Nowhere else to go: A file photo of Bangladesh Navy personnel helping a disabled Rohingya refugee child disembark from a navy vessel at the Bhasan Char island in Noakhali district, Bangladesh. — Reuters
THE United Nations improperly collected and shared data from more than 800, 000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, passing it on to Myanmar, the country they fled, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, urging an investigation.
Over the past three years, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has registered hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladeshi camps, enabling Dhaka to provide them with identity cards needed to access essential aid and services.
But according to a fresh HRW report yesterday, the refugees were generally not made aware that the data they were providing would also be used by the Bangladeshi government to submit details on them to authorities in Myanmar, with a view to possible repatriation.
The UNHCR refuted this, with spokesman Andrej Mahecic saying that the agency had “clear policies in place to ensure the safeguarding of the data we collect when registering refugees all over the world”.
But HRW said the refugees often likely did not understand that the data being collected, including
photos, fingerprints and biographic data, could be shared with Myanmar.This, the report said, was particularly concerning in the case of the approximately 880, 000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, many of whom fled a 2017 crackdown in Myanmar that UN investigators say amounted to genocide.
“The UN refugee agency’s data collection practices with Rohingya in Bangladesh were contrary to the agency’s own policies and exposed refugees to further risk, ” Lama Fakih, HRW’s crisis and conflict director, said in a statement.
The group interviewed 24 Rohingya refugees between September 2020 and March 2021 about their experience registering with UNHCR in Cox’s Bazar, along with aid workers and others who witnessed or participated in the registration.
The UN agency insisted that its staff asked the Rohingya for permission to share their data for repatriation eligibility assessments, and explained that the so-called Smart Card needed to access aid would be issued regardless of whether they agreed to sharing the information.
It also said it had provided individual advice to ensure that refugees “fully understood the purpose of the exercise”.
But all but one of the 24 refugees told HRW they were never told that the data would be used for anything beyond establishing aid access.
They were given a receipt with a box ticked stating that they had agreed to the data being shared with Myanmar – but only in English, which only three of them could read.“What very quickly became clear to us is that the Rohingya we spoke to had not been asked for informed consent, ” senior HRW researcher Belkis Wille said.
She urged the UNHCR to conduct “an investigation to look carefully at why the decisions at the time were made the way they were”.
Wille acknowledged that it was “hard to generalise based on the small sample size” of refugees HRW had spoken with.
But she pointed to reports that Bangladesh had submitted data on at least 830, 000 Rohingya to Myanmar – nearly every Rohingya refugee in the country.
“It is hard to imagine that every single one would have agreed, ” she said. — AFP
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