Introduction

There are around 12 million refugees around the world today. The total population of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), including asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and stateless persons, is nearly 20 million, many of whom are displaced as a result of armed conflict (US Committee for Refugees 2006; UNHCR 2006). There are three types of durable solutions to refugee situations: return/repatriation, local integration and resettlement in a third country. Repatriation has over the past twenty years become the distinctively most important solution, preferred by the UNHCR as well as most host states. Having long been the ideal solution only in theory, in the mid-1980s repatriation started to be endorsed as the ideal solution also in practice, and today the other two solutions – local integration and resettlement – are applicable to less than 1 per cent of the world's refugees (Chimni, 2003, p. 195; 2004).

In an Agenda for Peace, under the heading ‘Post-conflict peace-building’, Boutros-Ghali (1992, Para 55) included refugee repatriation among factors that will help to consolidate peace after war. In 1997, then High Commissioner Ogata (1997, p. vii) wrote that ‘peace-building requires just solutions for refugees and displaced persons.