Visit our new website

(Washington, D.C.) Oct. 1, 2010 – After nearly 12 months of planning and work, Jesuit Refugee Service/USA is happy to announce the launch of our new website. In November 2009, JRS communications leaders from the International office, the U.S. office and the Eastern Africa office began collaborating with Omaha-based Adventure Studios to design and build the website.

This new website is designed to present information in a clear way with easy navigation, while highlighting the accompaniment, service and advocacy JRS undertakes worldwide with and on behalf of refugees and forcibly displaced people.

World Social Forum seeks translators

(Quito, Ecuador) April 22, 2010 – The World Social Forum on Migration is an event that takes part as component of the World Social Forum, and constitutes a space of democratic debate of ideas, reflection, proposal formulation, experience exchange and social movement articulation. The Forum becomes the meeting point for NGOs, networks and other civil society organizations that oppose the neoliberal scheme and back the recognition of civil, political, economical, social and cultural rights of migrants, IDPs, refugees and stateless people.

WSFM

Take Action: Support Colombian Internally Displaced Persons

Colombia has one of the highest internally displaced populations in the world.  In 2009 alone, 280,000 civilians were newly displaced in addition to over 4 million already displaced.  Victims of forced displacement leave their homes and families to escape violence, intimidation, and rape from both legal and illegal armed groups.  Vulnerable groups such as Afro-Colombians, indigenous communities and women face the greatest consequences of the armed conflict.

In 2004, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared a State of Unconstitutional Affairs and ordered the Colombian government to address the needs and rights of the displaced population.  Despite the Constitutional Court’s demands, Colombia’s displacement crisis continues and the Colombian government has yet to implement these orders.  The resolution led by Representative Hank Johnson (GA) and 22 other co-sponsors calls on the Government of Colombia to fully implement the Constitutional Court’s orders.

Ms. Sascha Thompson, Rep. Johnson’s aide, stated at a recent WOLA event that “many internally displaced Colombian leaders, who have been brave enough to organize their communities to speak out about their rights and to demand the Colombian authorities to meet its obligations to protect them and restore their lands, have become constant targets of threats against their lives, harassment, additional human rights violations, and extra violence.” These leaders and their families need your help.

Many indigenous groups in Colombia are on the verge of extinction. Afro-Colombians’ livelihoods are threatened by the armed conflict and invasive government policies.  The precarious condition of women is exacerbated by gender based violence.  Vulnerable populations in Colombia are disproportionately affected by the consequences of the armed conflict and their human rights must be protected.
Send a message to your representative asking him/her to co-sponsor House Resolution 1224

Hurricane season approaching, Haitians need shelter

Shelter remains the biggest and most urgent priority in Haiti, two months after it was struck by a catastrophic earthquake, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday as he visited the country for the second time since the disaster and stressed that the world has not forgotten its people’s plight.

Mr. Ban met with President René Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and toured a camp that is home to tens of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) on a one-day visit to the Caribbean country ahead of the international donors’ conference for Haiti that will be held at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 31 March.

The Secretary-General told journalists in Port-au-Prince, the capital, that the situation in Haiti, where the transition from emergency relief to early recovery and reconstruction has begun, remains extremely difficult.

Estimates vary but as many as 230,000 Haitians may have been killed in the quake that struck on 12 January and much of Port-au-Prince and nearby towns was levelled. Around 1.3 million people remain homeless.

1.2 million still homeless two months after Haiti earthquake

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will make a one-day visit to Haiti on Sunday, his second to the Caribbean country since the January 12 earthquake, his spokesperson announced today.

While in the capital, Port-au-Prince, Mr. Ban will meet with President René Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, as well as with the leadership of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti and UN agencies working on the ground, Martin Nesirky told reporters.

The Secretary-General will also visit a camp housing some of the estimated 1.2 million people displaced by the 7.0-magnitude quake.

Meanwhile, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has announced that the $1.44 billion revised humanitarian appeal for Haiti is only 49 per cent funded.

Two months after the earthquake, the humanitarian work is picking up speed, OCHA noted, with more than 4.3 million people having received food assistance, 1.2 million people receiving daily water distributions, and more than 300,000 children and adults vaccinated against a range of infectious diseases, including measles, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.

UN: lack of progress on key issues in Sri Lanka

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Monday expressed concerns about the lack of progress on political reconciliation, the treatment of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the setting up of an accountability process in Sri Lanka since the United Nations signed a joint statement with the Government last year in the wake of the end of its civil war with separatist Tamil rebels.

Mr. Ban said that he had “a frank and honest exchange of views” last Thursday about these subjects during a telephone conversation with President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, where the runner-up candidate in January’s presidential elections, General Sarath Fonseka, was subsequently arrested for alleged “military offences” and the parliament was dissolved.

Displaced Colombians seek shelter at unconventional sites

(UNITED NATIONS) – As the number of people driven from their homes to escape violence across Colombia topped three million in 2009, the United Nations refugee agency said today that more and more of the forcibly displaced are seeking safety on scraps of land that no one else wants.

A stretch of beach on the outskirts of Cartagena is one such site, where some 118 families have created a settlement accommodating a new family every week, noted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

When these families arrived, the Villa Gloria district on the Caribbean coast had no electricity or other municipal services because city authorities said it was prone to flooding and land ownership was unclear.

UN sends food aid to thousands displaced in Dem. Rep. of Congo

The United Nations is rushing food to thousands of displaced Congolese in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where tribal clashes have driven 130,000 people from their homes.

“Because of ongoing clashes in the area where these people live, it has been difficult to get food assistance to those who need it most,” UN World Food Program (WFP) Country Director Abdou Dieng said, noting that the food distributions would be widened if security conditions improved.

Convoys carrying 50 metric tons of food escorted by peacekeepers from the UN mission in DRC (MONUC) left Gemena in Equateur Province yesterday for the two distribution sites in Bozene and Boyazala, where more than 6,000 displaced people will receive month-long rations of maize, beans, vegetable oil and salt, to be distributed by AVEP, a Congolese non-governmental organization (NGO).

Reforms in Dominican Republic increase number of stateless people

On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the government of the Dominican Republic is set to promulgate a constitutional reform measure that could leave large numbers of Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless. The changes to nationality provisions, first approved in October 2009 by the country’s legislators, will redefine Dominican citizenship and deny children born on Dominican soil to immigrant parents “residing illegally” in the country their legal claim to Dominican nationality.

Over the past year the Dominican Republic has been de-nationalizing many of its citizens of Haitian descent, despite their constitutional right to nationality. Under the amended Constitution, there is fear that thousands more Dominicans of Haitian descent will be retroactively stripped of their Dominican nationality, placing them at risk of losing their fundamental rights to attend school, access adequate housing, health care, property, and freedom of movement. Further, the constitutional change will leave thousands of Dominicans suspected of Haitian ancestry vulnerable to the intermittent mass expulsion campaigns carried out by Dominican authorities, in which military and immigration police have been known to deport thousands of people who “look Haitian” or who have French last names, over the border into Haiti.

Human rights organizations throughout the Dominican Republic and around the world are alarmed by this decision because of the impact it will have on this already marginalized community. The new constitutional provisions on nationality are incompatible with international law, as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has held that the migratory status of a person is not transmitted to their children. Any attempt by the Dominican Republic to apply this constitutional reform retroactively would constitute a clear violation of international law.

“The Dominican Republic has witnessed a steady drumbeat of discrimination against Dominicans of Haitian descent. Prior to this constitutional change, thousands have had their identity documents denied, or confiscated for no reason other than their ancestry,” said Monika Kalra Varma of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Sri Lanka continues media ban on war refugees

AFP reports that despite proclamations to the contrary, the government of Sri Lanka is continuing to bar journalists from reporting on people displaced by the war in Sri Lanka. The northern part of the island nation is still off-limits to reporters.

Foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama declared in a BBC interview Tuesday that the media now had full access, prompting a flood of requests from reporters to travel to the former war zone in the north.

But restrictions on visits to the northern district of Vavuniya where the government maintains its camp complex remain in place despite them being declared “open” on Tuesday.

“The restrictions on journalists to visit displaced people in camps have not been relaxed yet,” Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters. Pressed for a date when the camps would be open to the media, the minister said: “We are trying to lift the ban on media access, but it will take time.”

The few visits that have been allowed have been under strict military supervision.