About this website

Fairness

Transparency

Accountability

 

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RSDWatch.org is a project of Asylum Access, a US non-profit organization dedicated to making refugee rights a practical reality in the global south. Asylum Access promotes legal aid for refugees seeking protection, including in refugee status determination. 

 

RSDWatch was launched originally in February 2005, part of a widening effort by grassroots refugee rights organizations to promote reform of the way UNHCR conducts refugee status determination.  It is not funded by, nor directly connected to, the United Nations. Michael Kagan, who created and manages the website for Asylum Access, is a private American lawyer who has developed legal aid programs to assist asylum-seekers applying to the UN refugee agency for refugee status determination.

 

RSDWatch works in loose collaboration with several legal aid and refugee rights organizations in countries where UNHCR is involved in refugee status determination. The aim is to collect and present credible information on the way the UN High Commissioner for Refugees conducts refugee status determination (RSD), to promote fairness, transparency and accountability in refugee status determination, and to provide a forum in which to discuss the protection challenges that UNHCR-RSD poses.

 

The genesis of this website was to answer two needs.

 

First, advocates trying to assist asylum-seekers in the dozens of UNHCR-RSD countries have difficulty finding basic reference documents and statistics on UNHCR’s RSD procedures because they are scattered, un-indexed, and in some cases not even published.

 

Second, UNHCR-RSD presents an array of risks for refugees and policy challenges for governments and the UN. It deserves both more visibility, and a forum for serious discussion by all involved.

 

Accuracy, Completeness and Fairness: The aim of this website is to collect and disseminate accurate and credible information about the way the UN refugee agency conducts refugee status determination. But that does not mean RSDWatch aims for neutrality on key issues. RSDWatch believes that UNHCR RSD procedures should be fair, transparent and accountable; UNHCR should live up to the standards it promotes for governments, and ideally it should exceed those standards. This website would not have been launch if UNHCR’s RSD procedures did not need reform.

 

While this website is often critical of UNHCR, we consider ourselves to be supporters of the High Commissioner. The best way to strength UNHCR in terms of RSD is through constructive scrutiny in the public arena. That means that we try to be fair; when UNHCR improves, we say so. When UNHCR does the opposite, we say so. The best way to promote UNHCR RSD reform is by providing the public reliable information of the subject. While we don’t aim for neutrality, we believe fervently in accuracy and fairness.

 

RSDWatch includes a forum where anyone (including the High Commissioner for Refugees) can present views that may not represent the views of RSDWatch. In the spirit of fully informing the public about UNHCR RSD, we are happy to publish constructive criticism of the content of this website. 

 

If you have documents or information that should be part of this site, or if you believe something on the site to be in error or incomplete, please write to us.

 

 

Using RSDWatch material: We encourage others to publicly discuss UNHCR RSD issues. RSDWatch is a free site, and so we encourage others to use our material free of charge, so long as the source is cited clearly. We request that other internet sites provide a link to RSDWatch when they use our material, as we do when RSDWatch refers its readers to other sites on the Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

This site is not associated with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and does not reflect the views of UNHCR.

RSDWatch.org

An independent source of information about the way the UN refugee agency decides refugee cases.

 

As of 25 September 2006, RSDWatch is a project of Asylum Access, a US-based organization dedicated to making refugee rights a reality in the global south through legal aid and policy advocacy.

A project of Asylum Access