The UN refugee agency has called on the Kenyan government to reconsider its directive to move about 50,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers from urban areas to overcrowded and underserviced refugee camps.
The refugees, believed to be mostly Somalis, were ordered by Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Ole Lenku back to Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya amid increasing insecurity incidents across the country.
"All communities are affected by insecurity, and scapegoating refugees is not an answer. Blanket implementation of encampment measures is arbitrary and unreasonable, and carries a threat to human dignity," the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) said in its news release received on Saturday.
The UN refugee agency said the refugees are as much at risk from insecurity as the wider population and called for a solution that is sensitive to protection needs.
"We are in close contact with the government to see how its security concerns can be addressed in accordance with international legal norms and practices," it said.
On March 25, Lenku announced its ruling that the registered refugees must move from cities to either sprawling Dadaab camp, home to over 400,000 mainly Somali refugees, or to Kakuma, a vast settlement in Kenya's western desert region that is home to more than 125,000 refugees from South Sudan, Sudan and Somalia, among other countries.
Lenku warned any refugee who flouts the directive of severe punishment and also ordered the closure of all refugee registration centres in urban areas.
"All refugees residing outside the designated refugee camps of Kakuma and Dadaab are hereby directed to return to their respective camps with immediate effect," Lenku ordered in a statement issued in Nairobi.
He said the drastic decision has been taken owing to the emerging security challenges in the East African nation's urban centers and the need to streamline the management of refugees.
But UNHCR said while it understood the need to address security concerns and strengthen law enforcement, blanket measures which targeted people based on nationality or belonging to a group were discriminatory and usually ineffective, and were creating suffering for innocent people.
The UN agency said Kenya has a long history of hosting many thousands of refugees, and the current refugee population in the country amounted to over 550,000 people, of whom about 430,000 are from Somalia.
The East African nation has for many years generously hosted tens of thousands of Somalis refugees, fleeing fighting from central and southern Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia and DRC whose lives were at substantial risk that requires international protection.
Kenya, which hosted protracted negotiations that culminated in the formation of the governments in South Sudan and Somalia, said the refugee situation continues to pose security threats to Nairobi and the region apart from the humanitarian crisis.
"Any refugee found flouting this directive will be dealt with in accordance with the law. Consequently, all refugee centers in urban areas -- Nairobi, Mombasa, Malindi, Isiolo and Nakuru -- are hereby closed," he said.
Kenya, a signatory of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention, currently hosts some 630,000 refugees, of whom more than half a million are from neighboring Somalia.
The vast majority of the urban refugee population are of Somali origin, while smaller groups of urban refugees come from the Great Lakes Region.
Aid agencies say widespread poverty, unemployment, lack of food and water, and inadequate access to medical and legal aid as the harsh realities of lives for tens of thousands of East African refugees living in urban and peri-urban areas of Nairobi.
