Refugees and the Arab Middle East: Protection in States Not Party to the Refugee Convention (REF-ARAB)
REF-ARAB (2019-2023) was an interdisciplinary project led by Professor Maja Janmyr, funded by the Research Council of Norway, and hosted by the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. The project studied refugee protection in the Arab Middle East – a region where few countries have signed the Refugee Convention. The project applied both historical and socio-legal perspectives to investigate the characteristics of refugee protection in this region and to understand the practices of various actors at the local, national and global level.
Objectives
The states of the Arab Middle East are at the frontier of the international refugee regime. Yet, few have signed the Refugee Convention and no states have developed comprehensive national asylum systems. This reluctance to implement fully the international refugee law regime is paradoxical for a region where several states have complex histories of alternatively creating and hosting large refugee populations.
The issue of AME states’ lack of commitment to the Refugee Convention has received limited scholarly attention. The REF-ARAB project sought to address this blind spot by studying the multifaceted characteristics of refugee protection in the AME through a study of the practice of, and interaction between, actors on a global, national and local level. Through an interdisciplinary approach, REF-ARAB has researched refugee protection through three interconnected pillars: i) Refugee History; ii) United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) & International Protection; iii) Rule of Law & Legal Aid.
The REF-ARAB project was guided by the following objectives:
To study the historical and political circumstances related to why so many states in the AME region have remained non-parties to the Refugee Convention;
To explore how UNHCR executes its mandate to provide international protection to refugees in these same states;
To examine the avenues available for refugees in these countries by means of non-governmental legal aid organizations in securing legal protection on the basis of human rights instruments and other domestic legislation.
Research findings
REF-ARAB’s theoretical and intellectual contribution is an empirically-grounded analysis of the relation between non-signatory AME states and the international refugee law regime. In total, the project has produced 18 academic texts, including journal articles, book chapters and master theses.
The main findings include revealing the scope and necessity of a broader historical and temporal framework for understanding current refugee situations. REF-ARAB has provided crucial insights into the historical linkages between the UN refugee regime and AME states, specifically in the cases of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Algeria.
The research findings have furthermore emphasized the changing inter-relationships between UNHCR, state and refugee, and contribute to our understanding of the intended and unintended consequences of the UNHCR-state-refugee interactions.
The research has explored the role of the UNHCR in AME states more generally, zooming in on Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as key case studies for detailed scrutiny. By exploring refugee rights mobilization, REF-ARAB specifically contributes key insights on how the UNHCR-refugee dynamic influences the development of protection policy.
REF-ARAB also provides a comprehensive understanding of the processes of litigation and the role of legal aid organizations by drawing on in-depth fieldwork in Jordan, Lebanon and in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI).
Research comic on refugee mobilization
The project has given rise to the graphic novel Cardboard Camp: Stories of Sudanese Refugees in Lebanon. The comic is based on Professor Janmyr's field research on refugee protection in Lebanon and largely evolves around a protest camp that was set up outside the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, in Beirut.
Cardboard Camp is available free of charge online here, in both English and Arabic. It is also available in print.
Special feature of Forced Migration Review
The REF-ARAB project 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 feature is available in English, Arabic, French and Spanish on FMR's website here.
The contributors show the importance of acts of mobilization in different locations and contexts. Taken together, the special issue highlights how solidarity and bottom-up approaches are vital for ensuring meaningful and safe rights mobilization in challenging environments.
The official website of the REF-ARAB project is found here.