The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has reduced its staff footprint in Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps as a precautionary measure to prevent the transmission of the novel coronavirus, which leads to the deadly COVID-19 disease, Louise Donovan, UNHCR spokesperson in the city of Cox's Bazar, told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th May, 2020) The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has reduced its staff footprint in Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps as a precautionary measure to prevent the transmission of the novel coronavirus, which leads to the deadly COVID-19 disease, Louise Donovan, UNHCR spokesperson in the city of Cox's Bazar, told Sputnik.
Bangladesh, the most densely populated country in the world, also hosts the world's largest refugee camp near Cox's Bazar. To date, there are over 16,600 COVID-19 cases in Bangladesh.
"UNHCR and the humanitarian community are taking all preventive and precautionary measures to mitigate the risks of COVID-19 for the people we serve, as well as our own teams, while also ensuring that critical activities continue in the camps. We have made efforts to minimize the staff footprint in the camps to the extent possible, in line with the most recent Government Directive as of 8 April, in an effort to minimize the risk of exposure for the refugees," Donovan said.
The spokesperson noted that the agency is continuing activities in such critical areas as health, nutrition, good hygiene practices, water and sanitation facilities, protection, logistics services, the construction of health facilities and WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) infrastructures, as well as key distributions, such as food, liquefied petroleum gas and hygiene kits.
As of late April, about 860,000 refugees live in Cox's Bazar, most of whom are ethnic Rohingya Muslims forced to flee their homes in neighboring Myanmar amid an army offensive in August 2017. The Myanmar authorities launched an unprecedented violence campaign against the Rohingya after militants, allegedly from this minority group, carried out attacks on police posts in the country's north-western state of Rakhine.
A UN fact-finding mission to the country in 2018 said that there were grounds to charge Myanmar with crimes against humanity and genocide against the Rohingya people. In January, the International Court of Justice ruled that Myanmar must fully implement all measures to prevent the murder, torture or persecution of people based on racial, ethnic or religious grounds.
