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No Fingerprint, No Food: How the UN Is Failing the Rohingya
- Shafiur Rahman, The Diplomat
- Jun 6
- 6 min read
Some 400 families in refugee camps in Bangladesh have been barred from receiving aid after refusing to provide biometric data for registration.
“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 submit to fingerprinting and iris scans in the latest “registration update” by UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency.
Nur Hossain, aged 54, who was invited with 50 others to the Camp-in-Charge (CiC) office for re-registration, recalled the threat more bluntly: “Do the biometrics, or you will face consequences later,” said the UNHCR officer, according to Hossain. The CiC added, “We will make you do it – we know how to make it happen.”
A mother in Kutupalong, Shofika Khatun, shared: “I have four daughters; two were struck from the ration list for not giving biometrics. How can children learn when they are hungry?”
These testimonies are not rare. They represent some 400 families – at least 2,000 people in total – who are now purposefully excluded from the already meager monthly allowance that the World Food Program offers. 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.
The UNHCR’s own notice on the “registration update exercise” warned that anyone who declines the biometric update – required for all refugees aged 5 and above – will be “inactivated” and “will not benefit from any assistance in future.” If humanitarian principles still apply, that sentence should chill us: no fingerprint, no food.
The UNHCR frames biometric enrollment as harmless modernization. It says the registration push “improves the accuracy of data on refugees in Bangladesh, which will help the authorities and humanitarian partners to better understand the needs of the refugee population.”
UNHCR press releases on the process highlight Rohingya people dutifully taking part in the process, including images of children having their eyes and fingerprints scanned. “We want documents for Rohingyas. This is our document,” one Rohingya told the UNHCR’s cameras.
So why did 400 families say “no,” despite the steep costs?
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, as one refugee shared, “we feared our [existing] 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,” as Nur Hossain noted dryly.
Third, they are concerned about undisclosed data-sharing. No refugee interviewed received a written guarantee that their fingerprints and other data would not be sent to Myanmar or Bangladeshi agencies. In fact, some were asked, after protesting, 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 described 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 the UNHCR’s acting representative in Cox’s Bazar asking some straightforward questions: By what legal authority is food being withheld? How can consent under threat of hunger be “voluntary”? And who authored the chilling “inactivation” clause? UNHCR has not replied at the time of writing.
The silence speaks volumes.
ExCom Conclusion 91 (2001) – the U.N. refugee agency’s own registration “rule-book,” adopted by its Executive Committee to guide operations worldwide – defines registration as a protection tool. Nowhere does it authorize cutting aid when refugees refuse to be registered. The 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.
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 the UNHCR’s own “do-no-harm” rule demands that 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 honored in the breach. As Hossain testified, 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.
In Bangladesh specifically, the biometric registration campaign has strong ties to the government in Dhaka. The “smart card” – the new registration document, jointly branded with the crests of the Bangladesh government and the UNHCR – was conceived in a series of closed-door meetings coordinated 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 refugee camps are “temporary.” Bangladeshi officials also insist that no document may carry the word “Rohingya;” Dhaka’s preferred term is “Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals.” Notably, the term “Rohingya” is missing from the new smart cards.
Bangladesh hosts a million unwanted, voteless foreigners. In that atmosphere the UNHCR’s leverage dwindles to zero: accept the host’s conditions or risk a diplomatic clash. So the agency complies.
Bangladesh’s security services – the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, National Security Intelligence, and the Armed Police Battalion – police the camps through favored armed blocs and pliant Camp-in-Charge 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.
The 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 theater in which humanitarian actors cite host-state “sovereignty” while enforcing starvation policies the state itself prefers to delegate.
For the (approximately) 2,000 holdouts, the price of dissent is visible: children too tired to attend class; elderly men dying, their families say, after months without sufficient food; women who boil banana stems to quiet an empty stomach. It is visible in a mother’s embarrassment when her 9-year-old asks why classmates received Ramadan iftar that she could not provide.
“Is this not coercion?” Afzol Mia asked.
In conversation after conversation, affected Rohingya returned to the same essential points. “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 data 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 the 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 coercion dressed up as progress. Meeting them would be the first real test of the UNHCR’s claim to protect, rather than merely manage, the Rohingya.
“We protested because we already have U.N. documents,” Shofika told me. “Doing biometrics would cancel them. If the UNHCR can’t protect our papers or our name, what hope do we have?”
The same fear now haunts Rohingya in India, where biometrics ease round-ups and forced returns to Myanmar. Counting bodies is not protection. The UNHCR’s first duty is to stand with the Rohingya, not reduce them to data points.
*The names of Afzol Mia, Shofika Khatun and Nur Hossain have been changed for safety.
(c) 2025, The Diplomat
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