UN refugee agency welcomes Dadaab deadline extension
Refugees queue for food rations at the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya. PHOTO | FILE
The United Nations has welcomed Kenya’s announcement that it would continue hosting Somali refugees at the Dadaab camp for six more months.
However, it urged the government to “show flexibility” regarding the plan. “Rigid time-frames will be difficult to meet,” the UN refugee agency said in a statement on Wednesday.
“For solutions to be genuinely voluntary people must be properly informed, and able to make their individual decisions free from pressure and in full awareness of the facts,” the UN body said.
Human rights groups also expressed relief over Kenya’s decision to lift the deadline for closing the Dadaab refugee camp by the end of this month.
But Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both stated that Somali refugees should be allowed to remain in Kenya until it is safe for them to return home.
Wednesday’s announcement of a six-month extension by the government was “not a change in policy,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
“Thousands of refugees remain at risk of forced repatriation to a war-torn country where they are at risk of death or injury in the ongoing conflict,” she said.
Laetitia Bader, a Human Rights Watch researcher, similarly urged the UN and donor governments pressure Kenya to “do more than merely extend its deadline, which would violate refugees’ rights if enforced.”
The Dadaab complex currently hosts about 285,000 refugees, majority of them Somalis.
Statistics show that voluntary repatriations to Somalia are proceeding at a slow pace. The UN refugee agency says 35,000 refugees have been assisted in returning to Somalia in the past two years.
If that rate were to continue, the UN’s aim of carrying out voluntary repatriation would not be fully achieved until 2032.
The camps’ population has been reduced by nearly 60,000 inhabitants due to unsupported departures by some refugees and the relocation of 14,000 non-Somalis to the Kakuma refugee camp in Turkana.
Another 40,500 Dadaab residents have been found to possess Kenyan identity cards or are on record as having applied for them, the UN said on Wednesday.
The refugee agency had indicated previously that it is consulting with Kenyan authorities on the resettlement of these individuals.
Some16,000 additional persons in Dadaab are awaiting clearances for agreed resettlement in third countries.
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