Regulatory Frameworks on Internal Displacement

It is vital that governments and other entities engaged in protecting and assisting IDPs organise their efforts in comprehensive and coordinated ways that follow pre-agreed standards and rules. Normative frameworks help to this end by providing operational structures for responders and ensuring that IDPs and their right to protection are recognised. The UN General Assembly acknowledges the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement as “an important international framework for the protection of internally displaced persons”. Since their adoption in 1998, a growing number of countries and regions have begun the process of developing normative tools that largely reflect them.

This paper, written by IDMC on behalf of the Global Protection Cluster (GPC), is based on a mapping exercise that the GPC’s Task Team on Law and Policy conducted in 2015 and that led to the launch of a global database on laws and policies on internal displacement. Following an overview of the global framework for IDPs’ protection and assistance, this study outlines lessons from national and regional processes such as the development and adoption of the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, widely known as the Kampala Convention, with a view to informing similar endeavours in the future.