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Safe From Harm

To mark World Refugee Day, members of the Karen Community, representatives from the UNHCR and Minister Alan Shatter gathered in the Lighthouse Cinema to watch Moving To Mars, a documentary on the plight of refugees.

Roe McDermott, 23 Aug 2012

The Karen people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Burma, making up around 7% of the population. Successive military dictatorships have persecuted them, forcing them from their homes and denying them basic human rights. Desperate and fearful, thousands of Karen people now live as Internally Displaced People (IDPs), hidden in the jungles of Burma, where they are vulnerable to attacks from the military. Many others have crossed the border into Thailand, where they live in large refugee camps. There are 92,000 registered refugees from Burma in Thailand, as well as an estimated 54,000 unregistered asylum seekers in nine camps along the Thai-Burmese border.

In 2007, 97 members of the Karen community were resettled from a refugee camp in Thailand to Castlebar and Ballina in Co. Mayo. But Ireland could do more for such besieged people. The UNHCR have been pressing for a change in legislation so that more refugees can be assisted. While the Minister Alan Shatter and the UNHCR may not always agree, they do share an understanding that we need a better system than the present one, which is rife with prohibitive waiting lists and red tape.

There are arcane aspects to it. Refugee protection deals with those who faced individual persecution because of their race, religion, politics or nationality. So-called ‘subsidiary protection’ deals with those not facing specific personal threats, but who live in a country where violence is widespread and everyone is a potential victim of a bombing or other violence.

“The difficulty in Ireland at the moment,” explains Sophie Magennis, head of office at UNHCR, “is that you do the refugee bit, which takes about a year, and then you apply for this other type of protection, and there’s a huge backlog of cases. There’s currently 6,000 people waiting for that piece of their case to be looked at, and that’s particularly difficult for people in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, who have to wait for many years for possibly the most important piece of their case to be looked at. So we want all the questions to be asked at the same time in the first interview, which is what happens in all other EU member states.”



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