What is an IDP? As you hopefully know from week 1, the acronym stands for internally displaced person. Clearly, this rather unwieldy concepts has no intuitive or automatic appeal. In contrast to widely used terms such as refugee, migrant, and so on, the notion of an internally displaced person is not commonly deployed outside the humanitarian and development fields. Unless you already work in one of these fields, the meaning of that term may not be automatically obvious to you. Indeed, it's probably fair to say that without some further points of reference, most of us, when we hear the word IDP, do not immediately form a clear picture in our minds of what is meant by that term. Partly this potential lack of clarity reflects the facts that the concept of internally displaced persons emerged from the humanitarian field as a technical term to denote those who were displaced, like refugees, but unlike refugees who remained within their own country. Moreover, interest within the international community in this category of internal refugees, so to speak, emerged only comparatively recently, such that the IDP concept is not so well established as terms of more general and longstanding usage, such as migrants, refugees, and so on. Indeed is the article by Erin Mooney on the recommended reading list for this session describes, it was only during the 1990s with the shift in international politics and an apparent increase in the number of people displaced within their own countries. There the concept of internally displaced persons gains traction, firstly, within the humanitarian field, and then on a more general basis within international society. The growing consensus in the 1990s, the IDPs have particular needs and may constitute a specific category of concern within an important development. This idea was reinforced by the creation within the UN system of a dedicated international instrument for the protection of IDPs, known as the UN guiding principles on internal displacement. The creation of the guiding principles within the UN system, and the challenges that it's drafters faced, is described in a short article by Roberta Cohn and Francis Deng. Which you can find among your recommended readings for this session. In substance though, the guiding principles draw on existing international law standards to set out a framework of 30 principles that regulate the prevention of displacement, protection and assistance of IDPs during displacement, and the need to facilitate solutions to internal displacement. Even if they take the form of policy rather than a legal treaty, these UN guiding principles now represent a crucial points of reference as the most important set of IDP protection standards globally. As such, please ensure that you read the extracts from the guiding principles that are listed among this week's essential readings. Then the UN guiding principles sets out IDP protection standards for states who have the principal responsibility for IDP protection, and also for international humanitarian organizations and other actors who work on IDP assistance and protection. For example, among the extracts from the guiding principles in the essential reading for this week, you can see that principles 10 through to 23 set out some really key protection standards for the treatment of IDPs following their displacement. In the discussion forum, you may wish to consider addressing which of those principles has the greatest importance for protecting IDPs in practice. Coming back to our opening question for this session, the guiding principles also offer a useful and widely used description of what the term IDP means. In essence, then we can understand the notion of IDPs as people who have been forced, displaced from their homes, but who have not crossed an international border. Note though, that this definition is only descriptive. As such, it does not create a special international legal status for IDPs in the way that the Refugee Convention does for refugees, for example. Since being presented to the UN in 1998, the guiding principles have become the key set of standards for IDP protection within the international community; including for protection agencies such as the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, and the Red Cross Movement. Equally, many states with large conflict-affected IDP populations have now recognized the IDP issue as one of concern. As a result, they have adopted laws and policies at the national level to protect and assist IDPs in their own countries. Countries with IDP laws can be found in all regions with prominent examples, including the legal and policy frameworks in Colombia, Kenya, and the Philippines. On the essential reading list, the short article by Phil Orchard discusses the development of national laws on IDP protection and the influence of the guiding principles on those legal processes. Drawing on the guiding principles, states in the African continent have taken the matter one step further, and also develops legally binding regional agreements on IDP protection. The most notable is the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons, also known as the Kampala Convention. This Kampala Convention has a number of innovative features. They include an attempt to regulate non-state armed groups in relation to internal displacement, and the creation of a right not to be arbitrarily displaced. A brief analysis of the Kampala Convention in relation to those two innovative issues can be found respectively in the articles on your essential reading list by Katinka Ridderbos and by Romola Adeola. Finally, it's clear that unlike for refugees who fall under the competence of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, there is no single UN agency with an exclusive mandate for protecting IDPs. Instead, within the UN humanitarian system, responsibility for distinct aspects of assistance to IDPs is shared out among different institutional actors. For instance, although UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, does not have an exclusive mandate for IDPs as a category of concern, it does take the lead operationally on areas like protection and camp management for conflict-affected IDPs. Alternative areas of IDP assistance, by contrast, are led by other UN agencies. For instance, the World Health Organization is the lead for health issues affecting IDPs and so on. These institutions also work alongside international humanitarian organizations from outside the UN system that assist IDPs too, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose work in protecting civilians in situations of armed conflict, often includes engagement with IDPs. See the essential reading by the Global Protection Cluster this week for more details about this institutional apparatus. Finally, in recent years, there has been a considerable push for the international community to give renewed attention to the IDP issue. In 2018, 20 years after the guiding principles were first presented to the UN system, this expression of concern took place through the so-called GP20, or Guiding Principles 20 campaign. In 2021, the UN Secretary-General convened a high-level panel on internal displacement, which has made far-reaching recommendations about improving the response to the global crisis of internal displacement. Links to both of these developments can be found among the further readings for this week. Overall, though, the key point for this session is that frameworks and institutions for the protection of IDPs now exist and are well established at the international level. They include the core set of IDP protection standards in the non-binding UN guiding principles, as well as the range of UN and other actors that now provide protection and assistance in internal displacement crises. Of course, these efforts have been accompanied by the development of laws and policies, both at the regional level in Africa and at the national level in many conflict-affected countries. These new laws legally require national authorities to engage in the protection of IDPs.
