Two Year Progress Assessment of the CRRF Approach

On 19 September 2016, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, 1 reaffirming the importance of the international refugee regime and containing a wide range of commitments by Member States to strengthen and enhance mechanisms to protect people on the move. It focuses on the importance of supporting those countries and communities that host a large number of refugees to promote the inclusion of refugees, ensure the involvement of development actors from an early stage, and bring together national and local authorities, regional and international financial institutions, donor agencies, and the private and civil society sectors to generate a “whole of society” approach to refugee responses. While many of these concepts were in practice prior to the New York Declaration, its adoption signalled a new commitment to global solidarity and refugee protection at a time of unprecedented displacement, and particularly on ensuring that comprehensive responses to refugee protection are developed. Specifically, the New York Declaration called upon UNHCR to develop and initiate the application of a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) in specific situations that featured large-scale movements of refugees and protracted refugee situations, with four key objectives:0
 Objective One: Ease pressures on the host countries involved;
 Objective Two: Enhance refugee self-reliance;
 Objective Three: Expand access to third-country solutions; and
 Objective Four: Support conditions in countries of origin for return in safety and dignity.