GENEVA, 5 July (ICMC) – Participating in the Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement (ATCR), a United-Nations-led series of consultations on the theme of resettlement which this year (1-3 July) focused on the protection benefits of this durable solution for refugees, the International Catholic Migration Commission drew attention to the needs of the most vulnerable and how to raise awareness about them.

For the past three years, ICMC “deployees” - trained resettlement experts, child protection specialists and refugee-status determination experts – have interviewed about half of the people put forward by UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for resettlement consideration. Drawing on this expertise and in field involvement, ICMC called upon the international community to make child protection a resettlement priority.

ICMC, whose deployees undertook some 1,500 Best Interest Assessment (BIA) and Best Interest Determination (BID)< assessments in 2012 – a number that is ten times bigger than in 2009 – logically participated in a plenary session focusing on the Congolese crisis in the Great Lakes Region and a thematic session about operational tools, challenges and guidelines pertaining to those assessments for children and youth in the context of resettlement.

Suwedi Yunus Abdallah was recruited and trained by ICMC within the ICMC-UNHCR Resettlement Deployment Scheme< to support UNHCR resettlement operations. He is the sole child protection specialist based in UNHCR’s office in Kampala, Uganda. As such, Mr. Abdallah described the trends and challenges observed on the job in Uganda, and emphasized the need to make the protection of child refugees a key priority:

• BID activities – carried out when UNHCR case workers consider a range of criteria to help ensure the well-being of unaccompanied minors or refugee children who have been separated from their parents – need to be mainstreamed as fundamental activities within each UNHCR country operation to ensure effective child protection;
• More resources are needed to train and hire local and international child protection staff in key crisis areas;
• Such needs assessments offer an opportunity to refer children to appropriate services and better assist them while they await resettlement, and also ease their arrival and future integration in the resettlement country.

Petra Hueck, ICMC-Europe’s bureau chief, also presented, pointing to the importance of increasing media awareness on refugee resettlement for greater uptake of the urgent protection needs of the people on the move.

As such, Ms. Hueck discussed how ICMC has engaged the media on the SHARE project<. Lead by ICMC and involving International Organization for Migration and UNHCR, and financed by the European Union, SHARE aims at building a refugee resettlement network of European cities, municipalities and regions.

Ms. Hueck described how a recent SHARE City Exchange Media Visit< in Sheffield brought together journalists and NGO press officers from across Europe, United Kingdom to generate informed media reports about the impact and importance of refugee resettlement and build awareness of how resettlement works at the “receiving end” in Europe.

The ATCR meetings, helmed by the UNHCR, this year took place at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters in Geneva.

Their purpose is to better coordinate international efforts to improve and promote refugee resettlement. A significant outcome of the ATCR is the tripartite relationship itself, which encourages information sharing, innovative problem solving and resource pooling on issues ranging from policy and procedure recommendations, to advocacy, training and support of field operations worldwide.

Since 1951, ICMC has identified and accompanied over one million refugees for resettlement.

Today, ICMC provides expert resettlement personnel through the ICMC-UNHCR Resettlement Deployment Scheme to support UNHCR resettlement activities in multiple field offices. Our highly skilled deployees submitted nearly 41,000 individual cases for resettlement in 2012 alone.

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The ICMC Europe office in Brussels has been actively promoting European resettlement through advocacy, capacity building and training.

-- by Cécile Van de Voorde and Lori Brumat with reporting by Vanessa Matyas