On the World Environment Day, I thought it befitting to write about the status of environmental refugees who are victims of apathy exhibited by governments across the world. A recent ruling by the United Nations Human Rights Committee that governments cannot refuse to accept those seeking refuge in other nations due to environmental factors and claiming to be victims of climate change.
There can be no words to describe the humiliation faced by those who are forced to leave their homes, they wish they never had to leave and the feeling of disappointment and devastation when refused a place in the land they seek refuge.
Even nations that are not parties to the refugee convention are bound by the principle of ‘non-refoulement’ under customary international law, but refugees who have lost their land and livelihood in their birth nation have no redressal under international law owing to the fact that there is no fixed and universal definition for the term “environmental refugees”. The UN’s ruling has rightly brought these categories of refugees within the purview of standard definition of “refugee” under international law and has granted legitimacy to claims for asylum based on environmental factors including loss of habitat due to sea level rise and loss of livelihoods due to climate change impacts and frequent incidents of natural disaster.
As on date, there is no clear and legal definition for the term “environmental refugee” but it finds a place in the OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms as “a person displaced owing to environmental causes, notably land loss and degradation, and natural disaster.
It has taken a long time for institutions to recognize the growing problem of environmental refugees at a global level. The only solution to prevent exodus of environmental refugees from Small Island Nations, Pacific Islands and countries that are losing their habitable land to sea level rise is to curb greenhouse gas emissions and take serious steps to prevent a repeat of business-as-usual scenario in the immediate future after the pandemic recedes.
On a similar note, but in a domestic scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the underlying weaknesses in publicly established systems such as primary health care infrastructure in developing nations and access to emergency services relating to health, food and shelter for the poor and underprivileged living in densely populated areas. The pandemic has brought to the forefront the government’s apathy towards the poor with total disregard to their housing comfort where social distancing, crucial to prevent the rapid spread of the corona virus has been impossible to implement. All claims by governments that PDS is a huge success need to be rejected considering the fact we witnessed scenes of huge population of migrant laborers walking hundreds of miles back to their hometowns to stave off hunger and starvation.
The problems posed by migrant laborers in India during the pandemic clearly establishes the fact that they are ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs) with no provision to access the public distribution system for food and essential commodities in the state where they have been contributing to the economy except in their registered hometowns. Although, their migration has been voluntary and in search of employment, treating them as IDPs under the current scenario is only appropriate that grants them rights for enforcement. International law mandates that the governments of those states where such IDPs are living and working are responsible for the welfare of such populations. By permitting them to leave one state with no guarantee of fulfillment of basic necessities is violation of human rights by the that state.
It is a humanitarian crisis of severe nature that India is witnessing. With this understanding, I hope the governments endeavor to put in place a system that ensures the welfare of these migrant laborers within the state they seek employment is taken care of and these invisible citizens are accounted for.
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