Documentary Note: The Relationship between ICARA II and Refugee Aid and Development

Abstract

Over the past five years there have been two separate sets of meetings dealing with assistance to refugees in develop- ing countries. One was a series of meet- ings on Refugee Aid and Development convened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the other set of meetings was the two International Conferences on as- sistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARAI and ICARA II) convened by the United Nations (UN). In 1984 these separate tracks of meetings have converged re- sulting in a new international consen- sus on principles for refugee assistance in developing countries. These new principles were necessitated by funda- mental changes in developing country refugee problems which meant that the traditional approaches to refugee assis- tance no longer seemed adequate to deal with the problems.