CIAO DATE: 04/05

Protect or Neglect? Toward a More Effective United Nations Approach to the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons

Simon Bagshaw and Diane Paul

November 2004

Brookings Institution

 

Introduction

Displaced people who are persecuted or neglected—whether in Darfur in the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, the Russian Federation, Afghanistan or elsewhere—turn to the United Nations to provide them with material aid and to protect them from armed attack, arbitrary detention, forced conscription or sexual violence.

To examine how the UN has been providing protection to internally displaced persons (IDPs) and how to make that response more effective, the Brookings Institution-Johns Hopkins Project on Internal Displacement and the Internal Displacement Unit (now Division) of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs dispatched a team into the field in 2003. Composed of Simon Bagshaw and Diane Paul, the team visited nine countries and produced this 102-page study, Protect or Neglect: Toward A More Effective United Nations Approach to the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons (November 2004).

The study finds that the UN’s approach to protecting vulnerable populations “is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, system-wide agenda.” It notes that staff efforts in the field are often undermined by a lack of political and financial support from headquarters and UN member states. It proposes that the United Nations make the protection of civilians and the prevention of displacement “a core part of its mandate.”

Full Text (PDF format, 114 pages, 1.40 MB)