Thank you for the question—it's a good one. I haven't actually seen anything within the UN system other than almost spreading out the need to conduct...so I'll speak specifically to refugee status determination. This is the process by which an asylum seeker, a person who's crossed an international boundary, is saying that they fear that they cannot go back to their country of origin. They have to prove that. Somebody has to basically, for better or for worse, interrogate them as to where they're from, and then figure out whether or not they meet the convention grounds.
That system, in itself, is weak, because the threshold for the burden of proof is the lowest possible threshold. It's not a criminal standard. It's not a civil standard. The benefit of the doubt is given to the claimant. Whatever the claimant says, the interviewing officer simply has to accept it at face value, more or less. Once the interview is done, he or she then goes to a series of reports, whether it's by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Those are often recycled reports.
I'll just pick something—let's say, an ongoing conflict in Somalia, or something like that. You have to prove that you're from south-central Somalia. How do I really know, as an interviewing officer, that you're from south-central Somalia? You could actually be a Kenyan Somalian posing as somebody from south-central Somalia. You just need to know a few facts. You speak the same language—Af Soomaali. You prove verbally that you're from a clan structure, which I simply just have on a sheet that's printed out in English for me. Then, if you have been coached to read from just a few lines of a Human Rights Watch report or Amnesty International—bing—you cannot be returned or refouled. Therefore, you go into the pipeline for resettlement.
I never saw anything within the UNHCR system to do that. On top of that, I also saw so-called reforms within UNHCR to then offshoot RSD from their own RSD unit to other agencies, like the Danish Refugee Council, for example.