World Refugee Day

As part of its humanitarian missions, La Chaîne de l’Espoir is sometimes called upon to help refugee populations provide access to healthcare for particularly vulnerable and destitute children. This is the case, for example, in Jordan, where the association has been providing care for cardiac and orthopedic pathologies since 2012. An overview.

What is World Refugee Day?

World Refugee Day has been celebrated on June 20 since 2001, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the July 28, 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Also known as the “Geneva Convention”, this text defines the conditions under which a State is obliged to grant refugee status to those who request it, as well as the rights and duties of such persons.

Quite apart from the date, World Refugee Day aims to raise public awareness of the plight of the world’s refugees.

World Refugee Day: what’s the state of play?

It should be noted that there are various concepts related to the uprooting of people:

• Refugee According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), this is any person who, “. who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. “.
• Asylum seeker: a person seeking international protection outside his or her own country, who has not yet been recognized as a refugee.
• Internally displaced person: a person who has fled in search of safety and, unlike a refugee, has not crossed an international border to seek asylum in another country. They therefore remain legally under the protection of their own government, which may be the cause of their flight.
• Stateless: according to the New York Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons of September 28, 1954, a stateless person is ” a person whom no State considers a national under the operation of its law “. In other words, a person who has no nationality and is therefore not protected by any state.

World Refugee Day: some examples of actions proposed by UNHCR!

Like other global and international days, Refugee Day aims to inform and raise awareness among the general public about the specific issue of refugees. The aim is “to foster greater understanding and empathy for the plight of refugees, and to raise awareness of their resilience as they start a new life “. To achieve this objective, which combines information and awareness-raising, the UN program proposes to :

• Donate to the campaign to create scholarships for young refugees,
• Take part in a worldwide art competition to design shirts that will raise funds for refugees,
• Reach out to social networks to amplify the message.

Refugee Day : Chaîne de l’Espoir mobilized in Jordan

In Jordan, we are working to promote medical care for Syrian refugees so that they are not forgotten. La Chaîne de l’Espoir intervened in Jordan for the 1st time in 2012. In this Middle Eastern country, access to healthcare is extremely limited and difficult for vulnerable populations, including refugees. According to a country fact sheet from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (DG ECHO) dated January 13, 2021, there are 752,000 registered refugees in Jordan, 663,000 of them Syrian. Almost half of them are children, and the overwhelming majority (editor’s note: 86%) live below the poverty line. As a result, medical and surgical care is totally inaccessible for most of them.

In addition, according to the Jordanian health authorities, around 2% of children suffer from congenital orthopedic and cardiac conditions. And every year, over 3,000 babies are born with congenital hip dislocation and 250 with clubfoot.

This is where La Chaîne de l’Espoir comes in. For several years, we have been providing medical and surgical care to the most vulnerable Jordanian children, as well as to Syrian refugee children suffering from cardiac and orthopedic pathologies. In 2021, 31 children underwent heart surgery thanks to an international volunteer mission and three local missions. At the same time, 187 children benefited from orthopedic surgery thanks to four volunteer international medical missions and four missions led by local surgeons. In addition to treatment, the children who underwent surgery also had access to psychosocial support.