An Internally Displaced Person (IDP) is someone forced to flee their home but who, unlike a refugee, has not crossed an internationally recognized state border. Because they remain within their own country, IDPs stay under the legal protection of their own government — even when that government is the cause of their displacement. This creates a structural protection gap that distinguishes IDP issues from refugee law.
The authoritative working definition comes from the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (1998), drafted under the leadership of Francis M. Deng, then Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons. The Principles describe IDPs as persons forced or obliged to flee their homes "in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters." The Guiding Principles are not a binding treaty but consolidate norms drawn from international humanitarian law, human rights law, and refugee law by analogy.
At the regional level, the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa — known as the Kampala Convention, adopted in 2009 and entering into force in 2012 — is the first binding multilateral treaty specifically on internal displacement.
Key operational actors include UNHCR, which leads protection clusters for conflict-displaced IDPs under the IASC cluster approach, OCHA for coordination, and IOM for tracking through its Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Geneva publishes the annual Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID), the standard reference for global figures.
Important distinctions for delegates:
- IDPs vs. refugees: border-crossing is the legal threshold.
- Conflict IDPs vs. disaster IDPs: both fall within the Guiding Principles, though funding streams differ.
- Durable solutions: return, local integration, or settlement elsewhere in the country, per the IASC Framework on Durable Solutions (2010).
Example
By 2022, the conflict in Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion had displaced several million people internally, making Ukrainians one of the largest IDP populations tracked by IOM and IDMC that year.