Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
But overall it seems like the UNHCR never met a refugee it didn't do its best to keep a refugee.
UNHCR certainly is an odd duck, but they are also caught up in some even weirder political issues. Consider, by way of example, the need for refugees to have government issued papers in order to claim refuge status in many nations (kind of hard to do in many cases these days...). Consider also the role of the safe third nation ruling that has been adopted by the US, Canada, EU, etc. For many of these countries, the UNHCR acts as a para-government to certify that a refugee is actually a refugee. Furthermore, they make a convenient political intermediary to blame and yet, at the same time, they have almost no actual power at all (look at what's happening in the refugee camps in Uganda as an example....).

Do they keep people as refugees? Sure they do - the entire system is structured that way and they don't have the power to change it even though I know some of their senior bureaucrats at least want to.