Mozambique: UN legal help desk assists 7,000 displaced people in Cabo Delgado

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Mozambique: UN legal help desk assists 7,000 displaced people in Cabo Delgado

7:34 CAT | 17 Feb 2021

FILE PHOTO - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Lusa]

Around 7,000 displaced people from Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, have passed through a legal help desk set up in Pemba by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in partnership with Mozambique’s Catholic University.

“People’s main concerns are the lack of birth certificates and identity cards, as well as the registration of deaths and marriages and other changes in civil status,” UNHCR reported in a statement.

Pemba, the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado, and its surroundings are home to many of the half a million displaced persons caused by the region’s armed insurgency.

At the legal help desk in Josina Machel neighbourhood, where the first phase of this initiative is taking place, mobile teams of two lawyers work free of charge alongside law students every day of the week.

Most visitors are women and children who fled armed attacks in Quissanga and Macomia districts and left everything behind, including documents.

One of the initiative’s main objectives is to address the lack of documents that “can worsen the situation of vulnerability of displaced persons” and highlights UNHCR.

A person without identity documents “cannot travel safely”, children separated from their parents “are more vulnerable to trafficking” and “access to goods and services that facilitate self-reliance and local integration, as well as education and health, can be challenging”, it concludes.

The legal help desk project started in December and, in this first phase, aims to serve 10,000 displaced people by the end of February.

The goal of the partners is to replicate this initiative in other IDP communities.

The armed violence in the northern province of Mozambique, which is home to the largest private multinational investment in Africa, for natural gas exploration, is causing a humanitarian crisis with over two thousand deaths and 560,000 displaced people, without housing or food, concentrated mainly in the provincial capital, Pemba.

Some of the incursions have been claimed by the ‘jihadist’ group Islamic State since 2019.

Source: Lusa