UN accuses Kenya of denying Somali refugees asylum

A new report accuses Kenya of failing tens of thousands of Somali refugees it hosts. So serious are some of the allegations in the report released recently that UN refugee agency UNHCR accuses Kenya of deporting hundreds of Somali asylum seekers, and says this could be breaking international law.

UNHCR has lodged a formal complaint with Kenya’s Immigration ministry, the report adds. The issue follows a Human Rights Watch report which accused Kenyan police of extorting money from Somalis. At least 92 Somalis have been deported in the past week, said UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond.

A Kenyan government spokesman denied the accusations, saying that genuine refugees were not being deported. Human Rights Watch says that an average of 165 Somalis crossed into Kenya each day in 2008. There are now 260,000 Somalis at the Dadaab camp on the border, it adds.

The report says that hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in Kenya face abuse by corrupt and violent police and a rapidly growing humanitarian emergency in the world’s largest refugee settlement.

Abusive police

Human Rights Watch urges the Kenya government to immediately rein in abusive police and grant new land for additional camps, and the UN and international donors to urgently respond to Somali refugees’ basic needs. 

The 58-page report, From Horror to Hopelessness: Kenya’s Forgotten Somali Refugee Crisis, documents the extortion, detention, violence and deportation at the hands of the Kenyan police faced by a record number of Somalis entering Kenya.

The new refugees are joining over a quarter of a million fellow refugees struggling to survive in camps designed for one-third that number. “People escaping violence in Somalia need protection and help, but instead face more danger, abuse and deprivation,” says Mr Gerry Simpson, a refugee researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

“Somali asylum seekers should be able to cross the border safely and get the aid in Kenya they urgently need.”  In 2008, a record yearly total of almost 60,000 Somalis sought refuge at three camps near the town of Dadaab in northeastern Kenya, while possibly tens of thousands more travelled to Nairobi.

New arrivals face police extortion, violence, and unlawful deportation when trying to cross Kenya’s officially closed border and end up in appalling crowded conditions in under-serviced refugee camps.

Citing security concerns, Kenya officially closed its 682km border with Somalia in January 2007, when Ethiopian troops intervened in support of Somalia’s weak transitional government and ousted a coalition of Islamic courts from Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

During the past two years, an escalating armed conflict by Ethiopian and Somali government forces against an insurgency, resulting in numerous war crimes and human rights abuses, has forced almost 1 million residents of Mogadishu to flee, and provoked a growing influx of Somali refugees into Kenya.

Despite Ethiopia’s withdrawal in late 2008, violence continues between Islamist groups and the government, and more refugees are expected throughout 2009. The border closure has allegedly encouraged the Kenyan police to increase the extent of their extortion of Somali asylum seekers trying to reach the camps, Human Rights Watch says.

The border closure has forced tens of thousands of Somalis to use smuggling networks to cross into Kenya secretly. The closure also forced the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to close its transit centre, where all new refugees previously had been quickly registered and given health checks before being transported to the camps.

From Horror to Hopelessness concludes that closing the border to refugees violates the international refugee law prohibition against forced return (refoulement) and has resulted in other serious abuses. The report quotes refugees who describe being forced back to Somalia because they could not pay bribes to Kenyan police and others who were arrested, held in appalling detention conditions in the camps or nearby towns, beaten, and in some cases deported back to Somalia.

“Kenya has legitimate security concerns and a right to control its borders, but its borders can’t be closed to refugees fleeing fighting and persecution,” says Mr Simpson. “The border closure has only made Somali refugees more vulnerable to abuse and lessened the government’s and UNHCR’s control over who enters Kenya and who is registered in the camps.”