Friday 11 October 2002

Press Briefing Notes
Friday 11 October 2002
Spokesperson: Jean Philippe Chauzy

1. AFGHANISTAN - Italy Supports Return of Afghan Lawyers
2. TIMOR-LESTE - Sri Lankan Migrants Return Home
3. LIBERIA - IDP Assessment Mission
4. ZIMBABWE - IOM and ACBF Sign Brain Drain MOU

AFGHANISTAN - Italy Supports Return of Afghan Lawyers - IOM's Return of Qualified Afghans (RQA) programme received a boost this week when the Italian government stepped in to support the scheme's efforts to bring back Afghan lawyers to rebuild Afghanistan's shattered legal system.

The Italian contribution of Euro 300,000 will help IOM to carry forward a plan to bring back up to 60 legal experts to work in the Afghan judiciary.

To date, 16 of the 272 qualified Afghans who have returned to Afghanistan with IOM's RQA programme have been lawyers. Eleven of them now work in the Justice Ministry.

The RQA database, which now contains applications from over 6,000 Afghan professionals worldwide, has resumes from another 234 Afghan lawyers interested in returning home.

The RQA programme matches requests for skilled personnel from employers in Afghanistan with resumes submitted to the database. Successful applicants and their families are provided with various benefits including return travel to Afghanistan, reintegration grants and, in some cases, salary subsidies.

TIMOR-LESTE - Sri Lankan Migrants Return Home - This week 25 Sri Lankan irregular migrants stranded in East Timor en route to New Zealand voluntarily returned home with the assistance of IOM.

They were part of a group of 58 Sri Lankan men between the ages of 19 and 55, who arrived in Dili in a small, 14-meter boat on 28 July.

The Timor-Leste authorities asked IOM to provide food, accommodation and medical services for the group after deciding that the vessel was unseaworthy and could not safely complete its voyage.

The 25 migrants who returned home this week were the second group to ask IOM for voluntary repatriation. Twenty-four others returned to Sri Lanka on September 12th.

The remaining 9 Sri Lankans left in East Timor are expected to return home with IOM assistance when they receive temporary travel documents from the Sri Lankan authorities through IOM Canberra.

LIBERIA - IDP Assessment Mission - IOM this week dispatched an assessment team to Liberia, at the invitation of UNOCHA and UNHCR, to review the IDP situation with a view to developing a future humanitarian assistance programme.

Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the mission will assess the IDP population in terms of their numbers, needs and vulnerability, and will look at the likely cost of an assistance programme. The team will also look at potential IDP camp management and vocational skills training projects.

Estimates of the number of IDPs in Liberia vary, but currently stand at around 130,000. The majority are located in the greater Monrovia area and were displaced by fighting between Liberian Government Forces (AFL) and the rebel group known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).

There are also some 10,000 Sierra Leonean refugees in camps in the Monrovia area, 4,600 of whom had been registered by UNHCR by the end of August 2002. Elsewhere in the country, there are an estimated further 5,000 refugees, many of them displaced former residents of the Sinje refugee camp, 50 miles from Monrovia, which was attacked by rebels on 20th June.

ZIMBABWE - IOM and ACBF Sign Brain Drain MOU - The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and IOM have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote programmes and policies designed to limit Africa's brain drain and to facilitate skills transfer from the African diaspora.

Both organisations will work together to engage governments, the private sector and the civil society to support programmes that facilitate the mobility of skilled human resources and address the issue of brain drain. They will also work together to support research on migration and sustainable development issues.


The Harare-based ACBF, set up in 1992, is an independent capacity building institution backed by multilateral and bilateral donors.

IOM recently launched a Migration for Development in Africa (MIDA) programme which seeks to transfer skills and resources from the African diaspora to support development in Africa. The MIDA programme also facilitates the "virtual" return of skills, using modern information technology.

MIDA is a successor to IOM's Return and Reintegration of Qualified African Nationals Programme, which was launched in 1993 and helped more than 2,000 skilled African nationals to return home to contribute to the development of their countries.