Introduction
The COVID-19 outbreak has significantly affected the global world. In fact, we have been going through a process which may have results that go beyond the 1929 Great Depression, which is the most important depression in world history.
One of the important areas where these problems can be experienced is the lives of refugees and refugee camps.The communities in countries have focused on measures to be taken to find a solution to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, if the preparation plans do not take migrants and refugees and their needs into account, these people face the risk of contracting many diseases, especially COVID-19, because refugees and migrants have already been trying to live in overpopulated conditions without reaching basic health conditions (Kluge et al. 2020: 1238).
Many people affected by humanitarian crises live in host countries or camp-like environments. These overcrowded camps pose a serious health risk to the host population and residents. Lack of clean water and soap, lack of medical staff and limited access to health information are serious problems in these environments. Maintaining basic hand hygiene and social distance in refugee camps is either impossible or extremely difficult. In addition, international migrant workers and refugees may also be affected by loss of income, health care insecurity and decisions related to deferring their legal status or reducing employment, legal and administrative services. If urgent measures are not taken to improve the conditions, it is predicted that COVID-19 can spread very quickly in the camps and reach dangerous levels (Kluge et al. 2020: 1238).
In this context, humanitarian organizations state that people in camps should not be forgotten while taking public health measures (Lacobucci 2020). United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that efforts are being made to set up portable hand washing facilities, within the scope of efforts to increase hand washing in the field, and the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that COVID- 19 testing has started in camps (Vince 2020).
With the measures to be taken, it will be possible for refugees to be less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and to reduce its rate of spread.
For this reason, countries should take decisions in a way that includes refugees and migrants, should not resort to repatriation and should not discriminate on the grounds that these people spread disease, and the concept of public health should be evaluated in a way that includes refugees and migrants (Kluge et al. 2020: 1239). Only this way, the harmful effects of COVID-19 on refugees can be reduced.After giving general information on GPGs, this part of the book will provide the theory of GPGs of health and refugee protection. Afterwards, we will evaluate with what kind of policy the refugee protection is approached in the COVID-19 outbreak and how the refugees are doing during the pandemic. In this context; in addition to the decisions made by the countries regarding the refugees after the COVID-19 outbreak, we will address how some situations that the refugees living in the camps face such as limited access to facilities, namely clean water, soap, cleaning materials, etc., and not being able to maintain social distance affect the risk of pandemic. In this sense, the study will make a significant contribution to the literature in terms of evaluating the situation of refugees, during the pandemic, who already had to live under difficult conditions before the pandemic, showing that the countries’ COVID- 19 outbreak policies should also include refugees. At the same time, being one of the pioneering studies, it will be a reference for those who will work in this field in the future.
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