Blog
“The law is not meant to act a trap”: How can Pakistan change its approach to Afghan refugees and asylum seekers?
The story of one woman, Rahil Azizi, highlights the impossible situation of Afghan refugees and asylum seekers seeking safety in Pakistan. Azizi’s long fight to claim asylum through the Islamabad High Court suggests there is an ever-widening gap in Pakistan between the letter and the spirit of the law. Arjumand Bano Kazmi believes Azizi’s victory could be a timely aid to hundreds of other Afghan refugees who are subjected to arbitrary arrests, detentions, trials and deportation.
Falling in Love with the Archives: Refugee Files
I am listening to the countless voices, talking to me, telling me their stories. In the memos, letters, official and confidential reports, meeting minutes, press cuttings, telex, incoming and outgoing cables, fax messages, photographs, and the yellowish Action Sheets – reside stories, voices of concern, of hope and despair.
Introducing … Cardboard Camp!
We’ve made a graphic novel, yay!
Based on the research that we’ve done in the REF-ARAB project, we spent much of the past year writing, illustrating, translating and designing Cardboard Camp: Stories of Sudanese Refugees in Lebanon. This was my first time being involved in research-based visual storytelling and the learning curve has certainly been quite steep. Everything started with Yazan al-Saadi and I working mostly over Zoom and sometimes together in Beirut to write the actual script of the comic. To a large extent we used dialogue that emerged from my interviews or from other material such as video recordings made by my informants themselves.
Who is a Refugee in Times of Deportation? Lebanon Prepares for the Large-Scale Forced Return of Syrians
Maja Janmyr argues that, in the current policy landscape, a distinction between those in need of protection and those who potentially are not is difficult, if not impossible, to make.
Mobilising for rights in the MENA region
The REF-ARAB project has partnered with Forced Migration Review on a special issue exploring the role of mobilization in supporting the rights of forced migrants in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).
The 2022 Saudi census: what it tells us about refugees and Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is often accused of not hosting any refugees. Nevertheless, within the borders of the Saudi state there are a large number of people are likely to be de-facto refugees, despite not being recognized as such by Saudi authorities. The publicly available results of the 2022 census – for the first time including population statistics on nationality – shed new light on the number of potential refugees in Saudi Arabia, and by extension on Saudi refugee policies.
Refugees welcome? The Saudi approach to the Sudanese fleeing from war
Saudi Arabia is seemingly taking a leading role in the global response to the outbreak of war in Sudan. But is it all for show?
Give refugees access to the agreements that govern them
When people cross borders to seek international protection, they become subject to the laws and regulations of their host state. Yet many states across the world, including several of the world’s most important refugee host states, are not signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention that guarantees refugee rights, nor do they have any laws pertaining to asylum seekers and refugees. What comes in place of a recognized legal framework? Increasingly, it is confidential agreements negotiated between UNHCR and the host state.
Lebanon’s branding as ‘no country of asylum’ is historically misleading
Lebanon seeks to position itself as “no country of asylum.” The phrase has in recent years been repeated in many political and humanitarian settings relating to refugees, most notably in the joint UN-Lebanon response to the country’s Syrian refugee presence. But a closer historical examination reveals a Lebanese approach to asylum that is surprisingly progressive, inclusive and rights-focused.
Online workshop: International Refugee Law and Non-Signatory States to the 1951 Refugee Convention — Developing a Research Agenda
The BEYOND project organizes an online exploratory workshop to generate discussions, form networks and explore collaborations for future research on the interplay between international refugee law and non-signatory states. The call for participation is now open.
The earthquake and the refugees in Turkey
In the early morning hours of 6 February 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria. Its epicentre was near Gaziantep, Turkey. It will be a while before we know how many lives are lost but the current figure of around 40,000 is sure to rise immensely. Thousands have lost their family members, friends, livelihoods, homes…
Bangladesh and the 1951 Refugee Convention
There are currently over 27.1 million refugees globally, and 83 percent of them are hosted in low- and middle-income countries. A good number of refugee hosting states have not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol. At present, none of the South Asian countries – except Afghanistan, in 2005 – has signed the 1951 Convention. Among them is Bangladesh, one of the world’s major refugee hosting countries. Despite Bangladesh being an important host state, few studies have examined its relation to international refugee law. In this blogpost, I explore Bangladesh’s position as a non-signatory state to the 1951 Convention.
The right to asylum in International Law and Islamic Law: Some Reflections
After decades of a Euro-centric, Refugee Convention-driven approach to asylum, recent years have witnessed greater acknowledgement of the role played in asylum norm development by regional instruments and states that are either not party to the Convention or have undeveloped refugee determination systems. They are consequently reliant upon non-governmental or international organisations, such as the UNHCR, to assist with refugee protection. An important dimension of such norm development is the right to asylum in accordance with Islamic principles, and this discussion highlights scholarly contributions alongside regional and national legal instruments that address asylum and refuge. It concludes with some brief reflections on the current state of play.
Call for article proposals: Mobilising for rights in the MENA region
The REF-ARAB project welcomes contributions to a Forced Migration Review workshop/special feature on mobilisation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Technology and refugee legal aid in Iraqi Kurdistan
Maryam – a pseudonym used for a Syrian woman we spoke to in one of the refugee camps in the Erbil governorate – reflects on the online awareness sessions provided by humanitarian organisations in response to the COVID-19 lockdown in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). ‘For the organisations, maybe it was good. They continued their work. But for us, it was not good.’
The organisation whose awareness sessions she attended provided participants with headphones and told them to keep their personal information to themselves, but the living conditions in refugee camp housing during lockdown made participation difficult.
Moreover, there was a mismatch between the technologies used by refugees and those preferred by organisations. Maryam critiques: ‘We usually use WhatsApp, Viber. Not Zoom like the organisations wanted us to use.’ These communicational problems were also present in other aspects of life in the camps. Efforts to move to online education for refugee children were halted after two weeks, because there were too few devices available.
Refugees and racial hierarchies in Lebanon: How refugee protection policies in the country ignore the prevalent problem of racism
There’s no denying that Lebanon has a race problem. Accounts of racially charged physical and verbal abuse of, and discrimination towards, black- and brown-skinned refugees and migrants are common. Civil society organisations such as the Anti-Racism Movement (ARM) have documented widespread racist and exploitative practices. Even the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has repeatedly pointed to Lebanon’s lack of anti-discrimination legislation and recommended that the country should ensure that all manifestations of racial discrimination are prohibited and punished.
From the 1951 Convention to the 1967 Protocol: how the refugee regime was globalized
How should we understand the globalization of the international refugee regime? A conventional understanding is that the 1951 Refugee Convention, although it put in place a universal definition of ‘refugee’ for the first time, remained limited to European refugees. The text refers to refugees displaced as a result of ‘events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951’, because it was intended to deal with Europeans still displaced after the second world war. This was understood to be a finite task, and the mandate of UNHCR, the agency set up to assist states in implementing the convention, was due to last only eight years. Two new refugee crises in the 1950s changed this.
State succession to the 1951 Refugee Convention: the curious case of Mauritius
In 2003 the Supreme Court of Mauritius concluded that, upon its independence from Great Britain in 1968, Mauritius had succeeded to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Yet Mauritius is not among the formal list of States Parties to the Convention and UNHCR regularly encourages it to accede to the Convention. Why then does the Supreme Court consider Mauritius a State Party while the International Community continues to see it as a non-signatory State?
UNHCR and the Middle East: A shifting dynamic?
In February 2011, Michael Kagan produced his now famous Research Paper for UNHCR entitled ‘“We live in a country of UNHCR” The UN surrogate state and refugee policy in the Middle East’. In many ways, this ground-breaking piece provided much needed clarity on the relationship between the UNHCR and countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the approach to refugee protection for non-Palestinian refugees. While the focus over decades, in the region, had turned understandably to the role of UNRWA and its mandate in relation to Palestinian refugees (see for overview, Akram, 2021), the UNHCR had arguably escaped equivalent scrutiny – until this publication.
From state petitions to protection space: UNHCR’s promotion of the 1951 Refugee Convention
Although UNHCR has a mandatory duty to promote accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR appears to increasingly take the back seat when it comes to petitioning for state accession. Universal accession to the Convention has proven almost impossible to achieve and new states parties are rare