NGO Recommendations for the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement

In July 2018, the Government of Norway, alongside thirty-six member states, initiated a call for the U.N. Secretary General to create a High-Level Panel to address the dearth of durable solutions for the 41.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally. The rising call is finally being answered as the inaugural meeting of the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement takes place this week in Geneva on 25-27 February 2020.

InterAction and its Members advocated for the Panel to be created and are invested in making sure that it leads to tangible results for internally displaced people across the world. The InterAction Forced Displacement Working Group developed a light recommendation paper outlining its hopes for the orientation, working modalities, and efforts of the Panel over the next 12 months.

In particular, we encourage the Panel to:

• Adopt a rights-based approach to all its efforts and engage in consultation with IDPs and affected communities to determine the actions that would result in tangible changes in their lives.
• Focus on creating context-specific “road maps” outlining opportunities for durable solutions in a handful of internal displacement contexts in which the affected government, Member States, U.N. agencies and other key actors agree to a set of activities and targets required to make real progress toward reducing protracted internal displacement.
• Consult frequently and meaningfully with civil society and NGOs, which have deep technical and contextual knowledge and can play a role in identifying necessary programmatic and policy interventions in each context.
• Create a path toward the creation of a policy process to implement the country “road maps” that lives beyond the life of the Panel itself, much like the High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing did in the creation of the Grand Bargain process.