The little known efforts of the Representative of the UN Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons are a case study in the effective development and implementation of human rights norms.  For more than a decade, the first representative, Francis Deng, and his successor, Walter Kalin, have worked to improve the status of “internally displaced persons,” or “IDPs”.   Those forced from their homes, but not across international borders, fall outside of international law protecting “refugees”.  But the hardship of the internally displaced is often no less, and with civil war and internal conflict on the rise, their numbers only grow.  Today, approximately 25 million displaced persons worldwide have been forced from their homes and communities because of armed conflict and violence.  Millions more are similarly displaced within the borders of their own countries as a result of human rights violations, natural disasters, and development projects.  Lacking the protection of international and domestic law, many displaced persons are deprived of adequate access to shelter, food, and education.  Others face discrimination, gender-based violence, forced resettlement, and other violations of their fundamental rights.  Deng and Kalin along with Manfred Nowak (Ludwig Bolzman Institute of Human Rights, Vienna) and Robert Goldman (Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, DC) have filled the gap with the “Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.”  The principles provide a normative framework for upholding the basic rights of the internally displaced and have been carefully gleaned from existing international human rights and humanitarian law as is reflected in a new edition of Kalin’s annotations on the principles, published by ASIL in conjunction with the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.  And as we heard at a recent ASIL Annual Meeting panel, what were once mere “guiding principles” that governments were encouraged to consider are increasingly assuming the character of “hard law.”  (Audio from the session will soon be available at http://www.prolibraries.com/asil/?select=session&sessionID=39.)  In addition, more and more states are developing national laws that implement the principles and guarantee the rights of displaced persons in the process.  While so many other sessions of the ASIL Annual Meeting highlighted the erosion of international principles,this one stood as a welcome success story.