DISERO AND RASRO IN BRIEF DISERO
ANNEX 3
The DISERO (DISEmbarkation Resettlement Offers) scheme began in October 1979, after it became evident that ships flying "flags of convenience" or flags of states unable to resettle refugees were meeting many delays when seeking to disembark rescued refugees in ports of some Southeast Asian coastal states. These delays were caused by the coastal state requirement that the flag state provide guarantees that refugees allowed to disembark would be resettled within a fixed period of time, usually 90 days.
DISERO provides a pool of resettlement places which may be drawn on when required to facilitate such disembarkations. When a qualifying vessel rescues refugees, it radioes ahead to the next scheduled port of call and UNHCR approaches one or more of the governments participating in DISERO to provide the disembarkation guarantee.
Between 10-20% of all rescued refugees disembark under the scheme. Current (1985-86) participants are: Australia, Canada, France, Germany (Federal Republic), New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
RASRO
The objective of the RASRO (Rescue at Sea Resettlement Offers) scheme is to share more equally the resettlement responsibilities arising from rescue at sea by ensuring participant countries an annual maximum resettlement intake of refugees rescued at sea. This should allow governments to encourage shipowners and shipmasters to rescue refugees in need.
This sharing of the resettlement "burden" involves maritime and non-maritime countries in the pledging of quotas to a collective pool of resettlement offers.
Should a participant country have fully utilised its quota, but its ships rescue additional refugees during the course of the year, the additional refugees will be sent to other participant countries.
The scheme is also intended to increase integration prospects by making it possible for refugees to be sent to resettlement countries where they have any kind of link (relative, friend, language, occupation, etc.) rather than, as was formerly the case for the majority of rescued refugees, resettling in the country represented by the flag of the ship which happened to pick them up.
The RASRO pool of country quotas should be utilised proportionately throughout the year to allow better use to be made of existing reception facilities in receiving countries and ensure proportional equality of resettlement efforts should the total number of refugees rescued during the year fall below the total size of the pool.
Currently, fifteen nations have provided some 2,900 places to the RASRO pool: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA.
The scheme went into operation on 1 May 1985.