Angelina Jolie is taking on a new role in the United Nations, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said Tuesday. According to InterAksyon, the actress will be a Special Representative on the afghan refugee situation, which is seeking to help determine the fate of 2.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran.
Jolie has already served for 10 years as goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and has donated $5 million to its aid operations. The details of her new appointment, however, remain undetermined and she told reporters, “We are looking at a few countries in the world.”
“We’re hoping to discuss it in the next few weeks but we want to research it properly and do it well,” she said after a meeting of UNHCR’s Executive Committee in Geneva. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said that Jolie would become “our special envoy mainly for the most dramatic refugee situations that require a lot of advocacy.”
The UNHCR did say, however, that Jolie’s expanded role had not yet been finalized as a number of countries were still under consideration and “relevant authorities” were still being consulted with regard to the actress’s additional role.
Jolie decided she wanted to be involved with the refugee movement after meeting several refugees during her 40 field missions for the UNHCR in locations from Pakistan to Kenya. She described them as “among the most vulnerable and yet the most resilient people in the world.”