UNHCR- Nairobi
It was two weeks before the Nairobi branch of the UNHCR let me out of the filing room and I had my first contact with the urban refugee population. The second refugee I saw at the Protection reception desk smashed the computer monitor and CPU on the floor in front of me before he started to pull the metal rod out of his sleeve. The security guards ran in, the 200 or so refugees waiting outside the office started to yell, and we shut down the protection desk for the day. And so ended my first day serving urban refugees in Kenya.
I am interning in the Protection Delivery Unit, the legal section charged with assessing the security risks to urban refugees and providing protection solutions when the risks are found credible. The unit is almost overwhelmed by the constant security concerns of the urban refugees. So overwhelmed, in fact, that there was no one available to train me in the legal tests used when assessing security claims. There is, of course, an up-side to everything, and because I have not been trained in the bread and butter of security claim assessment I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of fascinating projects.
In 1991 Kenya handed over all responsibility for refugee status determination and humanitarian assistance to the United Nations. After many years of lobbying, however, the government passed domestic refugee legislation and has committed to once again assuming responsibility for status determination. In preparation for this hand-over, I am helping UNHCR to develop training materials and compile case law for the pro-bono lawyers who will be litigating the first test cases before the Kenyan judiciary. We have also been conducting training sessions for Kenyan immigration officials, police officers, and hopefully the judiciary, sensitizing them to the realities of refugee survival in Kenya.
I have also had the opportunity to work on some of the newer protection initiatives being developed by the office. Refugee protection in Nairobi is a complex task. Most refugees here are survivors of extreme violence or torture, and in Nairobi, an insecure city at the best of times, many incidents that would be 'common-place' muggings and assaults for the city's poor are perceived by the traumatized refugee as continued foreign state-agent persecution. Sorting out who is actively being pursued by foreign government operatives and who is haunted by ghosts of past government operatives is a difficult task.
The living conditions of Kenya's refugee population also make finding credible security concerns a loaded assessment. Like most other African countries, the government of Kenya has implemented an official encampment policy which requires refugees to reside in the designated camps along the Somali and Sudanese borders. As a result, the refugees who choose, or are forced by security problems, to live in Nairobi, face constant harassment and possible detention by the police. Furthermore, although refugees theoretically have the right to work, only a handful of work permits have been issued for refugees recognized after 1991, when the UNHCR took over status determination. Even work permits for pre-1991 government-recognized refugees, previously issued and renewed, have been put on hold over the past two years. Because for the most part UNHCR only gives material assistance in the camps, this leaves urban refugees with the untenable choice of either working illegally, often in exploitative conditions, or starving. All this is set against the commonly-voiced perception that refugees are a drag on the domestic economy and cut into the very limited supply of Kenyan jobs.
The complete lack of local integration prospects means that the majority of refugees pin their hopes on third country resettlement to North America or Europe. Although an extremely small percentage of refugees are actually resettled, many still submit multiple security claims in the hopes that their claims of security problems in Nairobi will trigger whatever processes are necessary to convince UNHCR to submit their case to a third country. Addressing the imagined, alleged and real security concerns of a desperate and traumatized population is necessarily a sensitive task.
To better address refugees' concerns UNHCR is attempting to create stronger ties with many of the community organizations and small NGOs that operate within the refugee population. I have also been helping out with the new Community-Based Protection Response project, which consults with community groups and conducts home visits to find broader solutions to commonly-experienced problems such as religious discrimination and sexual or gender-based violence. The reality is, however, that as long as the refugees cannot repatriate, resettlement quotas remain limited, and local integration is all but impossible, life for most refugees in Nairobi will continue to be an uphill battle.
