Internal eviction

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Internally Displaced Persons (also: IDPs , internally displaced or from English internally displaced people / IDPs ) are people who have been forcibly evicted from their ancestral and legitimate home when they fled - unlike refugees have not crossed the state border and in the - in the legal sense of their own country. The reasons for this internal displacement are armed conflict, violence, human rights violations and natural disasters.

numbers

In its 2020 annual report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) in Geneva estimates the number of internally displaced persons at 50.8 million at the end of 2019, more than ever since the calculations began. That was 12.8 million more than in 2015. The most dramatic developments were seen in countries like Syria: with 5.6 million internally displaced persons and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 5.5 million internally displaced persons.

Reasons for eviction

Forced evictions are carried out for various reasons and by various actors. The main reason for internal displacement is armed conflict, in which the civilian population gets caught between the fronts of the warring parties. In some cases, displacement is also used specifically as a means to remove members of certain ethnic or religious groups or actual or alleged political opponents from an area, as was the case in Myanmar / Burma (see Armed Conflicts in Myanmar ), Kenya after the 2007 elections and Iraq happened. In Colombia in particular , people have been displaced by paramilitary groups or by left-wing guerrillas in order to steal their land and use it to grow drugs or make it accessible to major investors in the agricultural industry.

Legal status and situation

The status and protection of internally displaced persons are not clearly regulated under international law. The Geneva Refugee Convention , which forms the international legal basis for the protection of the politically persecuted, does not cover internally displaced persons. There is also no other international convention for the protection of internally displaced persons, no international organization (like the UNHCR for refugees) with a clear UN mandate to protect them, and no legal definition of the term. The guidelines of the UN Special Representative for the Protection of Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons represent an international standard for the protection and support of those affected and are respected by many aid organizations and governments, but are not binding in terms of international law.

The UNHCR also advocates the protection of internally displaced persons at the request of the government concerned or the UN General Assembly.

Some internally displaced people live in camps, others in urban slums or in the great outdoors. Often they remain within or near a conflict area. This makes their security situation worse than that of refugees, and international organizations have greater difficulty in assisting them.

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 2020 Global Report on Internal Displacement. Retrieved June 11, 2020 .