Worthy of reading!! | Re-conceptualising rights-based protection in refugee crises: the need for alternative approaches and methods in institutional and policy responses | Professor Galya Benarieh Ruffer In her essay, ‘We Refugees’, Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’. We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants’. Refugees are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees’. I was struck recently by the comment made by a friend of mine who works with immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, that refugees are the fortunate ones. No one wants to live the life of a refugee. Refugee status is a status of last resort, yet it is an increasingly coveted status for the tens of millions of people who have lost all other forms of status. That is why today we have 35.8 million persons under the protection of the UNHCR – 15.4 million of these are officially refugees and an additional one million are asylum seekers – meaning they have arrived on the territory of a host state claiming asylum. Millions more are not in the system at all for reasons that we need to know more about as we reflect on the international legal framework and seek to set a research agenda that can best inform policies going forward... Party States: the US It may come as a surprise to some of you to know that in the U.S. we did not have legislation implementing the Refugee Convention until 1980. And, even after we did have that implementing legislation, we really did not have an affirmative RSD process but rather the way we continued to recognise refugees was through a system of ‘parole’ where the executive decreed that a certain group of people were refugees and, if you could show you were from that country, you were let in as a refugee. It was only when too many people began to arrive at our shores that we felt a need to comply with the Refugee Convention by applying the definition and, as you can sense from the story I’m telling, the reason for implementing legislation was hardly to expand refugee protection, but rather to limit it. States generally implement the Refugee Convention at the point at which they start receiving more refugees than they think they can handle. The RSD process is a way in which to ‘regain control of borders.’ As more states are implementing an RSD process today, we can, therefore, expect the number of refugees who will be protected by the Refugee Convention - i.e., those who will be afforded the legal status of ‘refugee’ - to shrink. It’s imperative, therefore, to have a better understanding of the historical legacies of refugee reception and, to examine formal RSD and pose questions about the process and effects through the eyes of an interdisciplinary group. We already started us off by including sets of questions that are associated with each session. In terms of formal RSD, there are statistical kinds of questions such as is the RSD process capturing the most deserving people? Economic questions about gaming the system, political science questions about how we might understand protection as it is related to ‘compliance’ and anthropological questions about how the RSD process encourages or discourages particular applicants. Connecting all these questions is the need to better understand alternative statuses and processes through which refugees are afforded protection. And to know more about how refugees and international advocacy networks mobilise international and national law and policies. It is our contention that the benefits of an asylum system ought to be understood not just as the accurate determination of status according to ‘official’ documented criteria, but also as the change in overall protection as defined by criteria such as access to basic rights such as non-refoulement, non discrimination, freedom of movement and additional rights such as access to right to work, land, housing, education, public relief and assistance. As we know, party states have diverged from the Refugee Convention legal framework by constructing border fences, preventing entry of asylum seekers through offshore or fast track processing, setting short filing deadlines for asylum applications, and mandatory detention of asylum seekers during the application process. In response, the UNHCR and refugee legal advocates have been forced to find alternative approaches to the processing of persons seeking refugee status that, while they do not accord a person the full protection of a Convention refugee, offer refugees better protection than do restrictive measures. One example is the increasing use of ‘temporary protection’ as an emergency response where individual status determination is impractical and is used to grant protection to a broader category of persons not necessarily covered by the 1951 Convention. Complementary protection, such as temporary protected status (TPS), has implications for understanding the ways key groups are often considered ‘too difficult’ for ‘proper’ protection and the need to tackle head on the extent to which such status is sufficient for the interests of individuals, states, society, etc One of the interesting questions that emerged as I placed all of you together into sessions was that of the resettlement scholars. The question they bring concerns the role of community in the ability of an RSD process to offer protection to refugees. It could well be that the effectiveness of an RSD process depends highly on informal mechanisms and communities. Non- Party States Therefore, it is not a wonder that 80% of refugees reside in states that have either not signed the Refugee Convention, do not have implementing legislation or, if they do, do not grant refugees rights as defined by the Refugee Convention. Pakistan, for example, is a non-party state that is currently host to 1.6 million refugees, the largest number of refugees worldwide. In non-party states, the UNHCR has increasingly been called up to set up refugee status determination processes under its Statutory Mandate. Consider that in 2007 the UNHCR conducted RSD in some 75 countries making decisions for 48,745 people, with 90 percent of its work concentrated in 15 countries (Algeria, Cameroon, China (Hong Kong), Egypt, India, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Yemen), whereas by 2013 that case load reached 203,200. Human rights and refugee advocates have documented human rights abuses of refugees in non-party states such as arbitrary detention, deportation and lack of basic rights, but little is known about cases and situations where refugees have been granted alternate forms of protection outside of the Refugee Convention based legal processes. Through ancient traditions of tolerance, acceptance and accommodation, non-party states such as India and Bangladesh have long records ‘of performing humanitarian obligations towards refugees’ (Mohammad, 2012, p. 147). As one scholar notes, ‘If a comparative analysis of such institutional responses from the [South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] SAARC countries is undertaken, then it would certainly help us to understand certain commonalities in such responses and slowly build up the regime so as to enable to (sic) regional arrangement which would reflect the international response to refugee problems’ (Vijaykumar, 1998, p. 8). These non-party contexts raise all sorts of questions that we need to know more about such as: Why do refugees continue to flee mainly to countries that have not signed the Convention? Although it’s easy to simply say that they flee to these countries because they can (easy to cross the border), it would be worthwhile to know more about the choices they make once they cross the border. And, the role refugee communities themselves serve as a source of reception for others. We also need to broaden our understandings of refugee vulnerabilities. And to understand in what way the grant of refugee status speaks to these vulnerabilities. For example, simply having the status does not mean you have the rights that would make you less vulnerable to poverty or discrimination. This is why so many refugees would prefer to live the invisible life of an urban refugee rather than be in a refugee camp. For many of those forced to leave their homes, the legal status ‘refugee’ is almost always a last resort. Sources | For more, Please visit!! rightsinexile.tumblr/post/96367507292/re-conceptualising-rights-based-protection-in-refugee
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:47:20 +0000
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