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Basic Principles:
Protection and Assistance
3 A refugee is defined as someone outside his own country "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion". Parties to the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, of whom there are some 80, mainly Western, African and Latin American states undertake to grant refugees certain privileges and in particular not to return them ("refouler") to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened. States themselves decide whom they take as refugees. There is no obligation to grant asylum. But UNHCR, whose 1950 Statute requires it to protect refugees, continually encourages states to offer asylum. In this it is more successful in Africa
than elsewhere.
4
UNHCR's role in providing material assistance to refugees was originally secondary to its protection role. But it has now assumed major proportions. Of the $500 million or thereabouts which UNHCR will spend in 1980, by far the larger part will be spent on care and maintenance of refugees and the financing of their resttlement, including transport. In this latter field UNHCE normally uses as its agent the Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration (ICEM), an organisation from which we withdrew a decade ago, and which financial considerations militate against
our rejoining.
The Broadening of UNHCR's Mandate
5 UNHCR's three basic solutions to refugee problems are (in order of preference) voluntary repatriation to the country of origin; permanent settlement in the first country of asylum; and resettlement in a third country. In the case of a mass exodus, the typical sequence is that acting on a request from the country of asylum or from the UN General Assembly or its Secretary-General, UNHCR sets up camps and provides assistance and launches a special appeal. It then negotiates and organises repatriation and re-installation, permanent settlement or resettlement.
6 But all this is a far cry from what UNHCR was originally /established
CONFIDENTIAL