International Thesaurus of Refugee Terminology

"The Thesaurus grew out of the Draft Thesaurus of Refugee Terminology compiled in English for the UNHCR by Piers Campbell in 1986. In 1988, the then chief of the UNHCR Centre for Documentation on Refugees (CDR), Hans Thoolen, invited Jean Aitchison, a respected expert in the field of thesauri, to provide the technical expertise for the revision and restructuring of this draft. She worked closely with the CDR and with an international working group, and the result of their collaboration was the first edition of the International Thesaurus of Refugee Terminology, in three separate language editions, published in 1989. The Spanish version was translated by the Latin American Information Center on Migration (CIMAL) in Santiago de Chile and published by the Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos (IIDH) in Costa Rica. The French edition was translated by Documentation Réfugiés in Paris and published by La Documentation française (France). The English edition was published by UNHCR. We hope this new version will serve as a more efficient medium for identifying relevant indexing terminology and as a value-added mechanism for managing refugee- and forced migration-related information. It is intended as a tool for use by organizations that process information concerning refugees."