UNHCR special representative arriving

April 21, 2003
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KATHMANDU, April 21: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has appointed Jahn Shah Assadi as special representative to Nepal. He is arriving here tomorrow to take up his assignment in the UNHCR country office.

“Assadi’s appointment as special envoy by the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva is aimed at expediting the resolution of the Bhutanese refugees in forms of verification and repatriation,” Foreign Minister Narendra Bikarm Shah told The Rising Nepal.

The post has been created as a positive indication to the progress made in recent bilateral ministerial talks in resolving the 12-year-long refugee problem between Nepal and Bhutan, Shah added.
Assadi is scheduled to meet foreign minister Shah on Wednesday.

The long delayed 12th round of Ministerial Joint Committee (MJC) meeting in February this year had decided to undertake the work of categorising 12,000 plus verified refugees into four groups in Thimpu, the Bhutanese capital.

A Joint Verification Team (JVT) had verified the refugees of Khudunabari camp nearly 16 months ago. 
The JVT team has been in Bhutan since February to categorise the refugees. The team is expected to submit its categorisation results by the 14th MJC meet scheduled for May in Kathmandu. 
Nepal and Bhutan had agreed to categorise refugees into four groups – bonabide Bhutanese, Non- Bhutanese, Bhutanese involved in criminal activities and voluntary migrants.

More than 100,000 Bhutanese of Nepalese origin have been sheltered in seven UNHCR-supported camps in two districts of eastern Nepal since 1990. They had fled the Land of Thunder Dragon to escape ethnic cleansing.