When thousands of refugees converge on the borders of an impoverished country, it is often the promise of international solidarity in the form of aid that keeps the door to asylum open. Equally, donor fatigue and falling assistance levels can undermine asylum as we saw vividly last week, when Pakistan closed its borders to Afghan refugees. Well-designed humanitarian assistance programmes also have a direct, positive impact on protection. Protecting refugee women from sexual attacks may mean providing them with firewood so that they do not have to trek through dangerous, bandit-infested countryside to collect it. Protecting refugee adolescents from military recruitment may mean offering them an alternative such as going to school.
Assistance is also crucial to achieving solutions.
For example, last year s emergency shelter programme in Kosovo helped hundreds of thousands of returning refugees make it through the harsh winter. Our protection efforts over the past decade have necessarily been a mixture of both tradition and innovation. Along with our partners, we ensured the safe return and reintegration of refugees in Cambodia, Mozambique, Tajikistan and elsewhere. Together with many of you, we have worked to make resettlement a more sophisticated tool of international protection and solutions moving decisively away from the mechanical processing of large groups to a highly diversified and individualised approach, especially in Africa. We broke new ground and saved many lives by promoting temporary protection for refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Europe.