Past Event

The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN) presents the next Lunch and LERRN event:

Protecting the Internally Displaced: From Rhetoric to Reality

Today, there are over 40 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally. Refugees, outside of their own state and unable to count on its protection, are provided protection through an international refugee regime based in law and organizations such as the UNHCR. By contrast, IDPs, though displaced for similar reasons, do not have the same protections since they remain within their own state.

Dr. Phil Orchard

An Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Wollongong and a Senior Research Fellow at the AsiaPacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

Drawing from his recent book, Protecting the Internally Displaced: From Rhetoric to Reality (Routledge, 2018), and on the eve of the 20^th Anniversary of the UN’s Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, Orchard’s presentation will examine how the international response to the problem of IDP protection has changed over the past twenty years, and how legal protections have been introduced at the regional and domestic levels. The soft law Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement offer IDPs a measure of protection, and some forty states have now adopted their own domestic laws and policies. While these are positive developments, Orchard argues that only one-third of domestic laws and have been fully imple­mented and international support in the drafting process has done little to improve these figures. Critical to successful implementation, he argues, are four factors: timing; the inclusion of independent domestic institutions and democratic electoral systems to ensure accountability; linkages to other regional and domestic pro­cesses including peace treaties; and international support not just at the drafting stage but throughout the implementation process. This presentation will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, forced migration, R2P, and regime theory, as well as to policymakers, governments, and the NGO community.

To register for the event, please click here.

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