GC: n
S: UNHCR – http://bit.do/eAor5; http://bit.do/eAow6 (last access: 8 November 2018).
N: 1. – assistance (n): early 15c., “act of helping or aiding; help given, aid,” from Old French assistance and Medieval Latin assistentia, from the respective verbs (see “assist”).
– to (prep): Old English to “in the direction of, for the purpose of, furthermore,” from West Germanic *to (source also of Old Saxon and Old Frisian to, Dutch toe, Old High German zuo, German zu “to”), from PIE pronominal base *do- “to, toward, upward” (source also of Latin donec “as long as,” Old Church Slavonic do “as far as, to,” Greek suffix -de “to, toward,” Old Irish do, Lithuanian da-), from demonstrative *de-. Not found in Scandinavian, where the equivalent of till (prep.) is used.
– refugees (npl): refugee, 1680s, from French réfugié, noun use of past participle of réfugier “to take shelter, protect,” from Old French refuge. First applied in English to French Huguenots who migrated after the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes. The word meant “one seeking asylum” until 1914, when it evolved to mean “one fleeing home” (first applied in this sense to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in World War I). In Australian slang from World War II, reffo.
2. A refugee is a person who is outside his/her home country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of his race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. Assistance to persons who have fled from their homes because of civil war or severe unrest may also be counted under this item.
3. Refugee protection is a legal obligation for OECD member states, all of whom are States party to the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Assistance to refugees may be considered as humanitarian in nature and is provided with the aim of ensuring the dignity and human rights of beneficiary populations.
4. Throughout 1997, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provided international protection and assistance to more than 22 million people who had fled war or persecution, of whom some 12 million were refugees and some 4.4 million were internally displaced perons. Recently, internal conflicts have been the main cause of refugee crises. As of end-1997, UNHCR assisted 2.6 million refugees from Afghanistan, 631,000 from Iraq, 525,000 from Somalia, 517,000 from Burundi and 487,000 from Liberia.
5. Although UNHCR’s mandate is to protect and assist refugees, it has been called upon more and more to come to the aid of a wider range of people living in refugee-like situations. In recent years, the distinction between refugees and displaced persons (those who have not crossed international borders) has become increasingly blurred, with the number of people displaced within their own country -the “internally displaced”- overtaking the number of refugees.
S: 1. OED – http://bit.do/eAoyX; http://bit.do/eAoAc (last access: 8 November 2018). 2 & 3. OECD – http://bit.do/eAoyE (last access: 8 November 2018). 4 & 5. UN – http://bit.do/eAov5 (last access: 8 November 2018).
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