မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ UNHCR ဒုကၡသည္ႏွင့္ ခိုလံႈသူမ်ား ဇန္န၀ါရီလတြင္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ရန္ 06/11/2011

မေလးရွားအစိုးရအေနႏွင့္ UNHCR အေထာက္အထားကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားၾကသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးခိုလံႈသူမ်ားကို ဇန္န၀ါရီလ၊ ၂၀၁၂ တြင္ စတင္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ေပးသြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း UNHCR ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မွ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ယခုကိစၥသည္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းအေပၚ မေလးအစိုးရႏွင့္ UNHCR တို႔၏ သေဘာတူညီမႈတခုျဖစ္ျပီး ျပည္ထဲေရး၀န္ၾကီး၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ၾကီး၊ လူ၀င္မႈၾကီးၾကပ္ေရးဌာန၊ အမ်ိဳးသားလံုျခံဳေရးေကာင္စီ ႏွင့္ UNHCR တို႔ ပူးေပါင္းအားထုတ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား အမ်ားဆံုးေနထိုင္ရာ ေနရာမ်ားတြင္ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းျပဳလုပ္မည့္ အခ်ိန္ႏွင့္ေနရာတို႔ကို UNHCR မွေန၍ ဒုကၡသည္အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားသို႔ ဆက္သြယ္ညႊန္ၾကားေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ျပီး UNHCR အေထာက္အထားရွိသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္ႏွင့္ ခိုလံႈသူမ်ားအားလံုး မေလးအစိုးရႏွင့္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းျပီးဆံုးသည္အထိ ဆက္လက္ျပဳလုပ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း UNHCR ၏ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံဆုိင္ရာ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ Alan Vernon မွ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ယခုျပဳလုပ္မည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းသည္ တရားမ၀င္ႏိုင္ငံျခားသားမ်ားအတြက္ မေလးရွားျပည္ထဲေရးဌာနမွ ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရွိေသာ 6P အစီအစဥ္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သတ္မႈမရွိဘဲ သပ္သပ္စီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း Alan Vernon မွ ရွင္းလင္းေျပာၾကားသည္။

ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ UNHCR-Malaysia ႏွင့္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ထားျပီးေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ႏွင့္ ခိုလံႈသူစုစုေပါင္း ၉၅၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ရွိျပီး ၄င္းတို႔မွာ ျမန္မာ၊ သီရိလကၤာ၊ ဆိုမာလီ၊ အာဖဂန္နစၥတန္ႏွင့္ အီရတ္ႏိုင္ငံတို႔အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေပါင္းမ်ားစြာမွ ဘာသာေရး၊ လူမ်ိဳးေရးႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေျပးလာၾကသူမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။

ယခုမေလးရွားအစိုးရႏွင့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခငး္ကိစၥသည္ အျခားေသာႏိုင္ငံမ်ားႏွင့္ UNHCR တို႔ သေဘာတူထားၾကသည့္အခ်က္ျဖစ္ေသာ UNHCR အေထာက္အထား ကိုင္ေဆာင္သူ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား၏ ကိုယ္ေရးကိုယ္တာ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကို သက္ဆိုင္သည့္အစိုးရႏွင့္ UNHCR တို႔မွ လံုျခံဳစြာ ထိန္းသိမ္းကာကြယ္ၾကရန္ ဟူသည့္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္အတိုင္း ပူေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သြားၾကမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

Ref : The Sta
Refugee headcount

PETALING JAYA: For the first time, Malaysia will join hands with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and register refugees and asylum-seekers to better protect them.
The move, expected to commence in January, involves some 94,800 refugees and asylum-seekers.
“Having their biodata in the government database will ensure better protection for refugees especially against arrests and detentions,” said the UNHCR.
Other developments:
> Deputy Foreign Minister A. Kohilan Pillay says the exercise is a “timely move”;
> Human rights activists welcome the move, saying Malaysia should also be a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention; and
> Bar Council says the decision is a step in the right direction but notes that more needs to be done.
Working for refugee rights

PUTRAJAYA: Malaysia will undertake a joint exercise for the first time with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to register refugees and asylum seekers to ensure better protection for them.
The move, expected to take off in January, involves some 94,800 refugees and asylum-seekers whose status is already confirmed by the UNHCR in Malaysia.
The inclusion of their biodata within a government database is expected to lead to greater protection for the refugees, said UNHCR representative Alan Vernon, particularly against arrest and detention as their identities could then be easily verified by law enforcement officials.
“This will also help prevent prosecution of persons holding UNHCR documents for immigration offences or deportation. It will also help address the problem of fraudulent UNHCR identification cards,” Vernon said in a statement yesterday.
The exercise will be carried out progressively in major cities where the refugees are located.
The effort involves the Home and Foreign ministries, the Immigration Department, the National Security Council and the UNHCR.
Data from the refugee agency shows that most of the refugees registered with the UNHCR here are from Myanmar, numbering 87,000 persons or about 90% of the total asylum-seeker population in the country.
Others who have sought refuge in Malaysia are Sri Lankans (4,200), Somalis (1,000), Iraqis (720) and Afghans (440).
The data, last updated in September, shows that some 71% of refugees and asylum-seekers are men. Children also make up a significant part of the refugee community, numbering 19,200.
However, a large number of asylum-seekers are believed to be unregistered.
Vernon said the exercise would be separate from the Home Ministry’s ongoing 6P programme involving illegal immigrants.
The six-step programme, which comprises registration, legalisation, amnesty, supervision, enforcement and deportation has seen – as of last week – a total of 25,561 illegal immigrants being granted amnesty and leaving the country.
“While Malaysia is not yet a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR very much appreciates the cooperation we enjoy with the Malaysian Government and look forward to continuing discussions on how to strengthen refugee protection in Malaysia, including creating opportunities for legal work for refugees as well as enhanced access to education and health services,” Vernon added.
The issue came to surface recently after the Malaysia-Australia refugee swap deal was shelved last month.
The majority of lawmakers in Australia were against legislation that would have enabled Australia to send 800 new boat arrivals to Malaysia in return for Australia resettling 4,000 registered refugees from Kuala Lumpur.
Registration a timely move, says Kohilan
PETALING JAYA: The exercise to register asylum-seekers and refugees in the country is a timely move, A. Kohilan Pillay said.
The Deputy Foreign Minister said it was crucial for the Government to know their exact number.
“We need to know how many of them are here and which countries they have come from,” said Kohilan of the joint exercise between Malaysia and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The exercise, scheduled to commence in January, will see the UNHCR working with the Home Ministry, Foreign Ministry, National Security Council and Immigration Department.
UNHCR representative Alan Vernon said the agreement was formulated after a series of meetings with the Government.
Ratify Refugee Convention, Govt urged

PETALING JAYA: Human rights activists and the Bar Council want the Government to be a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention before registering asylum-seekers and refugees in the country.
Suhakam commissioner James Nayagam said such a move would put Malaysia on a positive platform in the international scene.
He said the new registration exercise would lower the number of refugee and asylum-seeker arrests as law enforcers could verify their identities quickly.
“It will also help reduce cases of immigrants who enter the country to work but produce fake United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) documents when caught,” he said in an interview yesterday.
He hoped the registration process would be access-friendly for refugees and asylum-seekers and urged the Government to provide them with one-stop centres.
Bar Council president Lim Chee Wee said the registration exercise was a step in the right direction but more needed to be done.
“We need to enact laws to promote and protect internationally-recognised rights of asylum-seekers and their rights to livelihood, healthcare and education,” he said.
“The Prime Minister wants us to be the best democracy, and if this is to be so, then we must demonstrate compassion on how we treat the vulnerable and weak.”
Lim said amendments to laws like the Immigration Act was necessary to recognise the legal status of asylum-seekers.
Amnesty International-Malaysia executive director Nora Murat also said Malaysia should agree to the convention before proceeding with the new registration exercise.
Association for the Promotion of Human Rights president Tan Sri Simon Sipaun said it was ironic that even with the registration, asylum-seekers were not recognised as refugees.
“How can you sign an agreement when you do not recognise them as refugees?” he asked, adding that asylum-seekers would still be treated as illegal immigrants even if they were registered.
Chin Refugee Committee co-ordinator Henry Pin Maunt Shwe said the agreement between the Government and UNHCR was a step in assuring safety of asylum-seekers and refugees.
“When they have registered, they can get a proper job and provide for their family.”

Related Stories:

Refugee headcount
Working for refugee rights
Registration a timely move, says Kohilan

Lwin Pwin
http://wanna23-23.blogspot.com/