Suchergebnisse

On 9 September 2010 the body of a man who had fallen from a British Airways flight to Heathrow was discovered in a wealthy west-London suburb. It is hard to pinpoint any one precise origin of the migration crisis currently unfolding in Europe, but the migrant who fell from the sky in his extreme efforts to enter a Europe otherwise closed to him was to foreshadow something on a much larger scale which has shaken European integration to its very core. The mass movement of more than a million refugees and migrants (many fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq) into European countries during 2015, the migration crisis so called, has generated an extreme level of disruption and disunity in the European Union and its member states as they strive to deal with the arrivals. But the crisis is, first and foremost, a humanitarian catastrophe of a kind unseen in Europe since the 1930s and 40s. Images from Lesbos and Lampedusa, among others, bear witness to the magnitude of the human cost of the crisis, which is still growing at an alarming rate at the time of writing. This note argues that the humanitarian crisis points to more deep-seated and long-standing problems in the governance of the European Union. As the EU and its member states struggle with the pressures of mass movement of displaced people, the treatment of those people exposes what can only be described as a crisis of European values. It is, in many ways, a stark expos{acute}e of shortcomings in the application of European fundamental rights, humanitarian law, and neighbourhood policy.

Accurate, relevant and timely public health information is paramount in a humanitarian crisis: it can help to identify needs and priorities, guide decisions on interventions and resource allocation, monitor trends, evaluate the effectiveness of the response, support advocacy for human rights, and extract lessons that could be relevant in similar contexts. The present review shows, however, that the public health information available in humanitarian crises is, in general, inadequate and that its application is secondary to reasoning and incentives of a political nature, thus contributing to the recurrent failings of humanitarian action. This article reviews the causes of this state of affairs - cultural, political/institutional/methodological and ethical - that hinder the production, dissemination, and use of information for determining which interventions should be implemented or modified. Traditional epidemiological skills and methods are poorly suited to humanitarian contexts. The approaches and tools that have been introduced in crisis contexts require validation and improvement. There is a need for more field "barefoot epidemiologists" who are able to collaborate with anthropologists, demographers, and sociologists to better understand the priorities to be addressed in a crisis. Evidence, however, is not enough per se: it is political will that is the key factor in the use, or not, of information in decision-making concerning humanitarian resources and interventions.

Media coverage of the Kosovo crisis has given the impression that UNHCR & the relief agencies were overwhelmed by the influx of refugees into Macedonia & that it was highly fortunate that NATO was on hand to save the day. Such is the aftermath of NATO's large & slickly publicised humanitarian operation. This impression is questionable.

The two UN bodies were requested by the Humanitarian Emergency Policy Group to conduct a joint assessment of Rafah's humanitarian needs in March 2004, but the report——which as originally prepared covered the period from January 2003 to February 2004——was delayed to take into account the further destruction from the May 2004 IDF operations in the camp. The data for the needs assessment were supplied by the Rafah Municipality and all the UN agencies and NGOs operating in Rafah. The report warns that the figures should be considered provisional, because ""field assessments are still being finalized, especially in the infrastructure sector"" and ""IDF incursions and demolitions continued into June."" What follows is the twenty-one-page report's executive summary and the section ""Background: Humanitarian Crisis in Rafah."" Footnotes have been omitted for space. The full report is available online at www.un.org/unrwa.

Examines whether inaction in the 1996 Zairian crisis and the earlier Rwandan and Burundi crises can be attributed to the absence of early-warning information or to international disagreement about the value of the information available.

Rohingya women are the victim of one of the world's most protracted ethnic cleansing. In any war, women and children are the most vulnerable ones. Rohingya people are seeking asylum for long three decades in their neighboring country Bangladesh. They faced a series of physical and psychological incubus in Myanmar; contrariwise, Bangladesh bears a hand to them and assisted them with all sorts of humanitarian treatment, shelter, food, medicine, and security. Assorted civil society organization working willfully to accommodate Rohingya women in camp life and engaging them in a leadership program for peacebuilding, disaster mitigation, and resilience. Apart from that, they have launched the MPWC program which is women intensive employment program; through this program, they can work for NGOs and earn money. UNHCR is arranging a safe place for Rohingya women which will be free from all kinds of gender-based violence against women. Considering the women's safety, the Bangladesh government adopted a women and children friendly repatriation program but the Myanmar government still not being able to create a repatriation safe atmosphere in the Rakhine state and compel them to accept indefinite national verification cards. To assist this paper, intersectionality and feminist theory have been materialized. Policy recommendation has been given for the betterment of Rohingya women and to prevent violence against women. In this paper, qualitative and analytical research methods have been applied both primarily and secondarily.

Statement By Panos Moumtzis, Regional Humanitarian Coordinator For The Syria Crisis, On East Ghouta

Abstract
In humanitarian actions, people respond to crisis and disaster situations in which victims are unable to recover on their own and in which their vulnerability puts them at further risk. Individuals involved in humanitarian work are driven by strong motivation which source can be identified using an ethics-based approach. Moral motivation is the basis for the commitment to the moral course of the human agent's action. Humanitarian ethics shows us it is important to renew the discussion on the role of moral motivation in ethical decision-making. Some of the moral sources of motivation will be critically examined in this study—namely, the partiality, the popularity of ethics, the value declaration, and moral motivation based on moral obligation (according to the ethics of social consequences).

India's opposition to humanitarian intervention has been influenced by its colonial experience and its predisposition towards the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. However, India did not adopt a strident opposition in the post-Cold War due to the changed power configuration. The article discusses how India adopted a cautious approach and yet used every opportunity to remind the international community the baleful effect of intervention in the internal affairs. After securing concession to a considerable extent on the ambitious Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and when most of the countries showed an inclination to accept humanitarian intervention in the form of 'R2P' at the UN summit in 2005, India grudgingly went along accepting it. India participated in the deliberation on the implementation of R2P and took its stand on various crises in which R2P was evoked. The experience of NATO's Libya operation under R2P was regarded as substantiation of India's apprehension of the misuse of the concept, and India reverted its position to the sceptical view of humanitarian intervention/R2P. By mere complaining about the mixing of peace enforcement with peacekeeping, when the United Nations deployed 'intervention brigade' for the protection of civilians, India lost the opportunity to take the initiative to propose a new mechanism to deal with the humanitarian crisis in atrocious internal conflicts.

AbstractIn humanitarian contexts, it is a difficult and multi-faceted task to enlist academics, humanitarian actors and health authorities in a collaborative research effort. The lack of research in such settings has been widely described in the past decade, but few have analysed the challenges in building strong and balanced research partnerships. The major issues include considering operational priorities, ethical imperatives and power differentials. This paper analyses in two steps a collaborative empirical endeavour to assess health service utilization by Syrian refugee and Lebanese women undertaken by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) and the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center.First, based on challenges documented in the literature, we shed light on how we negotiated appropriate research questions, methodologies, bias analyses, resource availability, population specificities, security, logistics, funding, ethical issues and organizational cultures throughout the partnership.Second, we describe how the negotiations required each partner to go outside their comfort zones. For the academics, the drivers to engage included the intellectual value of the collaboration, the readiness of the operational partners to conduct an empirical investigation and the possibility that such work might lead to a better understanding in public health terms of how the response met population needs. For actors responding to the humanitarian crisis (the ICRC and the MOPH), participating in a technical collaboration permitted methodological issues to be worked through in the context of deliberations within the wider epistemic community.We find that when they collaborate, academics, humanitarian actors and health authorities deploy their respective complementarities to build a more comprehensive approach. Barriers such as the lack of uptake of research results or weak links to the existing literature were overcome by giving space to define research questions and develop a longer-term collaboration involving individual and institutional learning. There is the need ahead of time to create balanced decision-making mechanisms, allow for relative financial autonomy, and define organizational responsibilities. Ultimately, mutual respect, trust and the recognition of each other's expertise formed the basis of an initiative that served to better understand populations affected by conflict and meet their needs.

This special issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly presents the experiences of frontline staff in Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as they grapple with the implications of the global refugee crisis. Over the past eighteen months hundreds of thousands of people have moved from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, generating widespread media attention and considerable political wrangling. But for aid workers, this situation raises questions that get to the very heart of humanitarianism and its purpose in the contemporary world. How does an organisation like MSF, the pioneer of 'sans-frontierism', engage with the shifting politics of borders and migration? What, practically, does it mean to be a 'borderless' organisation in a world where migration controls are such a big political issue? What are the implications of the refugee crisis for humanitarian principles and medical care? This introduction to the special issue brings some humanitarian dilemmas into focus, arguing that, in reaction to the migration crisis, aid agencies may have no option but to take a more robustly political approach.

What does the world's engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a "responsibility to protect" more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world's most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies "abused" humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the "responsibility to protect" inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and U.K. as "norm carriers" has been significantly undermined. Second, while the "responsibility to protect" has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.