Liberian refugees protest in Ghana

'The identity of the refugee is at… risk of being lost in… the new pragmatism, which view[s] the refugee no longer as a woman, a man or a child in need of protection, but rather as a unit of flight, a unit of displacement, to be contained and thereafter channelled down whatever humanitarian corridor leads to whatever political end.'

Guy Goodwin-Gill (1999) 'Refugee identity and protection's fading prospect'

In early 2008 Liberian refugees in Buduburam camp in Ghana did something highly upsetting to the status quo: they held a protest requesting a larger say over the durable solution to their situation and specifically asking for greater material help in repatriation. The reaction of both the host government and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to this unexpected new voice highlights problems currently afflicting the global refugee regime.

According to the governments and international agencies who assume charge of these refugees, the civil war in Liberia is over and any refugees currently remaining in Ghana are safe to return home. They are indeed positively encouraged to do so, and yet up to 2008 (five years after the war is supposed to have ended) repatriation numbers have been lower than expected. In UNHCR's view, the lack of repatriates meant that local integration needed to be encouraged as another option for these refugees, and so this has been increasingly promoted. It must have come as a shock to the agency then when, in February 2008, several hundred Liberian women convened on a football field in Buduburam camp holding banners with slogans such as 'Integration? No! Repatriation plus $1000? Yes! Yes! Resettlement? Why not' (UNHCR had been offering $100 with repatriation). It seemed not to have occurred to UNHCR that the refugees might want repatriation, but that they would also want a say over the circumstances in which it was carried out.

The demonstrations continued for about four weeks before the Ghanaian authorities took action, arresting over 600 protestors on 17 March, and 70 more the next day. Of the latter group, 16 were deported on 23 March on the grounds that they were illegally present in the country and posed a national security threat, despite the fact that UNHCR afterwards confirmed that 13 of the 16 were registered refugees. The government believed the deportees were a security threat because they were 'ex-combatants' from the war in Liberia. However, the government's case here is much weakened due to the fact that it hasn't produced compelling evidence either that the deportees are 'ex-combatants', or why some refugees being 'ex-combatants' should constitute a national security threat to Ghana. Indeed UNHCR themselves condemned the deportations.

On 1 April the Ghanaian Minister of the Interior Kwamena Bartels made a speech in which he repeatedly criticised the actions of refugees in Ghana, and announced the government's intention to invoke the cessation clause regarding refugees, which states that those refugees who could avail themselves of the protection of their state but continue not to do so could have their refugee status removed. As mentioned above it was the Ghanaian's government belief that war was over in Liberia. Furthermore, Bartels sweepingly asserted that all the Liberians in Ghana were there due to the generalised insecurity of war, and not due to persecution, and as such it was the government's view that all could safely return home. Once again we find the government making an unsubstantiated claim, and one which we must find hard to credit. Just because somebody hasn't fled persecution, it does not mean that they won't face it on return. The government of Ghana has to produce evidence that they won't. Sahen has argued that there are direct family members of former political leaders seeking refuge in Ghana who may face such persecution on return. Furthermore, there exist historical accounts of Liberians who fled for reasons of persecution (see Nagbe, K. M. (1996) Bulk challenge: the sorrow, the shame, the shock, the smile).

As the International Refugee Rights Initiative has made clear, the critical point is that although the cessation clause is a legal mechanism that the Ghanaian government has the right to invoke, from a legal perspective this 'must be based on a substantive assessment of conditions and circumstances in the home country'. Having failed to do this, Ghana finds itself on shaky legal grounds.

Note that if we accept these conclusions, suddenly the deportations described above become even more sinister. Though we cannot say a priori whether these were cases of refoulement, they may well have been, and there is at least a case that needs to be answered. Yet where is UNHCR's voice in all this? Yes, they briefly condemned the above deportations, but reading their briefing notes on the demonstrations and Ghana's response, they largely express concern regarding the actions of the demonstrators, and nowhere do they mention the possibility of refoulement and that there is a case that must be investigated. Refoulement is a serious violation of international law, and it is surprising to find that the international body charged with overseeing legal protection of refugees would turn such a blind eye to its possible cases. This is not to mention the various reports of police brutality towards the refugees which have gone unchallenged as well.

Regardless of the legal questions concerning the treatment of the Liberian refugees, the case described offers up some more general concerns over UNHCR's reaction to the protests. As already mentioned their response was in large part one of condemnation. They admonish the refugees for not staying within Ghanaian law, without noting that the very idea that they have strayed outside the law is a suspect one. The Ghanaian government can be found at different times claiming that the law was broken because the protest wasn't peaceful, because it posed a national security threat, and because it hadn't been reported to them beforehand.

These kinds of schizophrenic justifications, all of which are debatable, should arguably have been questioned and challenged by UNHCR. Yet at no point does the body suggest that there might be perfectly legitimate reasons for the refugees to raise their voices in protest. They seem to consider that the refugees should be grateful for being helped to repatriate at all, and that they are getting ideas above their station by asking for different terms. This kind of reaction is no more than many refugees have come to expect. As Shelly Dick has described, 'proper refugees' are those who conform to the image of an 'exemplary victim'.

Refugees are not expected to have an interest in how their repatriation is carried out, or really to fight for anything above their basic needs. Protest is considered subversive, where for a citizen group it would have much more opportunity of being viewed as legitimate. Again though, this is a strange response from an agency whose purpose is to protect the rights of refugees. We might have expected a protection agency to have responded to the protests by questioning whether the refugees had good cause for such action. Such an investigation might, for example, have uncovered the terrible conditions awaiting many repatriates to Liberia, and have made it clearer to all sides the rationality behind the refugees demanding more money to repatriate.

This article is hardly the first to note the surprisingly toothless actions of UNHCR in protecting refugee rights. Goodwin-Gill argues that there has been a trend in this direction since the early 1990s, and as his quote at the beginning of this article makes clear, this has been a result of UNHCR getting increasingly comfortable in its position as humanitarian actor and losing its focus on protection issues. In particular it has increasingly become preoccupied with achieving efficient political solutions to situations, rather than those which are best for the well-being of refugees. This helps explain its reticence to criticise the Ghanaian government's reaction to the protests, as it hopes to keep powerful actors onside in order to help engineer an efficient political solution in the future. Within this perspective, refugees, who aren't powerful actors, stop being the main focus of UNHCR policy and become a problem to solve, rather than people with a problem which needs to be solved.

UNHCR's failure to act like an effective refugee protection agency has left gaps which other institutions are starting to fill. Since 2007 a number of NGOs and other actors have been involved in the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network (SRLAN) which, under the guidance of Barbara Harrell-Bond, aims to build a network of organisations which can provide legal aid for refugees in the global South. In her piece introducing the project, Harrell-Bond notes that UNHCR has effectively abdicated responsibility for refugee protection in areas such as Refugee Status Determination (RSD). In many countries UNHCR has taken responsibility for this process and thus left a protection vacuum. If UNHCR is carrying out RSD they are no longer in a position to protect refugees whose rights are violated during such determinations, and so there is a need for NGOs to provide this service. SRLAN also puts its focus on widening the teaching of refugee law in universities, and producing assessments of countries' domestic refugee legislation with reference to the major international instruments of refugee law.

While the aims of the SRLAN are well-placed, it would be so much the better for the global protection of refugees if UNHCR could move in a similar direction, ideally helping to strengthen the network by supporting and taking part in it, and in the process becoming more like the effective protection agency it was created to be. In the case of the Liberian refugees in Ghana this could have ensured greater protection against the rights abuses they appear to have suffered. It is vital that all those who view refugee rights protection as the most empowering and effective way of promoting refugee well-being continue to push for these changes if they are to be achieved.

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