been superseded) and human trafficking (the full-text of this article can be accessed via FMO; scroll to vol. 19).

Tagged Publications.


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