by Mike Wagenheim
Mo Ghaoui told JNS that he went into a UNRWA office in Beirut and said his “cousin” wanted to be taken off the refugee rolls but was told the latter should stay listed, with “nothing to lose.”
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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, July 26, 2018. Credit:
Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90. |
Mo Ghaoui, a Palestinian-American digital creator who immigrated to the United States six years ago and is based in Kent, Wash., entered a nondescript, U.N. Relief and Works Agency office building on a recent visit to Beirut, where he used to live.
He saw about 10 employees and a few working computers in the office, and decided to put the U.N. agency to the test, he told JNS. He wanted to know if he could give up his refugee status; however, concerned about pushback, he decided to pose the question about delisting a cousin rather than himself.
He asked the UNRWA staffer if his “cousin” could delist from the agency’s refugee database. “Why?” the staffer asked him, he told JNS. “There’s nothing to lose. No one does it. No one. We don’t have this procedure.”
Ghaoui told JNS that he didn’t take “why” for an answer.
“He wants to do it because he thinks this is better,” he told the UNRWA staffer. “The guy is British.”
The UNRWA staffer told Ghaoui that his cousin could be both British and listed officially as a refugee, Ghaoui told JNS. When Ghaoui said that his “cousin” isn’t a refugee any longer, the UNRWA staffer told him that the cousin could have his name struck from the Palestinian Authority registry but would remain on the UNRWA list.
Ghaoui told JNS that he challenged the staffer’s logic and asked why UNRWA should keep someone on its registry if the person is no longer on the Palestinian Authority refugee list.
Jonathan Fowler, senior communications manager at UNRWA, told JNS that “registered Palestine refugees can only be removed from UNRWA’s register upon their death or in case of false/duplicate registration.”
“Not upon request,” he told JNS.
The U.N. General Assembly requires UNRWA “to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees until a just solution to their plight is reached,” Fowler told JNS. He added that the agency “maintains registration records and issues identification documents for Palestine refugees crucial for their access to services and the legal recognition to which they are entitled.”
Fowler admitted to JNS that other U.N. agencies, including the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which handles all non-Palestinian refugees globally, also don’t allow refugees to relinquish their status upon request and be deleted from the official U.N. list. (JNS sought comment from the High Commissioner for Refugees.)
Non-Palestinian refugees, who are covered under the High Commissioner for Refugees, aren’t considered to be refugees after they acquire another nationality. UNRWA still considers someone a “refugee” even if the person has multiple passports.
“Global data protection principles and privacy standards do not recognize an unqualified right to the erasure of personal data,” Fowler told JNS. “The personal data of refugees may be deleted when there is no legitimate basis for the processing, or where the personal data is no longer necessary for the specified purposes for which it was collected.”
Fowler told JNS that the “absence of a negotiated political outcome” for those that UNRWA lists as refugees forms “a legitimate basis for retaining the registration” of those in the agency’s refugee system.
UNRWA lacks “a mechanism for Palestine refugees to request deregistration from UNRWA,” Fowler told JNS, but “we may, in exceptional cases and on the request of the beneficiary, deactivate their profile so that they are no longer actively maintained on our beneficiary list.”
Such a deactivation would mean “that the refugee, and any spouse or dependents, will no longer be able to directly access health, education and other humanitarian-relief services from UNRWA,” he said. “However, deactivation of a profile does not affect the underlying registration of that refugee, nor does it change their legal status as a Palestine refugee under international law.”
‘An abomination’
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS that aside from UNRWA having “blood on its hands from its involvement in the Oct. 7 massacre,” the agency “also appears to be doing nothing to bring an end to this conflict by having set up rigorous processes and mechanisms that perpetuate the refugee status of Gazans for generations with no option to exit that status.”
“That is an abomination,” Danon told JNS.
Fowler told JNS that an UNRWA “refugee” can be delisted upon the person’s death, but Ghaoui noted that the deceased’s relatives would have to be proactive.
“When do you actually bother as a person to go declare someone’s death?” he told JNS. “When you actually need to follow up on something, like an inheritance.”
When Ghaoui’s grandparents died in Lebanon 15 years ago, he didn’t think that any of his relatives, who live all over the world, would go to UNRWA to update the registries. There was certainly no incentive to do so, he said.
He thinks that the broader UNRWA-driven economy is all too happy to perpetuate the financial advantages of forever-listed refugees.
“This is all linked together, because the government in Lebanon, like the government in Syria, like the government anywhere taking refugees, they get money based on the numbers,” he told JNS. He added that the agency and governments that host the “refugees” need “to inflate the numbers.”
Ghaoui told JNS that the benefits are small: some $50 per child, provided a few times annually, and a medical plan with dwindling reimbursements that requires a Fatah, Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad office to sign off upon. The payments “tokenize” people, he told JNS.
“It’s not helping,” he said, noting that UNRWA’s budget exceeds $1 billion annually. “If you match it to the budget, it doesn’t make sense.”
When Ghaoui worked for the Palestinian Authority embassy in Beirut in 2005, numbers varied widely across the global body, with the U.S. Agency for International Development listing about 270,000 Palestinians in Gaza and UNRWA recording some 600,000, he told JNS.
He believes the inflated numbers impact the prospects for peace.
Serious peace talks invariably collide with the question of the “right of return,” by which Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, and their descendants, have been told that they can return to land that is part of Israel.
If other countries in the region understood the true number of UNRWA refugees—rather than the inflated figures—they would be more willing to open up their doors for a manageable, permanent absorption, Ghaoui told JNS.
But the large numbers that the United Nations uses publicly scare countries, which would otherwise absorb Palestinians, into thinking they will be flooded with an overwhelming number of Palestinians, according to Ghaoui.
Mike Wagenheim
Source: https://www.jns.org/palestinian-refugees-cant-be-removed-from-un-lists-unrwa-admits/
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