Norwegian Refugee Council Reports on Bhutanese Refugees

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of the world's leading independent humanitarian organisations, has been a significant voice in documenting and advocating on behalf of Bhutanese refugees since the 1990s. Through its research publications, policy briefs, and the work of its affiliated Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the NRC has contributed some of the most rigorous analyses of the legal, political, and humanitarian dimensions of the Bhutanese refugee crisis. These reports have been essential in sustaining international attention on a situation that has often been overshadowed by larger and more visible displacement crises elsewhere in the world.^[1]

The Bhutanese refugee crisis, which saw over 100,000 Lhotshampa (ethnic Nepali Bhutanese) expelled or forced to flee from southern Bhutan between 1990 and 1993, became one of the world's most protracted refugee situations. For nearly two decades, the refugees lived in seven camps in southeastern Nepal administered by UNHCR, with no resolution in sight. The NRC's engagement with this crisis was driven by its organisational focus on displaced populations in forgotten or neglected contexts — exactly the category into which the Bhutanese refugee situation fell for much of its duration.

The NRC's reports have addressed multiple dimensions of the crisis: the legal framework governing citizenship and statelessness in Bhutan, the failure of bilateral negotiations between Bhutan and Nepal to achieve repatriation, the conditions in the refugee camps, the psychological and social impacts of prolonged displacement, and the eventual launch of third-country resettlement as the primary durable solution. These documents remain invaluable resources for researchers, policymakers, and advocates seeking to understand one of South Asia's most significant — and most under-reported — human rights crises.^[2]

Legal Analysis of Statelessness

One of the NRC's most important contributions to understanding the Bhutanese refugee crisis has been its legal analysis of statelessness. Through publications by its legal experts and through the IDMC, the NRC documented how Bhutan's 1985 Citizenship Act and subsequent amendments effectively stripped citizenship from a large segment of the Lhotshampa population, rendering them stateless. The analysis showed how the retroactive application of citizenship criteria, the requirement for documentation that many rural populations could not produce, and the conduct of a 1988 census in southern Bhutan combined to create a legal framework that facilitated mass denationalisation.

The NRC's reports placed the Bhutanese situation within the broader global framework of statelessness, drawing connections to other cases of mass denationalisation in Myanmar (the Rohingya), the Dominican Republic (Haitian-descended populations), and the Baltic states (Russian-speaking populations). This comparative approach helped internationalise the Bhutanese case and situated it within established categories of international law, making it harder for the international community to treat the crisis as a purely bilateral matter between Bhutan and Nepal.

The legal analyses also examined Nepal's response to the refugees, noting that Nepal's refusal to grant the Bhutanese refugees local integration rights — including the right to work, own property, and move freely outside the camps — compounded the hardships of displacement. The NRC argued that both Bhutan (as the country of origin) and Nepal (as the country of asylum) bore responsibilities under international law, and that the international community needed to play a more active role in brokering a resolution.^[3]

Documenting the Protracted Crisis

The NRC's reports consistently emphasised the protracted nature of the Bhutanese refugee crisis, using it as a case study in the human costs of international neglect. In its annual flagship publications and in dedicated policy briefs, the NRC documented how an entire generation of Bhutanese refugees was born and grew up in camps, attending camp schools, receiving camp healthcare, and developing social identities shaped entirely by displacement. The reports drew attention to the psychological toll of indefinite limbo — high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide in the camps — and to the erosion of hope that accompanied each failed round of bilateral negotiations between Bhutan and Nepal.

The fifteen rounds of bilateral talks between the Bhutanese and Nepalese governments, conducted intermittently between 1993 and 2003, produced no meaningful results. A joint verification exercise in Khudunabari camp in 2001 classified only 2.4 percent of the verified population as bona fide Bhutanese citizens eligible for repatriation — a finding that the refugees and their advocates, including the NRC, denounced as fundamentally flawed. The NRC's reporting on the verification process helped expose the methodological problems and political motivations that undermined its credibility.

By the mid-2000s, the NRC was among the organisations arguing that the international community could not continue to wait indefinitely for repatriation and that alternative durable solutions needed to be pursued. This position, while controversial among some refugee leaders who viewed third-country resettlement as an abandonment of the right to return, ultimately prevailed with the launch of the UNHCR-facilitated resettlement programme in 2007.

Advocacy for Durable Solutions

The NRC advocated for a comprehensive approach to the Bhutanese refugee crisis that combined the three traditional durable solutions recognised in international refugee law: voluntary repatriation, local integration, and third-country resettlement. The NRC argued that these solutions were not mutually exclusive and that pursuing resettlement need not — and should not — foreclose the possibility of repatriation for those who wished to return to Bhutan.

On repatriation, the NRC called on the Bhutanese government to create conditions for the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of refugees, including the restoration of citizenship, the return of confiscated land and property, and guarantees against discrimination and reprisals. These calls were consistent with the positions of UNHCR, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other organisations, but the Bhutanese government showed no willingness to engage meaningfully on repatriation.

On local integration, the NRC urged the Nepalese government to grant greater rights to refugees who wished to remain in Nepal, including work permits, freedom of movement, and access to Nepalese educational institutions. Nepal's resistance to local integration, driven by concerns about demographic change in the Jhapa and Morang districts where the camps were located, meant that this solution was never fully pursued.

On third-country resettlement, the NRC supported the programme launched in 2007 under which the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom offered resettlement places to Bhutanese refugees. By the programme's conclusion, over 113,000 refugees had been resettled — the vast majority to the United States. The NRC's reporting tracked the resettlement process, noting both its successes (providing a permanent solution for the majority of the camp population) and its challenges (family separation, cultural adjustment difficulties, and the unresolved status of those who chose not to resettle).^[4]

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

The NRC's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), established in 1998 as the leading international body monitoring internal displacement worldwide, has also contributed to understanding the Bhutanese situation. While the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal were technically international refugees rather than internally displaced persons, the IDMC's broader analyses of displacement in South Asia frequently referenced the Bhutanese case and drew attention to the displacement dimensions within Bhutan itself — including the forced relocation of Lhotshampa populations within the country prior to their expulsion and the resettlement of northern Bhutanese communities to the depopulated south.

The IDMC's global datasets and annual reports have consistently included Bhutan in their coverage of unresolved displacement situations in Asia, helping to ensure that the country's displacement legacy is not forgotten even as the refugee camps in Nepal have largely closed. The Centre's analytical frameworks — distinguishing between conflict-induced and development-induced displacement, and tracking the causes, patterns, and solutions for displacement — have provided useful lenses for understanding the complex dynamics of population movement in and from Bhutan.^[5]

Lasting Significance

The NRC's body of work on Bhutanese refugees has had lasting significance in several respects. First, it has contributed to the permanent record of the Bhutanese refugee crisis, ensuring that the experiences of the displaced Lhotshampa community are documented in authoritative, internationally recognised publications. Second, the NRC's legal analyses of statelessness and citizenship have informed broader international efforts to combat statelessness, including the UNHCR's #IBelong campaign and the development of international guidelines on the prevention and reduction of statelessness.

Third, the NRC's advocacy helped keep the Bhutanese refugee situation on the agenda of governments and international organisations during periods when it risked being forgotten entirely. In a world where humanitarian attention is disproportionately allocated to crises that generate dramatic media coverage, the NRC's sustained engagement with the Bhutanese case demonstrated the importance of institutional advocacy for protracted and forgotten displacement situations.

For the Bhutanese refugee diaspora — now scattered across cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and beyond — the NRC's reports serve as documentary evidence of the injustice they experienced and the international community's response. These documents are cited in asylum proceedings, academic research, and community advocacy, and they remain important reference materials for the ongoing effort to ensure that the Bhutanese refugee experience is remembered and its lessons applied to other displacement crises around the world.^[6]

References

1. Norwegian Refugee Council, nrc.no.
2. NRC, "Bhutan: Land of Happiness for the Select Few," NRC Reports, 2008.
3. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, internal-displacement.org.
4. NRC, "Bhutanese Refugees: Finding Durable Solutions," Policy Brief, 2010.
5. IDMC, "Global Report on Internal Displacement," various years, internal-displacement.org.
6. UNHCR, "Bhutanese Refugee Resettlement," unhcr.org.

Contributed by Anonymous Contributor, Manchester, New Hampshire