Despite these covenants, the refugee faces an array of the obstacles which must be surmounted before his or her political rights can be fully realized. Such obstacles include intimidation, illustrated among other things by the use of food relief as a tool to gain the political cooperation of groups of refugees; physical obstacles such as destroyed bridges or remote or impenetrable border crossings; and difficulty in accessing both election-specific information and more general reporting on civic life at home.
Refugees traditionally have been among the last of marginalized groups to become enfranchised. International practice on the promotion of the political rights of refugees has not yet been standardized. There is a lack consistency from region to region in terms of resource allocation, practice and institutional leadership. The range of policy differences is illustrated by a comparison of the examples of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996, where refugee enfranchisement was written into the 1995 General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Dayton Agreement) and balloting was conducted for refugees in 55 countries, and Liberia in 1997 where there were no out-of-country enfranchisement opportunities and no organized repatriation.
As the Refugee Policy Group study (Gallagher and Schowengerdt October 1997) points out, there are four models of political participation that can be identified in international practice. These models are:
The application of consistent international standards takes on special significance in the case of refugees because, by definition, enfranchisement efforts are international: they involve cross-border agreements between the countries and international organizations charged with administrative responsibilities or the implementation of peace accords. The recognition of consistent international principles on refugee enfranchisement and participation would also act as a foil to the tactic of ‘cleansing’ a region or community to expel a population and eliminate its political interests. The political motives for displacing people would be reduced if the refugee populations produced by rogue regimes did not lose their political rights but continued to have a voice and to vote regardless of their temporary dislocation.
Not only are there obstacles for refugees to overcome in achieving their political rights, but the international organizations that are charged with implementing enfranchisement programmes and promoting participation by refugees face obstacles of their own. These include competing policy options, time constraints and resource limitations.
