25 million displaced persons still need protection and aid, UN rights commission told

While the international community has taken strides to respond to the plight of people uprooted from their homes because of war and conflict, 25 million people in Africa, Asia and South America remain desperately in need of protection and assistance, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was told today.

Although the crisis of internal displacement remained daunting, the international community appeared resolved, and was certainly better equipped, to respond commensurately, Francis Deng, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Representative on internally displaced persons, told the Geneva-based Commission as it began its discussion of the rights of specific groups and individuals, including migrant workers, minorities, mass exoduses and displaced persons and other vulnerable groups and individuals.

Mr. Deng noted that in 2003 the number of people forced from their homes remained at 25 million because while some 3 million people were able to return to their areas of origin in places such as Angola, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Indonesia, an equal number were newly displaced. Most of them were in Africa - including in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sudan and Uganda - and in Colombia, Myanmar and the Aceh region in Indonesia.

Mr. Deng said the challenge was to be effective and comprehensive on the ground, where the needs of displaced populations for protection and assistance were real and pressing. What should be avoided was complacency and pessimism.

In a separate briefing, Hessa Khalifa bin-Ahmed al-Thani, the Commission for Social Development's Special Rapporteur on disability, said that the past 10 years had seen steady progress in dealing with disability as a human rights issue.

She told the Commission the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities adopted by the General Assembly in 1993 had served as an authoritative guide for countries in implementing disability programming and developing national plans and policies to ensure that persons with disabilities were brought from the margins of society into the mainstream of the economic, social, cultural, civil and political lives of their communities.

The Special Rapporteur recalled that the UN General Assembly had begun in 2001 a process of discussing the adoption of a treaty on the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. The elaboration of a new convention and the integration of disability into the work of existing human rights mechanisms should be seen as complementary approaches, she added. This so-called multi-track approach, which also included the continued efforts to address the social development dimension of the problems faced by persons with disabilities, had received broad support in the international community.