Jan Egeland
Jan Egeland
Jan Egelandis a Norwegian politician, formerly of the Labour party. He has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. He was previously the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch and the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe. Egeland formerly served as director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Under-Secretary-General of the UN. Egeland also holds a post as Professor II at the University of Stavanger...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 September 1957
CountryNorway
We have enough to keep people alive, but we can't at all change their totally inhuman kind of situation in camps where they cannot live without being attacked.
Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today, because it is too dangerous.
We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.
This time, at least, people heard about the earthquake. Many people fled inland.
Conditions here are totally unacceptable. It has to change because people have to live a better life and have a better future.
It's like nature strikes back on people who have treated nature badly and we see hundreds of thousands dead after these last two years and hundreds of millions of livelihoods lost.
It's by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western hemisphere, and yet the plight of these people remains a largely untold story.
It's a cruel reality. But after a week, very few people survive.
No amount of humanitarian assistance can protect people from being attacked.
Many access roads are too dangerous for relief workers, preventing them from carrying out assessments or reaching people in need.
We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.
We receive reports now on a daily basis from our own people on the ground in Darfur on widespread atrocities and grave violations of human rights against the civilian population.
Increasingly gang violence and organized crime, together with climate change-driven natural disasters, are displacing more people as wars are fewer on the continent and political violence has decreased considerably, the NRC has decided to treat this as a humanitarian crisis.
We have health kits and school-in-a-box kits that are tailored for immediate use for people that are displace by emergencies, and when such requests come we will answer immediately.