Reimagining refugee leadership at the UN: forcibly displaced people should sit on UNHCR’s Executive Committee

The United Nations (UN) Palais des Nations is an idyllic place. Grassy lawns dotted by trees slope down to crystal blue Lake Geneva. It couldn’t feel further from the violence and tragedy that force refugees like me to flee our homes. But the decisions made there – and at UN headquarters in New York – have profound implications for us.

Unfortunately, the democratic ideals of the UN are a false promise for refugees today. But they could be reality tomorrow: if democratically selected refugee representatives sat on the governing body of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), just like workers do for the International Labour Organization (ILO), we would begin to be represented in the global decisions that affect us.

It’s time we have a voice. It’s time for refugees to sit on the UNHCR Executive Committee (ExCom).

My father’s stolen corn

In the mid-90s, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) started experiencing both internal and external rebel attacks that led to a series of wars in the eastern part of the country. It is estimated that these wars have caused over six million deaths, internally displaced around six million people, and an additional one million Congolese have sought asylum in various neighbouring countries.

As a 14-year-old teenager, I fled my home country to Uganda where I lived as a refugee for 17 years before I was resettled to the United States (US). For about 25 years, I remained a refugee. Though the camp had its unique challenges, like thousands of refugees in my settlement, I believed that the refugee settlement would be a safe haven from the war in DR Congo. I later came to realise that huge challenges awaited: lack of sufficient laws to protect me, no right to work, no free movement, no access to quality education and health care were just a few.

To survive, we farmed land that had been allocated to us by the government of Uganda. It took six months to harvest beans and corn, which were the major crops. This was the only way to survive. After six months of hard labour to grow corn, my father took his harvest to a market in the city 60 miles from the refugee settlement. The police blocked him from leaving because refugees were not allowed out of the settlement. He decided to ‘sell’ his corn to a Ugandan middleman, but this man later refused to pay him a single coin for the crops. My father had no recourse. Neither the government of DR Congo nor of Uganda upheld his rights or safeguarded his interests.

This was one of many moments when I saw first-hand how refugees are left unprotected by the laws and the authorities of our host countries. The police in Uganda did not protect my father’s right to be paid for his goods. Rather, they enabled a Ugandan thief to steal his goods and prevented my father from leaving the camp to pursue his right to be paid.

At the same time, I could not rely on the government of DR Congo to protect me either. The government had already failed to protect me from the rebels that invaded my country, which is the reason I ended up being a refugee. There was no way it could protect me from property theft beyond its borders.

Witnessing this, I thought about returning to my home country where I was a citizen, not someone barely tolerated, confined and without rights. At the same time, tens of thousands of refugees arrived daily, fleeing the same persecution I had fled. The new refugees shared with me the atrocities rebels continued to commit including raping women and girls, massacres and recruiting children into their rebel groups.

I was forced to accept the reality that my new home, and that of millions of people around me, was Uganda, even when I saw that the Ugandan government did not serve us.

We need our own representatives

After what happened to my father, I had many questions about who was supposed to defend me and other refugees in my settlement from such injustices – and how I could help hold them accountable when they failed. When I left the settlement, I continued to find ways to advocate for the same issues I faced that affect millions of refugees across the globe. When I took a job with Asylum Access, an organisation advocating for refugee rights, I realised that these issues can be found in most refugee-hosting countries.

The international systems and institutions that respond to humanitarian crises, support global development and facilitate peace around the world are built on the assumption that states represent the people within them. This assumption is at best an approximation of reality: we know many governments are authoritarian, that votes are sometimes suppressed, that governments are often more responsive to the wealthy than the poor.

For refugees like me – at least for 25 years of my life – the assumption that a state represents us is not just imperfect, but definitively false. From the time I fled my home country at age 14 until I received my US citizenship last year as a 38-year-old, no state was even notionally responsible for representing my interests. As a result, I had no voice and no representation in the global decisions that affected my life every day.

In my work with Asylum Access, I’ve learned more about the UN structures, particularly the UNHCR, an institution mandated to protect refugees. UNHCR is governed by an Executive Committee or ‘ExCom’, which is composed of diplomats representing UN member states. Refugees’ origin states – the states that, like DR Congo, failed to protect them even from loss of life or liberty – are represented. So are refugees’ host states, the ones that confine them in camps, turn a blind eye to crimes against them, and put the interests of their citizens ahead of equity and rights for refugees. Donor states, too, are represented. Only refugees are not. Left without state representation, refugees have no representation in the supposedly democratic UN structure.

Follow the ILO model: refugees on ExCom

If we truly believe in a democratic global system where everyone is represented, we need to rethink representation for refugees.

I fled my home country because the country failed to protect me. However, even a lawless country with a broken political system, a country that allows its people to be raped and massacred, has more voice on ExCom than I do. This is not right.

Nor is it right that a country like Uganda has a voice when I do not. Uganda could even select the man who stole from my father to serve as a representative on UNHCR’s ExCom, while my father and I have no voice.

That’s why I believe refugees should elect their own representatives to ExCom. Such a model has a precedent at the UN: the ILO is governed by a tripartite group representing states, workers and employers. Because the ILO’s decisions directly affect workers, workers are directly represented by delegates selected by their largest unions.

Refugees today have global and regional networks, the equivalent of workers’ unions. These networks could elect delegates to represent them on UNHCR’s ExCom. If UNHCR was governed by at least 50% refugees, with the remaining 50% divided between refugee-hosting states and donor states that fund the bulk of displacement response, the people most affected by UNHCR’s decisions would have the greatest say. This is what a democratic global system requires. It’s time we made that a reality.

ExCom isn’t everything, but it’s a start

UNHCR isn’t the only global entity that makes decisions that affect refugees. World Bank institutions, also governed entirely by states, are increasingly involved in decisions that aim to address the development challenges that arise when people are forcibly displaced. Similarly, most UN agencies (all except ILO) are governed entirely by states – even when their decisions affect refugees, stateless people, and others who are left out of state representation.

We need new solutions that ensure equitable representation at the UN and throughout our global governance institutions. This may mean rethinking UN governance entirely – although doing so is not without its own challenges and risks. I’m not sure what the answer is when it comes to the UN or the World Bank as a whole, but I do know that having refugees on UNHCR’s ExCom is an important step for representation and legitimacy of the institution.

People with experience of forced displacement understand better than anyone else what it means to be displaced. They have experienced the isolation and injustice of systems that strip them of rights and power. They know what is needed to fix those systems, and can set better priorities for UNHCR’s interventions and aims. Refugees, like other citizens around the world, should have a central voice in the decisions that determine our destinies.

Bahati Kanyamanza is the Associate Director of Partnerships at Asylum Access and Co-Founder, COBURWAS International Youth Organization to Transform Africa. (bahati.kanyamanza@asylumaccess.org) @BKanyamanza