Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Honourable members of Parliament, I'm very pleased to be back at this committee to speak about the situation of the survivors of ISIS who have been relocated to Canada.
First, thank you to Canada for having offered this opportunity for UNHCR to work with the Iraqi authorities and the Canadian authorities on the relocation of the most vulnerable survivors of Daesh. In particular we have been working very closely in Iraq both with the central government in Baghdad and with the authorities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and particularly three departments: the department of public health, which as you have heard is supported by another UN agency in providing support to victims of sexual violence; the directorate combatting violence against women, which is co-chairing with the UNHCR the protection working group in Kurdistan; and the directorate of labour and social affairs, which is primarily concerned with working with children.
We had a common objective with Canada, and as mentioned earlier, with Germany, which also provided a number of relocation spaces. The common objective was to identify the most vulnerable survivors of Daesh who could not survive or who needed specific treatment that was not available in Kurdistan where they were living. Therefore, we worked with all the partners to identify those survivors in a safe and dignified manner.
One key element of all those relocation and resettlement programs is really to ensure the dignity of the people concerned and their freedom of choice, for them to be informed about what relocation or resettlement entails. Ultimately, it's very much the decision of the individual to leave a country to be resettled or relocated to a country such as Canada.
It is outside our traditional legal mandate to do relocation of persons who are still within the boundaries of their own country, but we have done that in exceptional cases when we were not able to provide assistance and protection to the people concerned.
We focused primarily on survivors of sexual violence—women and girls, but as mentioned earlier, we also need to recognize that violence of a sexual nature has been exercised against men and boys as well—persons who had been held captive by Daesh for prolonged periods and subjected to forced religious conversion, physical and psychological torture and abuse, risk of trafficking, forced labour; and people who had been separated from their families.
In doing so, we also reached out to our partners on the ground to get referrals not only from the three directorates I mentioned, of public health, social affairs, and the directorate to combat violence against women, but also our NGOs, not only in Iraq but also in Canada. I personally met a number of NGOs that were showing interest in providing us with lists of names. As a result, four NGOs in Canada have submitted names. They are the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society, the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Council, Canadian Lutheran World Relief, and the office for refugees of the Archdiocese of Toronto. They have submitted altogether 34 names, out of which 18 were already in the database of the Kurdish authorities, and therefore, in the database of UNHCR. They provided altogether an additional 16 names, which were presented to the Canadian authorities.
I will make a point that is a little outside the purview of this study, but as you well know, the resettlement or relocation addresses only the most vulnerable cases and it is usually less than 1% of the refugee population.
I want to note our worries regarding the funding for the operation in Iraq. As we speak, at the end of our fiscal year, which is the end of December, we will have received less than 20% of the funding required to assist more than four million displaced, including among those displaced, a large number of people who have been subjected to abuse by Daesh.
I'm saying this because, while we do very much appreciate the opportunity to relocate the most vulnerable, we also need to be able to provide assistance and protection to the people who are still in Iraq, including in Kurdistan, including victims and survivors of Daesh. With only 18% of our budget, that makes our life extremely complicated, and that's our problem. It really makes the survival and the protection assistance that we can offer to the displaced extremely limited.
I will stop there, and I will be happy to answer questions from members of Parliament.