Meanwhile, on August 30 the Pakistan government handed 147 newly-arrived Afghan refugees back to the Taliban authorities whose repressive policies they fled. And in the United Kingdom, racism and intolerance towards asylum seekers reached such a pitch in early August that a Kurdish asylum seeker from Turkey was stabbed to death and an Iranian asylum seeker seriously injured in unprovoked racist attacks on a deprived inner city housing estate in Glasgow, Scotland. Refugees and asylum seekers are often victims of repeated racism. Once they flee their countries to escape racism and ethnic intolerance, then they often are unable to find safety because of governments' xenophobic and exclusionary immigration policies. Those who do are frequently subject to racist and xenophobic treatment in their countries of refuge, and millions are unable to return to their own countries because of racial and ethnic discrimination.

Governments, such as the U.K and Australia, have manipulated and incited xenophobic fears for short-term political gain. The refusal by Australia to allow the Afghan refugees entry to its territory comes in the midst of a general election campaign, in which the government is seeking to demonstrate a tough stance on asylum and immigration and is not afraid to fuel xenophobic fears with inflammatory accounts of "floods" of refugees on the move to Australia.

Asylum and immigration also featured prominently in the U.K. general election campaign earlier this year, during which government and opposition politicians alike fueled public hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees. The race riots in northern England and the stabbing of the asylum seekers in Scotland came in the wake of the election, leading one leading civil liberties group in the U.K. to conclude that the negative portrayal of asylum seekers during the campaign had directly contributed to the rise in racist attacks against asylum seekers and to the heightened racial tensions in general in the U.K.

Pakistan faces another problem. After more than two decades of hosting one of the world's largest refugee population--some two million Afghans--Pakistan's hospitality is wearing thin and public hostility towards the refugees is growing. Largely ignored by the international community, these refugees are the victims of another form of racism--the extreme disparity in the international response to refugee crises. While money poured in for the Kosovar refugees, millions of refugees in countries such as Tanzania, Guinea, Pakistan and Iran remained largely neglected. This inequity does not, however, justify any government violating its international obligations and returning refugees to countries where they could face persecution or death.

Elsewhere, millions of refugees, such as the six million Palestinians, the 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in camps in Nepal, and thousands of ethnic minority Burmese, are obstructed from returning to their countries in safety and dignity because of continuing discrimination and exclusion.

These realities must be brought to the forefront during the World Conference Against Racism. Refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and internally displaced persons throughout the world are facing racism, xenophobia and discrimination on a daily basis.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Many of the same states present at the World Conference will meet in Switzerland in December this year to reaffirm their commitment to the international refugee Convention. Yet at the same time, governments have dropped substantive reference to the Convention from the conference documents.

A first step in recognizing the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and demonstrating that the conference is serious in addressing their plight would be to reinsert reference to the refugee Convention into the declaration and program of action. A failure to take this basic step would make a mockery of the refugee anniversary year and the stated objectives of the World Conference Against Racism.

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