After 18 months of work, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement presented its Final Report to the Secretary-General on 29 September 2021. The report, entitled Shining a Light on Internal Displacement, makes the case that maintaining the status quo is not an option and that far-reaching changes are needed to ensure that the rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs) are protected and that solutions are found. Elizabeth Ferris, Research Professor at ISIM, served as one of the four experts to the panel’s work, drafting several of the background papers which fed into the report and participating in more than 80 meetings with stakeholders in the preparations for the report. Several Georgetown graduate students served as interns to the Secretariat over the course of the High-Level Panel’s work and saw firsthand how international policies are made.
The comprehensive report makes a number of recommendations for finding solutions for the world’s 50 million internally displaced persons and marks the beginning – not the end – of the process of resolving displacement.