IDPs or Internally Displaced Persons are individuals who have been forced to flee from their home or place of habitual residence due to conflict, natural or man made disasters, but have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.

Although UNHCR’s presence in Sri Lanka stems from the large-scale repatriation of refugees from India in the late 1980s, when the internal conflict abruptly resumed in 1990, UNHCR responded to the changing needs by extending its mandate to protect and assist Sri Lanka’s IDPs.

Since then UNHCR has assisted more than half a million IDPs who were forced to flee various stages of fighting in the north and east. Although large numbers have gone home since the end of the conflict, there are still hundreds of thousands of IDPs in camps and with ‘host families’ (friends and relatives), awaiting a durable solution.

Since IDPs are citizens of Sri Lanka, the primary responsibility for their protection and assistance lies with the Government. UNHCR’s mandate is based on ‘Protection’ and the backbone of the agency’s operation in Sri Lanka is monitoring and capacity building. The agency continuously advocates with the Government and other stakeholders on strengthening the rights of its persons of concern.

Protecting IDPs

UNHCR through its five offices in the North and East, monitors the general welfare and human rights situation of IDPs. UNHCR staff make regular visits to camps and other locations where IDPs are staying, to ascertain their current situation, carry out assessments and highlight outstanding concerns they may have. In addition, UNHCR staff also identify key issues during aid distributions and registration processes. For example, the distribution of the shelter cash grants among the families returning to their homes is an excellent opportunity for UNHCR to identify their protection concerns.

Information collected on the ground helps UNHCR identify and raise key concerns and find solutions with the Government, the international community and other local and international organizations.

To help with this task, UNHCR has supported the development of a national protection network consisting of UNHCR field offices, government institutions and NGOs, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that displaced people have at least the same level of effective national protection as individuals who have never been forced to flee.

As part of its efforts to maintain the national protection network, UNHCR supports various implementing partners to widen its outreach in the North and East. In Colombo, a core component of UNHCR’s national protection network is the IDP Working Group - an inter-agency forum established by UNHCR in 2002 to strengthen collaboration between agencies, identify needs and gaps as raised by their field-based counterparts, and advise the Sri Lankan Government and the UN Country Team on conflict IDP issues.

The Working Group has been instrumental in raising concerns and highlighting outstanding issues with regard to the protection of and assistance to IDPs.

See Sri Lanka factsheet or the Donors & Partners section for list of UNHCR’s implementing partners for 2011.

Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (English/Sinhala/Tamil)
Prof. Walter Kaelin’s Annotation of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement 2000 
Puttalam welfare centre assessment 2006
IASC Paper on Conflict Related Displacement
Confidence Building and Stabilization Referance Documents 2008