02-08-2018 ■ Following the funding appeal of USD 391 million by the UNHCR to support 430,000 Burundian refugees in 2018, the Ministry of Home Affairs accuses the agency of providing and working on wrong figures. Térence Ntahiraja, Assistant to and Spokesperson for the Ministry of Home Affairs says the UN Refugees (...)

01-08-2018 ■ The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees-UNHCR has suspended its food assistance to more than 2500 asylum seekers from Burundi since Monday 1January 2018. It intends to stop water supply by the end of this month if they will not accept to be fingerprinted as it requires in (...)

09-12-2017 ■ Burundi Government says it still wonders why UNHCR still prevents refugees from returning home and continues to publish untrue figures. “Either the number is high or there are people pretending to be Burundian refugees when in fact they are not. Thus, there must be a hidden interest behind all (...)

09-04-2017 ■ The tripartite meeting held on 31 August by representatives of Burundi and Tanzanian Governments alongside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Dar-es Salaam concluded that approximately 12,000 Burundian refugees in Tanzania will be voluntarily repatriated by the end of December 2017. The delegation of the United (...)

06-16-2017 ■ 37,000 Burundians who fled during the recent crisis—including both registered and unregistered refugees—have now returned, according to UNHCR. But the government claims the number of returnees is closer to 156,000. Abel Mbilinyi, the country representative of UNCHR in Burundi, says 138 Burundian refugees have expressed their desire to return (...)

02-11-2017 ■ Burundi’s Home Affairs minister said on 9 February at the hearing with UNHCR representative in Burundi that figures released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, about Burundians fleeing the country are untrue. UNHCR said that hundreds of people are fleeing the country every week. «The number (...)

09-28-2016 ■ UNHCR says over 300,000 Burundians fled to neighboring countries, the number the interior minister rejects, stating that the majority have returned home “So far, about 100,000 Burundian refugees have willingly come back home from the neighboring countries”, said Térence Ntahiraja, Assistant to the Interior Minister. Most of them are (...)

09-22-2016 ■ The final report of the United Nations Independent Investigation in Burundi (UNIIB) published on 20 September indicates that UNIIB documented hundreds of cases of summary executions, targeted assassinations, arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence. UNIIB conducted a total of 227 interviews, in some cases with various parties. The interviews (...)