BANGKOK - , The world's 70 million displaced people and asylum seekers are among the most vulnerable in the global coronavirus pandemic, US-based humanitarian group, Refugees International, has said in a report released on Monday (March 30).
It urged governments to include these people in their strategies to contain the outbreak rather than simply close borders, lest they become new nodes of infection.
In the teeming refugee camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, where nearly 900,000 largely Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar are living, health workers there lack personal protective equipment, the report noted.
While Bangladesh's health ministry is developing a response plan in coordination with health United Nations (UN) agencies, UN officials "privately warn that they anticipate major problems in managing the spread of the virus inside their own international workforce, much less across the refugee population", it said.
Meanwhile, Dhaka continues to restrict phone and Internet access to these camps, hindering efforts to educate people about the virus.
The report stressed that fast and accurate information was critical in areas where the health infrastructure was weak and did not have the capacity to face an outbreak.
"What you have right now is a lot of misinformation, a lot of rumours, things like that the coronavirus is always fatal so people shouldn't come forward if they have it, because they will be put to death," Refugees International's senior advocate for human rights Daniel Sullivan told The Straits Times.
"Allowing mobile internet connections will allow for credible voices to confirm information," he said.
In Ethiopia, which is hosting more than 900,000 refugees and over 2.6 million internally displaced people, popular sentiment has turned, even violently, against foreigners, who are being blamed for spreading the disease, the report said. Ethiopia's western Oromia region has faced a months-long shutdown of phone and Internet services.
At the US-Mexican border, before the outbreak, the US had returned over 60,000 asylum seekers to northern Mexico where they are to wait for their US immigration court dates. As of February,there were also 15,000 people at US ports of entry awaiting asylum.
But port and border closures imposed on March 21 have allowed the US Department of Homeland Security to immediately turn back to Mexico or repatriate to their home countries all asylum-seekers without due process.
"Deportation of any individual without prior medical testing risks exporting the virus into countries unprepared to deal with mass outbreaks because of pre-existing crises and substantial vulnerable and marginalized populations with little access to limited healthcare systems," said the report.
As the pandemic roils the world, governments and organisations dealing with displaced populations should improve communication, prioritise sanitation and focus on reducing mass gatherings in camps, it said.
Services like food distribution and education should be restructured to avoid large gatherings, it said.
Meanwhile, travel restrictions should include provisions that protect asylum seekers from forced return to torture and persecution, it said.
"In times of national emergency, protecting vulnerable people from gross abuses of their basic rights can become for more challenging for governments, but it is at those very times when our commitment to such rights is decisively measured," it said.
