UN Refugee Agency Cannot be Trusted

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is where would-be asylum seekers are first registered and vetted for possible referral to a destination host country for resettlement. UNHCR is the prime international advocate for self-identified “refugees” seeking asylum. While the agency gives lip service to security concerns and the need to weed out terrorists, it operates on the premise that such asylum seekers, wherever they come from including the Middle East, should be given the benefit of the doubt.

In 2015, the United States contributed $1.35 billion to UNHCR, and is on its way to exceeding that contribution this year. What we get in return is an organization that cannot be trusted to carry out its duties in a balanced and effective manner. Instead we get moralistic lectures, which President Obama, Prime Minister Trudeau, Chancellor Merkel and other politically correct government leaders are only too happy to echo...

Western Europe – in particular France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany – have welcomed more than a million asylum seekers since the beginning of 2015, many of them from the Middle East. The response has been a sharp uptick in jihadi terrorist attacks, some directed or inspired by ISIS. We now learn from an investigative report in the New York Times that there exists today a highly sophisticated “global network of killers, built by a secretive branch of ISIS.” This “multilevel secret service” is “under the overall command of the Islamic State’s most senior Syrian operative...

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime of genocide in profiling terms as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The jihadists have profiled their victims based on religion. Christians and other non-Muslims are being slaughtered, raped, enslaved and forced from their homes because of their religion. What’s more, UNHCR’s referral process ends up being biased in favor of Muslims. Christians and other non-Muslims fear entering the camps where UNHCR registers “refugees” because those camps themselves are not secure against jihadist attacks. In other words, UNHCR is not even taking sufficient protective measures to identify and bar jihadists from the “refugee” camps, and it is not doing enough to reach out to Christians and other religious minorities in places where they feel relatively safe...

As the Obama administration continues to accelerate the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States, which Hillary Clinton would increase by 500 percent if she is elected president, Congress should give serious consideration to mandating a different registration system that reduces, if not eliminates, UNHCR’s role in the intake process. And far more accountability is required from UNHCR to merit anywhere near the enormous contributions to UNHCR’s budget that the U.S. is currently making.