“They said it was optional, then they took away our food.” Afzol Mia, a Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh’s Nayapara camp since 1991, does not exaggerate. His family has received no rice, no cooking gas, no soap and no clinic access since March, simply because they refused to surrender fingerprints and iris scans in UNHCR’s latest “registration update.”
A mother in Kutupalong, Shofika Khatun, echoes him: “I have four daughters; two were struck from the ration list for not giving biometrics. How can children learn when they are hungry?”
Fifty-four-year-old Nur Hossain, invited with 50 others to the CiC’s office, recalls the threat more bluntly: “Do the biometrics, or you will face consequences later,” said the UNHCR officer. The CiC added: “We will make you do it - we know how to make it happen.”
These testimonies are not rare. They represent some 400 families -- more than at least 2,000 people -- now purposefully excluded from the already meagre monthly allowance that the World Food Program trims or threatens to trim. In a camp economy where refugees are barred from formal work and forbidden to leave without a police pass, a ration card is a lifeline. UNHCR’s own notice warns that anyone who declines the biometric update will be “inactivated” and “will not benefit from any assistance in future.” If humanitarian principles still apply, the sentence should chill us: no fingerprint, no food.
Why did 400 families say “no”?
UNHCR frames biometric enrollment as harmless modernization, yet the families’ refusal is neither whimsical nor misinformed. In long conversations with Afzol, Shofika, Nur and others, five consistent motives emerged:
First they want to protect their existing legal status. They hold UNHCR identity cards and “yellow data” sheets issued in 1991-92. Officers told them new biometrics would “replace” the old papers. In their words, “we feared our documents would be nullified.”
Second, they point to an absence of genuine, informed consent. Officials first assured them the scheme was voluntary; only after refusal did they discover it was linked to aid withdrawal. “That is not consent,” Nur Hossain notes dryly.
Third, they are concerned about undisclosed data-sharing. No refugee interviewed received a written guarantee that fingerprints would not be sent to Myanmar or Bangladeshi agencies. Some were asked, post-protest, to sign slips authorizing such sharing -- an attempt to retrofit consent under duress.
Fourth, they see this as an equivalent to erasure of identity. Early ration books bore the word Rohingya; new smart cards do not. One elder describes it as “having a father but being forbidden to call him father.” If the label vanishes, they fear, so may their claim to citizenship in any future repatriation.
Finally, they expressed mistrust born of history. From the rushed 2018 mass registration (later exposed for clandestine data transfer to Myanmar) to UNHCR-brokered “voluntary” returns that fizzled under popular protest, refugees have learnt that “neutral paperwork” can become a political weapon overnight.
On May 24 I wrote to UNHCR’s acting representative in Cox’s Bazar asking some straightforward questions: By what legal authority is food withheld? How can consent under threat of hunger be “voluntary”? And who authored the chilling “inactivation” clause? UNHCR has not replied.
The silence speaks volumes.
ExCom Conclusion 91 (2001) -- the UN Refugee Agency’s own registration “rule-book,” adopted by its Executive Committee to guide operations worldwide -- defines registration as a protection tool and nowhere authorizes cutting aid when refugees refuse. I repeat, it never authorizes aid suspension for non-participants. UNHCR’s own Data Protection Policy (2015) demands “freely given, informed and specific” consent; the Emergency Handbook enshrines “do no harm” and prioritizing need over compliance. And UNHCR cannot claim ignorance of the law.
The 1951 Refugee Convention says nothing about ration cards or biometric compliance. Later ExCom texts (95, 97, 111) layer on data-protection and civil-registration safeguards, but none repeals the 2001 language, and UNHCR’s own “do-no-harm” rule demands assistance be delivered solely on the basis of need, impartially and without coercion. By weaponizing rations to harvest fingerprints, the agency is violating its primary normative reference on registration and its own humanitarian handbook.
Yet, in the camps, those principles are honoured in the breach. As Hossain testifies, ration clerks parrot one line: “Update data first, then eat.”
Nor is Cox’s Bazar an aberration. In Jordan, Syrians were iris-scanned without explanation. In Ethiopia, refugees who balked at biometrics saw food vouchers deactivated. Everywhere, the pattern is identical: Documentation first, rights later -- if ever.
Dhaka’s fingerprints are all over the policy. The “Smart Card” -- jointly branded with the crests of the Bangladesh government and UNHCR -- was conceived in a series of closed-door meetings co-ordinated by the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner; the accompanying notice that threatens to “inactivate” non-registrants bears both logos. Successive Bangladeshi ministers have made it plain that the camps are “temporary” and, effectively, that no document may carry the word Rohingya. In that atmosphere UNHCR’s leverage dwindles to zero: accept the host’s conditions or risk a diplomatic clash. So the agency complies, even when compliance means rationing hunger.
Why does the UN’s own refugee agency bend so easily to Dhaka’s dictates? Part of the answer lies in the logic of surplus. Bangladesh hosts a million unwanted, voteless foreigners. Its security services -- DGFI, NSI, and the Armed Police Battalion -- police the camps through favoured armed blocs and pliant Camp-in-Charge (CiC) managers. The daily business of rule is to keep the Rohingya contained, counted and compliant, not empowered. Biometric ID cards deliver exactly that. It is surveillance without conceding a single durable right.
UNHCR, chronically underfunded and diplomatically cautious, has slid from protector to administrator. Its officials now speak of “two systems”: Those with new biometrics and those without. “We cannot assist refugees in two different systems,” a protection officer told Nur Hossain -- as though the institution’s convenience outweighs the refugees’ survival. The result is a grim theatre in which humanitarian actors cite host-state “sovereignty” while enforcing starvation policies the state itself prefers to delegate.
For the (approximately) 400 holdouts, the price of dissent is visible in children too tired to attend class, in elderly men dying, their families say, after months without sufficient food, in women who boil banana stems to quiet an empty stomach. It is visible in a mother’s embarrassment when her nine-year-old asks why classmates received Ramadan iftar that she could not provide. “Is this not coercion?” Afzol Mia asks.
It is -- and it is being carried out under the UN flag.
In conversation after conversation, affected Rohingya returned to the same essentials. “Life-saving aid is not a reward for fingerprints,” insisted Abu Taleb, who chairs a residents’ committee in Nayapara. “Turn the cards back on - food, gas, medicine - for every registered family, biometric or not.”
Mohammed Iqbal from Kutupalong sketched the rest of the community’s minimum terms. Refugees must be told, in Rohingya or Bangla, exactly what data is taken, with whom they will be shared, and how they can opt out of transfers to Myanmar. “Put it in writing,” he said, “so consent is real, not forced.” The erasure of their ethnonym must also end: “We are Rohingya -- restore the word on every document, or give us an annex that certifies it.”
Both men want an external, time-bound audit -- co-led by Rohingya representatives and independent data-protection experts -- to judge whether the biometric scheme violates UNHCR’s own rules. And above all, they reject the ritual focus on “repatriation” that resurfaces whenever international attention flickers. Iqbal said, “until there is citizenship, safety and justice in Rakhine, please deal with the misery right here in Ukhiya and Teknaf.”
Their demands are stark in their simplicity: Food, truth, a name, a voice, and an end to the coercion dressed up as progress. Meeting them would be the first real test of UNHCR’s claim to protect, rather than merely manage, the Rohingya.
“We protested because we already have UN documents,” Shofika tells me. “Doing biometrics would cancel them. If UNHCR can’t protect our papers or our name, what hope do we have?”
That question -- more than any biometric control scheme -- should haunt the agency entrusted with the world’s displaced. It is time UNHCR remembered that its first duty is not to number the Rohingya, but to stand with them.
The names of Afzol Mia, Shofika Khatun, and Nur Hossain have been changed for safety.
Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the politics of refugee management in South and Southeast Asia. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter.
