Home Country Context
Nepal is not in isolation of all the four domains of population movement. The country has hosted refugees from a number of countries for the last more than half a century. Trafficking-in persons by and large has gone unreported and unpunished. Irregular migration is a common phenomenon resulting in serious plight and pain for migrant workers in the foreign lands. The internal armed conflict has uprooted thousand of civilians resulting in a considerable size of IDPs often compelled to languish as internal refugees.
There are no appropriate legal and institutional mechanisms to address the problem of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants. Nepal is neither the state party to the Refugee Convention-1951 nor has it ratified the 1990 UN Migration Convention. It has yet to ratify the SAARC Trafficking Convention and adopt necessary laws and policies to suit the spirit of the Convention. Nepal has not enacted any legal or administrative measure to intervene on the alarming problem of IDPs. Whatever protection measures and methods exist on population movement, they are ad-hoc and temporary.