Protection challenges facing UNHCR in addressing the question of IDPs in the absence of explicit international legal framework: the case study of Pader District, Uganda
Date
2010-02-24T12:49:51Z
Authors
Buzoya, Kimenyi
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Abstract
For more than two decades now, the civil conflict that has pitted the Ugandan government
against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has caused significant internal displacement of
people in the north of the country. Because political solutions have been slow to come to
Africa’s ‘forgotten war’, humanitarian organizations have increasingly played a role in
attempting to abate the effects of the war on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). One such
organization is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Following a
report by the then United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and
Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland in 2005 and invitation by the Government of
Uganda, UNHCR officially started its work to assist IDPs in northern Uganda, including Pader
district, in 2006.
This study considers the protection challenges that UNHCR is faced with in trying to address the
question of IDPs in the absence of explicit international legal framework. Specifically, the study
attempts to understand how UNHCR is responding and assisting the government of Uganda to
provide assistance and international protection to the IDPs in the context of the principle of
sovereignty, which may be a source of tension between governments and transnational
organizations, and a hindrance to effective implementation of UNHCR programmes. The study
engages with the paradox of UN humanitarian intervention with IDPs and the challenges it faces
as a result of its intervention.
This research report relies on the data that was collected among UNHCR staff in Uganda in
December 2008. Information was solicited from respondents through the open-ended in-depth
interview technique, while additional data was gathered through the consultation of articles,
reports and other written materials from UNHCR.
The findings of the study suggest that UNHCR is faced with challenges to protection that are
three-fold in nature; legal problems arising from gaps in the international legal framework for
IDP protection and a lack of explicit international protection mandate, ineffective intervention
challenges related to local dynamics that result in barriers to effective international protection of
IDPs in Pader, as well as security dilemmas associated with the seemingly dire prospects for
peace in northern Uganda in general, but particularly IDPs’ return to their previous villages that
have spawned this situation. These problems hinder the effective implementation of UNHCR
programmes at the local level.
The report further suggest that the challenges of protection are less about the absence of a legal
protection framework for internally displaced persons and more about contestation, conflict and
competition between the state and transnational humanitarian organizations to earn the right to
legitimacy in intervening on behalf of the internally displaced in the part of Uganda that is
engulfed in war. In an environment where neither the state can claim autonomy nor transnational
organisation can stick to political neutrality in delivering interventions, humanitarianism brings
rewards for both a) government officials who may expect incentives from UNHCR to carry out
work on behalf of the state, as well as b) UNHCR itself that wishes to appear to be the most
effective in delivering intervention in the face of donor organizations and countries as well as the
local population. In such conditions, both the ideals of sovereignty of the state and the political
neutrality of the transnational organizations appear to fall away in either an overlap between the
practices of sovereignty and humanitarianism, or the ineffective intervention that result in failure
to balance the two in coordinating intervention efforts at the local level.