Ms Gráinne O'Hara:

There is an interest on the part of these religious communities in ensuring that their rights and concerns are taken into account and that they have the possibility to return home. Returning home in the wake of some of the levels of violence the minority communities have faced is no easy matter. There is a long road to travel in terms of rebuilding confidence if indeed that can be achieved at all for the minority communities. This is something that must remain front and centre of all discussions about political solutions and the prospects for return. Return is something that remains very much to the forefront of the minds of the vast majority of refugees. It is something on which the UNHCR works very closely with host communities. It is definitely a solution that holds out greater prospects than resettlement could possibly achieve. We are not there yet, however. The political solution is not in place and conflict continues in parts of Syria and Iraq which makes it not an immediate prospect that people will be able to return home.

Deputy Crowe gave me a great deal of homework with his list of questions. I will try to go through them one by one. Each and every one of the points he raised was important to address. The figures are staggering. This is one of the biggest displacements we have seen in recent times. The annual statistics issued by UNHCR in 2016 show higher levels of displacement globally than we have seen since the end of the Second World War.

We are facing a crisis of displacement and the Middle East and North Africa are very much at the crossroads of this displacement, particularly around Syria and Iraq. Staggering as the numbers are they should not overwhelm us because there are responses and possibilities. This is why we continue to put these kinds of appeals in the public domain and why we are seeking funding to continue essential programmes which address many of the issues about which the Deputy expresses concern.

I will refer to one issue, in particular that the Deputy mentioned, the question of underage marriage and gender based violence more broadly. We are very much engaged with local communities, and are working on community-based approaches to address those sort of problems. What do I mean by community-based approaches? I mean precisely the sort of things that were raised in some of the Deputy's colleagues' questions and comments, to the effect that one has to understand culture and community in order to reach solutions. When we talk about community-based approaches, we are talking about going into the camps and neighbourhoods where refugees live, speaking to children and their parents and trying to get a good understanding of what drives people into permitting their children to enter underage marriages. Some of the push factors are definitely financial because people have slipped into such levels of poverty. Underage marriage, or youth marriage, is sometimes seen as a survival tactic, but it is one which we would perceive as negative because of its impact on the lives and well-being of young girls, in particular. There are a lot of programmes ongoing in that respect.

The Deputy also stated that there are some signs of hope coming out of Kazakhstan. The two-day discussions, which recently concluded in Astana, primarily involved the military actors, those actually doing the fighting. One of the fundamental outcomes from Astana has been the hope that the ceasefire that was declared in Syria would hold. Now we see Turkey, Iran and Russia offering themselves as guarantors of that ceasefire. The cessation of hostilities is, of course, a significant step forward for civilian populations. The easing of the daily pressure of bombardment is a huge step forward for populations in places like Aleppo, and of course it is to be welcomed, but it needs to be followed up with a firm political solution addressing all other aspects of the conflict ceasefires have come and gone in Syria. Hopefully, this one will hold.

With respect to the Deputy's question about Turkey, the UNHCR expressed concerns about the EU-Turkey deal. For those that are removed from Greece and returned to Turkey we have access to the places where those individuals are held. We have the possibility to visit and to provide advice and assistance to the Turkish authorities with respect to those cases that are returned. As I said in response to one of the Deputy's colleagues, one of the fundamental things we lobby the Turkish authorities for is to ensure that persons returned to Turkey, who are in need of international protection, would not be returned onwards to situations of danger, be that back to Syria, Afghanistan or from wherever they may have come. That is something we are working very closely with the Turkish authorities on.

I should make a distinction between the locations to which persons removed from Greece go back to in Turkey and the general camp population for the Syrian refugees, to which we have access. In making that point I would like very much to underline that one of the significant features of the Syria response across the region is the fact that the vast majority of Syrian refugees are not, in fact, living in camps. One of the fundamental characteristics of this population is that this is a very urbanised population. The vast majority of refugees are living in host communities in urban locations. The situation is very different when we look at internal displacement.

The Deputy asked in particular about the conditions for people leaving Mosul. Of the 162,000 people who have been displaced, the majority of them are living in temporary camp locations which have had to be set up very quickly to respond to their immediate needs. Not everyone is in camps, some people have friends and relatives that have been able to host them, but the camp conditions facing those leaving Mosul are very basic. This is partly by design because of the hope that the displacement will be short-lived and that people will be able to return to Mosul, but that has yet to be fully realised. The camp conditions are quite basic. They are not the most comfortable of locations to be living in.

The Deputy asked a specific question about the Aleppo situation and the reports of people having gone missing. In the week leading up to Christmas, roughly between 19 and 22 December, when this evacuation operation took place from Aleppo, between ourselves, UN entities, and the Red Cross, which has had a fundamental role in assisting in the departure of medical cases, we estimate that as many as 35,000 people had direct assistance to be evacuated from Aleppo. We also estimate that an additional 111,000 people were displaced in Aleppo but have remained there, roughly divided in half between the eastern and western parts of the city.

The UN was called on under the conditions of a Security Council resolution to undertake observation and monitoring of the evacuation from Aleppo. The degree to which we were able to do that effectively was extremely limited. The buses moved quite fast. People were loaded on those buses and, while we were there physically in an observer role, it was very difficult to have direct access to people and to be able to speak to them. We have had much more access to people at the points of arrival in locations within Idlib province. There, as the Deputy stated in his question, we have spoken to people who have lost family members. They have been separated from them. They may be in detention. There is a lot of work ongoing trying to trace family members. That was a characteristic of the Aleppo evacuation and indeed of other evacuations prior to that. I had personal experience myself of the evacuation from Homs in the summer of 2014 and we saw similar dynamics there.

On what I believe was the Deputy's last question, and he will tell me if I skipped any, on the question of pledging, we also often wonder why one would pledge and then not commit. It obviously creates problems for the sustainability and predictability of funding. What I want to make very clear is that when I talk about the major appeals only reaching a 60% level of funding, that does not necessarily equate to pledges having been made and not fully met. That starts from the fundamental basis of the pledges not necessarily matching up to the needs because we are constantly working on the basis of needs-based planning. By needs we are talking about people's fundamental needs, along the lines of the breakdown of the appeal that I gave the Deputy's colleague, such as health services, education and all those basic needs. We find that all too frequently the pledges simply do not match the needs. There are a range of reasons some individual states may fail to meet their pledges. It can be budgetary changes within a state or it can be changes in administration. Within a given funding year, there can be changes made to the pledges that individual states have made.