November 17, 2008
The financial crisis threatens to unleash fresh movements of refugees and may make countries less willing to host them, worsening an already potent cocktail of conflict and climate change, a U.N. refugee official said.
 | Afghan refugees in Greece are caught in a limbo without papers or rights: forbidden to stay and prevented from leaving for more welcoming states (Photo: Reuters) |
Erika Feller, assistant high commissioner for protection at U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, urged governments to overhaul their rules to cope with changing patterns of refugee flows and integrate them with other systems regulating migration.
"I think what we're seeing globally is a build-up of adverse factors which are contributing to provoke displacement," Feller said.
"These factors continue to be the traditional ones —persecution, conflict of various sorts —but, as they have in the past, they will be exacerbated by economic circumstances of individuals, by competition for declining resources," she said.
 | Picture Gallery (click on the image to start)The world's migration hotspots at a glance (Photo: Reuters) |
Mounting economic and climatic pressures could prompt more people to flee their homelands in future, Feller said. "One can reasonably solidly predict that climate and environmental factors will affect the sustainability of staying in one country or another, or one region or another. That will provoke large movements of people as well," she said.
"All countries have to adjust to the changing dynamics of displacement ... There are some dramatic forecasts —disappearing countries, sinking islands—that are creating whole new populations of stateless people and displaced persons," she said.
Feller said the classical definition of a refugee as fleeing persecution at home was too narrow for the modern world, where multiple economic, environmental and social factors combined to create what UNHCR classifies as refugee situations.
"Many refugee systems around the world will have to catch up with that, however, because too many of the classical systems are built on the definition of persecution," she said.
editor: Alistair Thomson
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