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2 episodes with refugee convention
2 episodes with refugee convention
2 episodes with refugee convention
4 episodes with refugee convention
4 episodes with refugee convention
2 episodes with refugee convention
Episode #264: Shalini Sri Perumal delves into her expertise in community-based healthcare, particularly focusing on the integration of indigenous and traditional medicine among Burmese migrant women in Thailand. Shalini's professional journey includes significant work with the Mae Tao Clinic on the Thai-Burma border, an important healthcare facility founded by Dr. Cynthia Maung. The clinic has expanded over the years, offering a wide range of services including reproductive health, dental care, and maternal care, despite facing challenges such as limited funding and the discrimination that Burmese migrants often encounter.Shalini emphasizes the critical role of traditional medicine in preserving cultural identity and providing accessible healthcare to marginalized communities. While she acknowledges that not all traditional practices are safe, she advocates for a collaborative approach that blends community-based methods with Western medicine. This approach not only respects indigenous practices but also seeks to validate them through scientific research. She underscores the impact of colonialism in severing connections to traditional knowledge and stresses the importance of restoring these connections, particularly through the inclusion of indigenous voices in healthcare discussions.In addition to discussing healthcare, Shalini sheds light on the broader situation of Burmese migrants in Thailand. There, particularly Karen and other ethnic minorities face significant discrimination from the Thai government. She also touches on the plight of Burmese refugees in India, particularly in Mizoram and New Delhi. There, refugees struggle with the lack of legal recognition and access to basic services, exacerbated by India's non-signatory status to the Refugee Convention and recent discriminatory policies. Despite these challenges, Shalini remains hopeful about the potential for advocacy and collective action among ethnic communities to improve their situation both in Thailand and India.
Today we talk about immigration myths and debunk the most common ones that will crop up this election season. The Refugee Convention and Protocoal Relating to the Status of Refugees (quote from page 5): https://www.unhcr.org/media/convention-and-protocol-relating-status-refugees For information on non-citizens voting and how few cases have been found, see: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/four-things-to-know-about-noncitizen-voting/ NBC Chicago produced a documentary on the issues related to finding housing for newly arrived asylum-seekers in Chicago when the state of Texas refused to coordinate with the City of Chicago: "Desde Cero: The Migrant Journey in Chicago," at: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/so-many-people-in-tents-new-documentary-follows-migrant-families-struggles-triumphs-in-chicago/3446095/ Correcting the Record: False or Misleading Statements on Immigration - The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) Law Abiding Immigrants - Stanford Law School Paul Krugman: “Immigration is Great for Jobs, Actually,” July 23, 2024: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opinion/immigration-unemployment-inflation.html
Border violence. Hostage diplomacy. Vaccine purchases. Just some of the areas where opaqueness in EU decision-making can erode public trust and ultimately democracy. These also are areas where accountability journalism like freedom of information requests can help uncover undue influence by lobbies and foreign powers as well as abuses by security services. One of the highest profile cases of accountability journalism in Europe to date is the decision by The New York Times to sue the European Commission for access to phone messages — messages in which the Commission's president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, reportedly negotiated vaccine purchases during the Covid-19 pandemic. Matina Stevis, the outgoing Brussels bureau chief for the Times, who is part of that lawsuit, says such scrutiny would be comparatively banal in jurisdictions like the US where news media and government regularly wrangle in court over the line between an executive's ability to govern and the public's right to know. But in the EU such scrutiny still can arouse accusations of euroscepticism and even sympathies with Brexit. Matina says the EU's accountability muscles need "deepening and flexing and exercising" but she also suggests reporters working EU corridors may need to do more to avoid "falling into the traps of access journalism" and "going, going softly so that people keep answering their phones when you call." Also in this episode, the pros and cons of reporting on the case of Johan Floderus, the EU official recently released from captivity in Iran. And a hard and harrowing look at the evidence of deadly actions by the Greek coastguard toward migrants on the Mediterranean Sea — and at the half-hearted attempts by Brussels to rein in such abuses amid tectonic shifts in refugee law and policy. These include calls for the so-called externalization of migration where refugees and asylum seekers must have their applications to enter the EU assessed offshore in countries like Albania or even Rwanda. Such shifts also entail discussions on reforming and even abandoning the 1951 Refugee Convention that was a key plank of postwar humanitarianism.Support the Show.
How are refugees protected in English law?This lecture traces the history of refugee protection, the limits of the Refugee Convention, and changes to the law in recent decades that have made refugees' lives increasingly difficult. The Government's latest tranche of policies: the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Rwanda offshoring scheme, are particularly brutal.Is it time to reverse anti-refugee policies and create safe and legal routes for refugees to reach the UK, without a number cap?This lecture was recorded by Leslie Thomas KC on 18th April 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, LondonThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/refugees-lawGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/Website: https://gresham.ac.ukTwitter: https://twitter.com/greshamcollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeSupport the Show.
What are the UK Government's ‘safe and legal routes'? How do these relate to ‘stop the boats', the Rwanda Plan, and the curtailment of asylum as laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention? What can we learn from listening to the Hong Kongers and Ukrainians beneficiaries of these humanitarian visas? And what if these routes are not so safe after all? In this episode we explore the UK's safe and legal (humanitarian routes). Elena Zambelli explains what ‘asylum' is, looking its history, scope and challenges to these international protections since 2015 ‘refugee crisis.' Fizza Qureshi, CEO of the Migrants' Rights Network, board member of Migrants at Work and of the honorary advisory committee for the Black Europeans, joins us to offer a critical overview of the UK's immigration and asylum reforms over the past decade. Asking what this tells us about migrants' rights, she highlights how these reforms impact disproportionately on brown and black migrants who try to make the UK their homes. And co-hosts Nando Sigona and Michaela Benson consider the ongoing contestations surrounding the figure of the ‘refugee' as well as the asylum system as a whole. They reflect on how beneficiaries of the Hong Kong BN(O) and Ukraine visa schemes experience these humanitarian visas, and what we can learn from them about the limits of these. You can access the full transcripts for the episode, further resources and active listening questions over on our website: Who do we think we are?
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty. This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
Our November roundup is here, where Colin and I cover the latest asylum and trafficking statistics, changes to the way late applications to the EUSS are treated, questions the SRA still hasn't answered, a couple of articles on Palestinians as well as quite a lot of case law. Policy (00:45) Assessing Braverman's legacy as Home Secretary: Part Deux Asylum (02:10) Latest statistics show huge increase in rejections of late EU settlement scheme applications, no evidence that Rwanda has impacted Channel crossings Briefing: four looming problems in the UK asylum system and how to address them Permission granted in challenge to rejection of Albanian asylum claim Returning a refugee to persecution must be a last resort India and Georgia to be added to the list of ‘safe' countries Gaza: what is the UK doing to rescue British citizens and their family members? Damages claim for asylum delay dismissed by Court of Appeal Upper Tribunal failed to properly assess whether error of law was material in asylum appeal Immigration (16:10) Court of Appeal tells Home Office to reconsider “plainly wrong” decision on Turkish business person application Deception case returned to the Upper Tribunal after material error of law made Making sense of sole responsibility for child visas in immigration law Deportation (19:10) Court of Appeal says deportation of mother of British child not “unduly harsh” Nationality (20:45) Court of Appeal dismisses appeal on interpretation of nationality law Trafficking (21:55) Latest trafficking figures show benefit of change in Home Office policy The UK must improve labour market enforcement in order to tackle exploitation of workers Increasing numbers of sponsored migrant workers are being exploited in the UK EU Settlement Scheme (26:05) Important changes to the way late EUSS applications are treated Court of Appeal dismisses government appeal on access to benefits for people with pre settled status Procedure (28:38) How to become an OISC level 2 adviser Government should not routinely remove names of civil servants in judicial review disclosure Guidance in Begum on deprivation decisions is not restricted to national security cases Solicitors Regulation Authority has questions to answer about their “warning” to immigration solicitors Late evidence from the Home Office can be admitted in an appeal where the appellant was aware of it Updated article (34:30) Briefing: Article 1D of the Refugee Convention and Palestinian refugees
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty. This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane. In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill. Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject. For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25 Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty. This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.
In this episode, we dive headfirst into the question that's sparking heated debates: "Does Multiculturalism work?" The conversation was ignited by Home Secretary Suella Braverman's remarks, questioning the effectiveness of the international asylum system and challenging the concept of multiculturalism.The Controversial Speech:Mrs. Braverman's speech raised eyebrows when she suggested that fearing discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation should not be sufficient grounds for refugee protection. She also criticized what she called the "misguided dogma of multiculturalism." These remarks triggered a sharp response from the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR), which defended the 1951 Refugee Convention as a "life-saving instrument."Multiculturalism: Pros and Cons:Multiculturalism is a complex concept with both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it promotes cultural understanding and tolerance by exposing individuals to new ideas and perspectives. It fosters empathy and broadens people's horizons by celebrating diverse customs, traditions, and beliefs. Moreover, multicultural societies can stimulate economic growth through increased trade, tourism, and innovation.However, multiculturalism is not without its challenges. Cultural differences can sometimes lead to tensions, misunderstandings, or conflicts, such as language barriers or clashes with societal norms. Critics argue that it may undermine social cohesion and lead to self-segregation among different cultural groups.Advantages vs. Disadvantages:During the episode, we explore the pros and cons of multiculturalism. On the positive side, multiculturalism is praised for fostering tolerance, peace, and a richer, more interesting society. It can also reduce prejudices and improve the overall quality of life for many people. Economically, multiculturalism can lead to progress and open new opportunities for businesses.However, it's essential to acknowledge the disadvantages too. These include potential tensions between cultural groups, challenges in integration, concerns about the preservation of cultural identity, and increased competition for resources.Examples from Around the World:The episode examines multiculturalism in different countries. Brazil and Canada are highlighted as countries with relatively successful multicultural policies, promoting unity in diversity. Brazil, in particular, is considered a true melting pot, where various immigrant populations have mixed over the years.Australia is also featured as one of the most multicultural societies globally, contributing significantly to its economy through immigration.To kick things off, Niall engages in a comprehensive discussion with Ben Scallan from Gript Media. Ben shares his insights and thoughts on the topic, adding depth and nuance to the conversation.Niall opens up the phone lines, allowing callers to share their views. Some callers emphasize the importance of recognizing the value of all cultures while ensuring equal rights and opportunities. Others point out the challenges of unequal resource access among cultural groups and stress the need for balance between multiculturalism and integration.As the episode unfolds, Niall wraps up the discussion, leaving listeners with much to ponder about the intricate dynamics of multiculturalism. Join Niall and his callers as they navigate the complexities of a topic that continues to shape societies worldwide.
UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman has questioned whether the United Nations' 1951 Refugee Convention is fit for our modern age. She told a meeting of the right wing American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC that "we now live in a completely different time" from when the convention was signed.Ms Braverman said, "we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin is sufficient to qualify for protection."Adrian Goldberg discusses her speech with Leila Zadeh, executive director of the charity Rainbow Migration, and Natasha Tsangarides of Freedom From Torture.Produced in Birmingham by Adrian Goldberg and Harvey White. Funded by subscriptions to the Byline Times. Made by We Bring Audio for Byline Times. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The UN has slapped down the UK for seeking changes to the UN's Refugee Convention. Home Secretary Suella Braverman says fearing discrimination for being gay or a woman should not be enough to qualify for international refugee protection. UK correspondent Gavin Grey says Braverman is being accused of 'dog-whistle politics', as several nations have criminalised homosexuality. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Check Out People of Colour in Tech's website: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/ Michael Berhane IG: https://www.instagram.com/michaelberhane_/?hl=en Email Us: TheDayAfter@THENEWBLXCK.com WhatsAPP: 07564841073 Join us in our twitter community - https://shorturl.at/jkrNQ The Day After, (00:00) Intro: If you could create a supergroup with any musicians, who would be in it? (16:56) Headlines: Court rules Donald Trump committed fraud to exaggerate his wealth by up to $3.6bn, Home Secretary Suella Braverman claims illegal migration is 'existential challenge' and hits out at 'dogma of multiculturalism', UK govt official says Being gay isn't reason enough to claim asylum (20:42) What You Saying? Is the UN 1951 Refugee Convention agreement outdated? Does Suella Braverman have a point or is she downright racist??
Sir Ed Davey launches an all-out attack on the Conservative government's record on the NHS as he closes the Liberal Democrat party conference. Chris Mason gives his analysis and Adam quizzes Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine on the finer details of her party's policies. And does the 1951 Refugee Convention need updating? Suella Braverman thinks so. Adam is joined by the Labour Peer, Lord Dubs, to discuss the Home Secretary's speech on migration. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere Today's Newscast was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by George Dabby with Sam McLaren and Joe Wilkinson. The technical producer was Ben Andrews. The senior news editors are Sam Bonham and Jonathan Aspinwall. TOPICS 00:00 - Chris Mason 06:45 - Lib Dem Conference 20:42 - Migration
“It was thanks to this country that lots of those rights and protections that exist for refugees are in place … but now… you get that sense in lots of parts of the world, frankly, that the UK isn't playing the active role that it has played historically.” The International Rescue Committee is a global organisation that helps people affected by humanitarian crises. The IRC supports people who have been caught in conflict and been forced to flee their homes, enabling them to survive, recover and rebuild their lives. Founded at the call of Albert Einstein in 1933, the IRC today works in over 40 crisis-affected countries, as well as with communities across Europe and the Americas. Laura Kyrke-Smith is the Executive Director of the International Rescue Committee in the UK. We talk about the current global context for refugees - 108 million people forcibly displaced around the world. Contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of these displaced people are not in the wealthy countries in the Global North, but are either within their own country or within a neighbouring country, often also a low and middle income country. We discuss the UK's Illegal Migration Bill, which seeks to remove the right to asylum - a stance that is in stark contrast to Britain's position back in 1951, as one of the original drafters of the Refugee Convention. And how today, Britain's standing on the international humanitarian stage is sadly not, what it once was. Recorded June 2023.
This month we talk more about the Illegal Migration Bill and its potential consequences, the right way to go about tackling the asylum backlog, Colin's suggestion of a new British Citizenship Act, the resumption of hostile environment bank account closures, we run through a load of cases and end by talking about some business immigration issues. If you would like to claim CPD points for reading the material and listening to this podcast, sign up here as a Free Movement member. There are well over 100 CPD hours of training materials available to members. You can find all the available courses here. If you listen to podcasts on your mobile phone, you can subscribe for free on Anchor, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or by pointing your podcast player to the podcast feed for Free Movement. Using a mobile device and subscribing has the advantage that each new podcast can be automatically downloaded for listening to on the go. The podcast follows the running order below. How does the Illegal Migration Bill breach the Refugee Convention? Illegal Migration Bill: helping force refugees into illegality and danger Could ‘safe and legal routes' stop the boats? If the Illegal Migration Bill is unworkable, what can the government do instead? Amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill attack basic legal rights and processes Two ways to address the asylum backlog and improve access to justice It is time for a new British Citizenship Act for the post-Brexit era Home Office resume bank account closures High Court rejects challenge by Afghan families to hotel move High Court dismisses challenge to family reunion rules for refugee children Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 ouster clause found effective Court of Appeal re-affirms restrictive parameters of domestic violence provisions in immigration rules Exceptional circumstances in a spouse or partner visa application under Appendix FM How to apply for a Senior or Specialist Worker visa Reporting hybrid working patterns: new sponsor obligations Visit visa operations are “refreshingly well run”
Richard Hermer KC speaks with Raza Husain KC and Sile Reynolds (Freedom from Torture) about the pressing Migration Bill—designed to deter refugees arriving into the UK on small boat—being pushed through UK Parliament. They discuss whether the bill can be overruled by the ECHR or the Refugee Convention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Richard Hermer KC speaks with Raza Husain KC (Matrix Chambers) and Sile Reynolds (Freedom from Torture) about the pressing Migration Bill being pushed through UK Parliament. The bill is designed to deter refugees arriving into the UK on small boats. Richard, Raza and Sile discuss the role of the courts and whether the bill can be overruled by the ECHR or the Refugee Convention.
This month Sonia and I talk a bit about denaturalisation generally and the case of Shamima Begum specifically, we cover the new streamlined asylum process and a few other asylum-related blog posts and then we run through a few cases. We manage to keep things a bit shorter than normal, but watch out for our coverage of the Illegal Migration Bill, which will be available separately. The 30-minute podcast follows the running order below. Denaturalisation Security tribunal finds Shamima Begum was trafficked but she loses anyway Book review: Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A legal and literary history of naturalization Bad cases make bad law: the unintended consequences of denaturalising bad guys Deception and denaturalisation: seek and you shall find Asylum Latest asylum stats show the Home Office failing on all fronts New streamlined asylum process Does 10 year ‘temporary refugee protection' status breach of the Refugee Convention? New policy: temporary permission to stay for victims of human trafficking Trafficking victims should get leave during their asylum claim Cases Immigration officers don't have to corroborate your story No damages for unlawful no recourse to public funds policy Differential treatment of Ukrainian and Afghan applications justified on national security grounds Not all procedural errors need to be remitted says Upper Tribunal More bad news from the Upper Tribunal for extended family members of EU citizens
The home secretary has acknowledged 80,000 people could cross the channel on small boats this year. Suella Braverman was defending new proposals for anyone found to have entered the UK illegally to be removed from the country within 28 days, but also be blocked from returning or claiming British citizenship in future. The United Nations Refugee Agency has accused the government of violating the Refugee Convention introduced after the Second World War through its proposals to tackle small boats. The BBC's Nick Robinson spoke to the home secretary and then to Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. (Image, Migrants disembark border vessel, Credit, Gareth Fuller PA)
This week we are joined by Dr. Emelie McDonnell, a human rights and refugee advocate, with experience and expertise in human rights, refugee, and international law more broadly. We look at Britain's diminishing rights record through the lens of Human Rights Watch whose work across the world is well-established and respected. Britain has set itself on an extraordinary path with a raft of domestic legislation that criminalises people seeking asylum who arrive without prior authorization, in breach of its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Not only that, it plans to outsource the processing of Refugees to Rwanda, a country with a very poor rights record. Domestically plans to repeal and replace the Human Rights Act are afoot. It's a truly precarious time for would-be Refugees. Emilie McDonnell talks us through the implications, she's clear, these changes are egregious and a flagrant disregard of international law. An instructive compelling listen
Date: 11.01.2023 Join Aneeq ur Rehman and Hanif Khan for Wednesday's show from 4-6pm where we will be discussing: "Rwanda" and "The Soul" Rwanda Last month, the High Court ruled that the government's Rwanda plan is legal and doesn't breach the UN's Refugee Convention or human rights laws. With human displacement levels at historical highs and a declining socio- economic environment across the globe, is it right for safe, first-world countries to disallow migrants the access to their resources? Do the UK'simmigration policies truly respect human rights? The Soul ‘Verily, he [truly] prospers who purifies himself.' (Surah al-A‘la, Ch.87: V.15) According to Allah the Almighty, the secret to success is a purified soul. But what exactly is a soul? What is its purpose? And how does one go about purifying it? Join us as we explore these questions around reforming oneself for the sake of attaining a purified soul. Guests include: Peter Walsh (Researcher at The Migration Observatory at Oxford University) Robert Evans (Member of Surrey County Council and of Labour Party) Imam Tahir Khalid PRODUCERS: Faryal Nasir and Bareera Ahmed
This month, Colin and Sonia mainly talk about an avalanche of asylum related news, law and updates. It's not all asylum, though, there's also some blog posts to go over on Comprehensive Sickness Insurance, third party support in spouse applications, marriages in durable partner cases, the opening of the citizenship route for Chagossian descendants and a Solicitor Regulation Authority report on immigration lawyers. They end by discussing a couple of opinion pieces Colin published, on whether the Home Office should be abolished and whether strategic litigation does more harm than good. The blog posts covered include: What are ‘short term holding facilities' like the Manston refugee camp? Briefing: What is Article 1D of the Refugee Convention? How does the asylum ‘white list' work and what does the government plan to change? Asylum backlog hits 150,000 and net migration hits 500,000 Understanding the Home Office's problem with asylum decisions Appendix Settlement Protection: indefinite leave to remain for people granted refugee status or humanitarian protection Reducing distress when working with children in the asylum process Record high referrals for potential victims of modern slavery The refugee reception crisis in the UK mirrors the situation on the continent Failed asylum seeker's false identity conviction quashed Home Office breaches the duty of candour in mobile phone seizures case Home Office guidance update: the NHS and comprehensive sickness insurance for EEA nationals Developments in third party financial support for spouse or partner visa applications Post-Brexit marriages in durable partner appeals New route to British citizenship for people of Chagossian descent Solicitors Regulation Authority publishes new guidance for immigration work: supervision, quality, and complaints Should the Home Office be abolished? Strategic litigation: more harm than good?
This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022. The seventh epsiode of the series will feature Laura Shobiye from Cardiff University and her talk 'Reflexive Positionality Researching Refugee Mothers as Radicalised Mother But Not Refugee.' Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Transcription 00:09 Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between. Hello, and welcome to this the seventh episode of our series on decolonizing research. This episode features Laura shrubby from the University of Cardiff and her talk reflexive positionality, researching refugee mothers as a racialized mother, but not as a refugee. 00:51 I'm absolutely not, and would not call myself a decolonial, researcher, a decolonial, specialist, or anything along those lines, I think that it is a very complex area. And there are people that specialize in it and do it very well, that I have found very inspiring and that I have learned from. So my work is influenced, be by decolonial approaches, I'd like to think I'm taking some decolonial approaches, but I wouldn't put that label on how I've gone about everything at all. So if you hear things you don't quite fit or or you're not sure. That's partly partly why I've chosen to talk about positionality. Because this is something that I really reflected on in my work, and the title slide kind of gives away, why in a way that I found positionality a really interesting concept when I learned about it. But I really didn't know in some ways how to apply it to myself, and what it might mean for my work. And so had some learning to do, and continue to learn in that respect. And I've come to believe that like reflexive positionality, and in some research is well in all research. But in some in particular, it's really important. And for me, the reason why it was important was well, I'll talk you through that. But initially, just because I'm I'm part of a racialized minority, I'm a mother, I was researching with mothers. And but I was researching with mothers who are to keep the phrase short for now, from refugee backgrounds, which I'm not. So I think, all of us here with an interest in in decolonial research, potentially have that dilemma of how do I sit with, with the social group that I'm researching with my participants in the spaces that I'm going into for one reason or another, either because we are researching with our community, or we're aware that we're coming in as an outsider. But for me, it's a bit of both. So some of who I am, was really, really important. Yes, I was a researcher, a student, a doctoral researcher, but that is absolutely not the be all and end all of who I am. And it's definitely not who I've always been. And who when i Obviously I started the PhD, who I'd been for probably the shortest period of time in my life, compared to all my other identities and all the other characteristics that I have. And I didn't feel that I'd be going into those research spaces as just a researcher. My project is, as I'll talk about more is, is heavily qualitative, focused on subjective experiences. And so I had to think about my own subjective experiences and who I would be to my participants in those spaces, and and it would gatekeepers and who I was for myself as well. So I'm British, this isn't from London, but living in Cardiff. It sort of became more relevant as we went along. I'm a woman My wife and mother sister daughter, not a blacks mixed race. Dodgy typer. I am black mixed race. So Black Heritage, white as well. So mixed race. And I've taught ESL, to English to Speakers of Other Languages, I've taught English as a foreign language. So I've worked with migrant groups. I have 05:30 on the one side, a migrant background, although I was born a British citizen. And I've taught I've got PGCE qualification. I've also done project management, I have a whole load of other things and skill sets and and who I am. And I need to question do I bring that into my my research? Do I bring that into spaces where I'm doing research how much so and how much will come with me, whether I intend it to or not. And that's where reflexive positionality becomes really important. Because we may think one thing at the start, but as we go along, we need to be continually for me continually reflecting continually thinking. But all of that, for me matters in relation to who we're doing the research and for me who we're doing it with. So I was doing research with mothers, who were also asylum seekers, refugees, sanctuary seekers, force migrants displaced, sorry. And for those of you who don't know much about the asylum system, and immigration immigration systems, in the UK, I won't go into lots of detail on the terminology. But an asylum seeker is someone who enters the UK. For them, they're a refugee. And then they claim that they claim the right to refugee status through an asylum claim. So they're called an asylum seeker. It's a concept that does not exist in much of the world, in fact, much of the world, from where, from the areas where asylum seekers that reached the UK may have come from. And there are international conventions. And if I were not talking about positionality, today, I'd go into those in more detail. But in summary, international conventions, the same types of conventions that set up many various rights and international laws in the two or three, post Second World War decades, there is an international convention on refugees, often referred to as the Geneva Convention and a protocol that goes with it. And it's got the criteria for what should count as a refugee. It also enshrined in law, that right to claim asylum, absolutely. Everybody on the planet. According to that international law has the right to claim asylum. And you'd be granted asylum, on the other hand, on the grounds specific grounds in that convention to do with persecution, war, and so on. And in the UK, you may be granted asylum, and granted refugee status, which comes with leave to remain, which is usually five years now. But there are other outcomes. So that's not the only outcome, you may be granted permission to stay leave to remain, but you don't fit. The individual doesn't fit the criteria of the Refugee Convention and the UK legal systems interpretation of that. So then you might be granted humanitarian protection, discretionary leave to remain, and so on, or protection as a stateless person is particularly relevant. And why I've gone into this level of detail here for for women, because when the conventions were written, the fact that sexual violence is used as a tool of war wasn't, wasn't acknowledged or recognized. The consideration of an individual being in danger for reasons of their sex, or as it would have been seen, then I And for things such as domestic violence, again wasn't, wasn't really considered. So that is difficult to argue. Women are part of a social group. But if that whole social group isn't under threat or a large proportion of it, it's just that 10:18 that one woman as it were, it gets trickier. So, women in those types of situations may be granted another type of status. And which may be less than than five years leave to remain, there are generic terms or, or catch all terms because of these layers of complexity that get used. In Wales, which is where I conducted my research, sanctuary seekers, people seeking sanctuary is a term that is used to cover asylum seekers, refugees, anybody else who may need that, that protection and safety that sanctuary. Forced migrants is a term that is often used displaced persons, force migrants, some people love some really don't like and they get those other cat catch all for one of a better phrase terms are used for things such as climate change refugees, so we hear that expression now. But again, that that wasn't that's not a reason set climate change isn't a reason in in the international law. So in summary, to go back over all of those databases of waffled now, mothers, any any mother who says that she was seeking sanctuary is residing in Wales or was residing in Wales at the time that I was conducting my fieldwork in all of those aspects, that of self identifying I accepted participants truths, their identity and their immigration status. I it was, it's about their experiences, their perceptions, I wasn't about to check gender identities, I wasn't about to check claims of motherhood, nor was I going to ask for their legal documentation and go down the road of bordering with my research. So, but there was more more to that, that was those those three points were really effectively my my recruitment criteria, as it were. But there are other aspects to consider. They were visible and all Gristick minorities are for people who are racialized in the UK, they could be married, separated, single, divorced, widowed, they might be living with their children, they might be living separate from their children or some of their children. I did leave scope for for pregnant women. Or those who might be becoming mothers, by other means, student mums, working moms, they might be stay at home mums, which might be a choice or might have been their previous life or their current life. And that might be through choice or through enforced circumstances. All of these were things too, that I considered, that I knew were possibilities, but also that I found as I went along and learn about the women that agreed to participate in my research. So that is all really important for me, and I will continue to explain why in terms of reflexive positionality and the overall kind of overriding reasons why we're here today. And so it's kind of a question of what I was asking, What am I doing? Why am I doing it? So I have my own personal reasons for coming into this. No, it's no coincidence that I was a mother and I researched mothers. My research focusing on their educational and learning experiences, not a coincidence, I taught that I was a student, mother myself. And I'd worked with asylum seekers and refugees in the past teaching and as a volunteer on projects that had led me to a personal interest that had developed over time, but I really didn't want that personal interest to be that kind of that white gaze. So when I was then looking at that academic influences on my work and research kind of approaches, I'm really became informed by in summary Black and intersectional feminism and critical race theory. 15:07 black feminism intersectionality. Thank you, Kimberly Crenshaw, racial capitalism and theories of social reproduction within social capitalism as well. These are all relevant because they help explain the lens, the theoretical lens and the perspective. But overall, I was approaching my work through and looking at it through particularly, the more I did my initial reading, the position that British immigration policy is was, was and is both gendered, racist and racialized. I think, with the issues with Rwanda, and the questions that have come up with the treatment of Ukrainian refugees over others, I think that idea has become quite well accepted quite quickly, in some circles, but when I started my PhD, there were, in fact, I don't even know few months ago, there were people that would still still struggle to understand the structural systemic racism of the British immigration system. So I was looking at and I look at the experiences that women talk to me about through that lens. With that, I discovered decolonial approaches, and which I found relevant, because while there are the forms of model imperialism, which force people to flee from their homes, economic imperialism, political imperialism interference in other countries, the bombs that the US UK like to drop on places, 17:13 and then walk away from or 17:17 question why people are then fleeing from the linguistic colonialism that remains today, as a result of the full legal and political empire, with a legacy that much of the world speaks and learns English, which does have an impact on why asylum seekers may come to British shores. But it also had its impact on me. And why I'm only English and fluent and fluent in English, despite having one parent who wasn't only fluent in English. And the context of conducting a research in the UK where the vast majority of people don't speak more than one language fluently. Although in Wales, obviously, it's a by the UK is bilingual, but Wales bilingual nation. But I needed to consider that I wasn't expecting my participants to be able to speak Welsh, but that I would need to consider translation or interpretation or be conducting my research through the medium of English. It also again, coming back to that positionality and some of those things that I mentioned at the beginning about myself and about my participants was just acknowledging my own privilege as someone who has been a British citizen from birth, and my own potential risks of Savior ism, and that Savior Ristic voyeuristic approach that can be taken in research. And just because I'm from a racialized minority myself, doesn't mean that I'm incapable of being Savior stick. Some of this then also led me towards other methods for qualitative research, beyond observations and interview is dialogical interviews and looking at creative visual, participatory participatory action and collaborative methods. So those influences have led me to lead me to form kind of the overall shape of my approach. Direct, which is ethnographic. And it took me a long time, till quite recently to feel comfortable using that that word about my research because of some of the negative connotations associated with it. And to be sure that I perhaps had hadn't taken that voyeuristic extractive save your Ristic approach entirely. Qualitative, collaborative, longitudinal. And then multimodal, which is the the language and visuals, research. So my word supports more forms of expression and communication than just words, which I'll talk about more next week. I focused on both presenting and analyzing and use the word displaced but perspectives on educational experiences in Wales. I've tried my best to share stories, share voices and share. When I say their humanity as my participants. I haven't given them voices. They had voices already. And I'm not telling their stories. Hopefully, I'm I'm sharing them. And actually, today when I was checking the slides, I changed some wording that I'd used in the past, again continuing to reflect and it's a very humanizing people that have been dehumanized is how I would describe it in the past. But you know what? That in itself may start a started to make me feel a bit uncomfortable, but cloning realistic, perhaps I don't know the language but just sharing their humanity they would never dehumanize. That's something other people 22:06 have done to this group of women. I conducted my interviews, as mother to Mother conversations with creative methods, which I talk about more as I go along. I say Mother to Mother conversations. And, again, I'll touch upon this later. But because of the in my case, the particular perception of which my participants and gatekeepers have of the term interview. And I think when you're reflecting on your position, it's really important to consider the context of who you are, where you're doing your research, who you're doing with your research with where you're doing your research with. Me and I get in there with the thesis and papers, and multimodal, thematic and narrative presentation. And multi modal thematic and narrative analysis. So I've considered how I present my research, not just how I generate, I use the term generate not collect data, and how I analyze it. To me, it's an entire process end to end, and Western academic traditions. There's still a lot of work to be done there. I think in terms of decolonial ality, and the style in which academic work and academic research is presented. So what does all of that mean for my positionality? Well, really, it was mixed, like me, I have that is an intentional plan, in case you're wondering, and it was messy. So for those of you that have started to do some research, or reading around positionality, who know a little bit, there's debates around aren't you have an insider? Or are you an outsider? Are you a black woman researching black women for so an insider? Or are you a white man, researching black woman and therefore an outsider, and then it's not that straightforward for most. So what determines an insider what determines an outsider? Was I both with whom? When and where? And so if I was both was I both in the same ways at the same times in the same places? Was that consistent? Now it's was no, it was really mixed and messy. So to explain that I did my fieldwork in In refugee community and support groups, so yes, I've used the term refugee but again for that for all sanctuary seekers, their support groups, community support groups, women's groups, in particular, and they did that around Wales. For someone who claims asylum in the UK, if they and they need support to VAs vas 90 or percent do financial support, then they are displaced, which means they are sent with no choice to anywhere around the country to dispersal areas. At the time I was doing my work Wales had for the dispersal system is it changing, particularly in Wales in terms of how many there are, but that's how it was set up. And then for those who come through schemes like the Syrian voluntary resettlement program, or the Afghanistan one, and they are, are sent to other areas, so not dispersal areas. The idea of this came with the 1999 Immigration Act and you labor to spread the burden, lovely term. So that it's not wasn't just London and the Southeast and poor areas that we're we're getting the majority of asylum seekers. And that's how the majority of sanctuary seekers come to the UK now, it is as individual asylum seekers, not through schemes. So I traveled around Wales to the four dispersal areas and another area and spent time in these groups. But each part of Wales each of these four cities, has its slightly different makeup has different proportions of the asylum seekers and refugees population in Wales. So, but half are in Cardiff, which is the most diverse city in Wales versus Wrexham, which only has about 5% of asylum seekers dispersed there. And it's a very white population. So yes, that made a difference. To be honest, there also, I am in Cardiff. So some of those groups I spent time in, I took my children to I volunteered in and I just spent time hanging out as just another person there. Others I couldn't get to on such a regular basis. So I went for the purpose of, of generating data, of interviewing participants. But I also tried to spend time just on those visits, just hanging out as it were, as well. And, obviously, I was able to go to women's groups, because I'm a woman. So in that respect, I was an insider, they were run by women, they were attended by women in some of the spaces. They were centers and location where it wasn't just women present. But I tended to be in the room or in the group or there at the time that was dedicated to women or women and children. And I'm visit visibly black, or brown, depending on people's interpretation. And, and a mother and I took my children. So I was visibly a mother, where I didn't take my children to talk about that in a bit. I did make myself visibly a mother, but also audibly British. And I was talking about this earlier today, in some of those spaces. In Wales, where the population is 95% White in those spaces, it was assumed more than once that I was there as an asylum seeker or refugee. Which was interesting. And I don't think unimportant, I think it helped gatekeepers feel more comfortable with me. Arguably, it helped some of the women feel more comfortably comfortable with me, and we could talk about issues of race as well as motherhood and womanhood. But I was also British talking to people with very, very precarious legal immigration status while I have a very, very certain one. 29:53 So I've talked about some of this already, and that in some of my spaces, some of the spaces my status wasn't clear you immediately, and in some it was, and in some, it wasn't. In some it was perhaps unclear. But I didn't try and hide who I was, I was very honest and open open. And at times, I would be in some spaces as just a woman and a mother, a member of the local community joining in. And other times I was there, as the researcher, or flitting between the two and at sign times, I was both, I was in the space as both. And so it wasn't Not, not at all. clear cut. I'm just gonna check. Yeah. So on the right hand side of these slides, you can see that I've got a little clipboard. And I'm going to whiz through now some of the last slides. So I've been talking too much and give a chance for some questions. So what some of this mean, in terms of the practical realities of of how I went about things. So I had, as I said, that deliberate contextual ethical distinction from other forms of interviews, that asylum seekers and refugees may have gone through journalists, perhaps home office interrogations, police interviews in the UK or elsewhere. And that was really important. And I wouldn't have been allowed into one space by one gatekeeper if I hadn't made that distinction. And that I was coming in, as a woman and as a mother, to speak to women and mothers. In that regard, in that way, mother to mother not to go through a list of questions and interrogate. Now, for me, this was really important because I wasn't there to extract data, or extract information, I was having a dialogue kind of conversation with them. So but having a chat over a cuppa, for one of a better analogy, and sometimes quite literally, if it was in a space where I hadn't taken my children, I might introduce myself as a researcher, yes, but also as a mother and show photos of my, of my kids on my phone, they might show me photos of theirs or call their children over and chat with them. That rapport was built so that I could have that dialogue with them, not to fake friendship. And there is a literature that that discusses that. But to to build that rapport and have that dialogue that is, was conversing with with empathize, sympathize, we laugh together a lot, I laughed a lot in interviews with women. And I've maintained friendly contact between interviews, as I was planning a longitudinal, I say planning, because the pandemic got in the way, but I was planning a longitudinal piece of research, which meant I would be returning to the women to ask them if they want were willing to speak with me again. So I'm in contact contact in between. Again, if I'm you know, honest, there's there's something for me as the researcher alone to gain from that making sure I've not lost participants, but also is not being that extractive here I turn up when I want something from you and only then do you hear from me type approach and continuing that consideration so as I said, I generated generated data with my participants, not from them. So dialogue with them, they drew you can see some of the joints here. I provided the materials and they did the drawings with them for like photo elicitation. So that's with them. They chose the photos, they gave the description. I then edited photos later, and they approved my editing. 34:30 The photos were particularly important with the impact of the pandemic as I moved to remote methods and chose not to continue with such an a focus on interviewing because it didn't feel ethically okay. I chosen to go into women's spaces and take myself into their spaces, not bring them into mine. Because ethically that felt the right thing to due for their comfort for their report or for their well being in case they disclose things and got upset or distressed, I didn't feel I could do any of that. In the same way while working remotely, I didn't feel I could hang up the phone and leave potentially a distressed woman and not know what might have happened, that she might be on her own, she might have a children with her, they hear some of it should my children hear some of it, as well as digital exclusion reasons. So the photographs became more important. So I was hoping to collaborate and I tried to collaborate, but without putting a heavy burden of labor on my participants, so and different people will take different approaches to this. But for me, I can't pay asylum seekers, I didn't have the budget to pay people anyway. And I didn't want to be asking a lot of time and labor from women. I felt that would feel unfair. But neither did I want to be extractive so is that that balancing ground that I constantly and again, constantly considering my positionality, and how best to do that, to be collaborative to continue that contact and check ins get their approval through the photo editing worked, or I created visual digital stories as a little mini visual story at the top there. Where they were created of individual narratives and stories, they were pre approved, again by the individual participant, so done with them. That with me taking the burden of labor. So I had the privilege of time and funding to be able to do this work doesn't always feel like it as a PhD student that you've got time or or money. Not everybody has funding, of course. But I did. Whatever we think of the levelers of stipends. I could empathize with the women and as a mother, but I had an experience of seeking sanctuary in Wales or being coming from refugee background. I was trusted, I am trusted, as a mother of respected as a researcher. But is it always that way round. And I made mistakes, because I don't share experiences. And that privilege, comes with the thoughts of power imbalances. And I did have one to one interviewing where the power balance felt very wrong. I was there to get information to use that explore extractive type phrase. But really, this was a woman who was only speaking to me because she was desperate, desperate, being the right word for information. So I help provide that information and have not included, cut the interview short, and if not included that in my work. And again, continuing to consider my positionality why the woman at a speed agreed to speak with me what she hoped to get from me from what she knew of me and who I was and why I was there. And I skim this a little bit, just to say I had some, some really wonderful feedback. There are next several difficulties, but someone telling me I'm so glad you're doing this, some of them even reflecting me in their creative methods. So on this image here on the right, I'm represented by the lines of jewels at the bottom. And she's represented her family through the rest of the jewelry. So quite touched by that and we're still in touch. Women saying I'm inspiring to them, can't say I necessarily would agree. But equally, I felt that the other way around. I felt that some of the women were really inspiring to me. Some of the women agreed to talk with me wanting to learn more about what's all involved, but that felt more 39:27 equal than the or more better balanced for one of a better term actually, than the situation I described before. And I was definitely able to gain access to spaces as I said before, because of who I am, not just because I'm a researcher and and I was able to build a rapport and friendships in ways that a man maybe even a white woman might not have been able to And yes, I did make friendships. And that's something I can can discuss later. That's something that people do consider the boundaries of. But these aren't things are not positive, unless I was an ethically responsible, which means continuing to reflect on my positionality. So should I be doing this this research? No, I'm not if I don't have that asylum seeking refugee background, am I the right person to be doing this? And how can I use the privileges that I do have? And the experiences that that, that I have both of of that relative privilege, but also of the discrimination and difficulties that I have faced as a, as a black Miss mixed race, woman Mother, how can I use those to support to amplify and to liberate, not to consider that I'm saving or that I'm speaking for, or that I'm discovering? Considering that presentation, and representation matter? And they really do, but when I'm not representative in an always on again, is that possible? Of the group that I'm researching with? How do I achieve that? And I've done that through some of my more visual and collaborative weights, the ethics of anonymization. And I talked about more about this next week, but particularly with photographs of people, and whether anonymizing is disempowering. And allowing people to real names to be used is liberating. And whether there are times as a researcher whether you need to decide for your participants or is that infantilizing. No straightforward answers. And in case anyone's wondering, I kept anonymized everything anonymized for various reasons. And this is a doctoral event. So in within the academy even, but also elsewhere, that racism isn't only about phenotypes. It's relevant for my positionality. It was relevant for my permissive, epistemological framework, relevant for my participants, they might be white, as it were, visibly, but maybe still racialized, based on their accent, their first language, their immigration status in particular. And this was deeply relevant, as I said, for my approach. 43:04 And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to like, rate and subscribe. And join me next time where I'll be talking to somebody else about researchers development and everything in between.
Europe has shown a big welcome to refugees from Ukraine. The Inside Geneva podcast asks whether this generosity will be extended to others.Podcast host Imogen Foulkes is joined in this episode by refugee policy experts.“The Ukraine crisis has really humanised the refugee issue, people have been able to see women, children, men in extremely difficult circumstances,” says Jeff Crisp, an expert on refugee policy with the University of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre.“As someone who understands the horrors of war very well, I was so happy to see countries in Europe opening their borders to Ukrainian refugees. But the question is: what was happening before that?” asks refugee and activist Nhial Deng.According to the UN, 100 million people worldwide are currently forcibly displaced. Are we really honouring the 1951 Refugee Convention, which outlines the rights of refugees and the obligations of states to protect them?“We do need to continue education and commitment to these principles, because we never know when they're going to be needed,” says Gillian Triggs, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection at the UN Refugee Agency.
In the third episode, we speak with Loly Rico of the FCJ Refugee Centre and Rachel Bryce, from the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers about the multiple issues facing those fleeing poverty, destabilization, the borderless crises of conflict and climate change and the responsibility of Canada to provide asylum. “Refugee is defined as someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted on five grounds. Those grounds are: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. But as you so rightly point out, climate is not one of those,” says Rachel Bryce. “I think that Canada being a signatory country is violating the Refugee Convention. Because the convention says that anyone who shows up at your borders, you must provide access for protection. And with the Safe Third Country Agreement, they don't provide that. They just limited the access for protection to too many people,” says Loly Rico. About today's guest: Loly Rico is executive director of the FCJ Refugee Center in Toronto, which she co-founded with her husband, human rights activist Francisco Rico-Martinez, who sadly passed away last year. From her own experience as both a refugee to Canada from El Salvador through her work, including as past president of OCASI, Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants and the Canadian Council for Refugees, she is a steadfast and powerful voice on anti-trafficking and refugee rights and status. Rachel Bryce is the co-chair of the Climate Migration Working Group for the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers or CARL. She has worked at landings, LLP, a leading immigration refugee and human rights law firm in Toronto since January, 2021. And before that in the international migration law unit of the UN migration agency in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as the International Development law organization in the Hague, the Netherlands. She holds a Juris Doctorate, Masters of Global Affairs joint degree from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. CARL Climate Migration Report Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute. Image: Loly Rico and Rachel Bryce / Used with permission. Excerpt from “Home” by Warsan Shire Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased Intro Voices: Chandra Budhu (General Intro./Outro.), Nayocka Allen, Nicolas Echeverri Parra, Doreen Kajumba (Street Voices); Bob Luker (Tommy Douglas quote) Courage My Friends Podcast Organizing Committee: Resh Budhu, Breanne Doyle (for rabble.ca), Chandra Budhu and Ashley Booth. Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca Host: Resh Budhu
In this episode, Dr. Happymon Jacob speaks with Dr. Avinash Paliwal (Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute) to discuss the Indian state's response to conflict-generated migrations since independence. Dr. Paliwal argues that the relationship between the home and the host state and the reputational benefits are the most important factors influencing a state's response to the conflict generated migrant crisis. The interview explains the nature of India's relation with the international refugee regime – including its refusal to sign the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol – and highlights the absence of a domestic legislative framework to distinguish between illegal migrants and refugees. In response to the recent movement of Rohingyas from India to Bangladesh, Dr. Paliwal argues that domestic politics appears to have gained the upper hand in India. He suggests that India's approach to conflict-generated migrations has witnessed a fundamental shift since it dealt with the Rohingyas. Dr. Paliwal appreciates India's overall approach to dealing with conflict-generated migrant crises compared to many western states, given the state of India's economy and issues of caste, class, and diversity within the country. Focusing on Myanmar since the coup and Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, the interview also interrogates the novel development in India's foreign policy to deal with whoever happens to be in power, regardless of the regime type. For Afghanistan, Dr. Paliwal makes a strong case that India should have a presence and outreach in Kabul to avoid any strategic catastrophe.
Refugees are defined and protected under the “1951 Refugee Convention relating to the Status of Refugees”. However, despite having policies and measures put in place to protect refugees, many are still vulnerable to poor living conditions, inaccessibility to education, employment bans, and other issues. Phil Robertson, Deputy Director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch breaks down the situation for us. Image credit: Unsplash.com
Last night the Lords failed to back an amendment to ensure that the government's Nationality And Borders Bill should ensure that the UK keeps its commitment to the 1951 Refugee Treaty, agreed in the aftermath of WWII to help prevent genocide. The amendment could have been made, but Labour whipped their Lords to abstain. The 1951 Refugee Convention: https://www.unhcr.org/4ca34be29.pdf What the Nationality and Borders Bill means for those fleeing persecution: https://togetherwithrefugees.org.uk/we-will-fight-on/
My guest today is Charlotte Lysa. Charlotte is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law and the University of Oslo in Norway. Her academic interests include politics and society in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the Arab Gulf monarchies in particular. She is currently working with the project REF-ARAB: Refugees and the Arab Middle East: Protection in States Not Party to the Refugee Convention, where she works on a sub-project on Saudi Arabia, but for her PhD-project she explored how women in Qatar and Saudi Arabia challenged patriarchal structures through playing football, and the social and political significance of the sport. Today, roughly half a year before the start of the 2022 World Cup, we talk about gender, politics, and soccer in Qatar. You can follow Charlotte Lysa on Twitter at @CharlotteLysa.
Anne C. Richard, distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House, will lead a conversation on refugees and global migration. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the final session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Anne Richard with us today to talk about refugees and global migration. Ms. Richard is a distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House. She has taught at several universities including Georgetown, University of Virginia, Hamilton College, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2017, Ms. Richard served as an assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, and before joining the Obama administration she served as vice president of government relations and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. She has also worked at the Peace Corps headquarters and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and is a member of CFR. So, Anne, thank you very much for being with us today. With your background and experience, it would be great if you could talk from your vantage point—give us an overview of the current refugee trends you are—we are seeing around the world, especially vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, et cetera. RICHARD: Thank you so much, Irina, for inviting me today and for always welcoming me back to the Council. And thank you to your team for putting this together. I'm very happy to speak about the global refugee situation, which, unfortunately, has, once again, grown yet larger in a way that is sort of stumping the international community in terms of what can well-meaning governments do, what can foundations and charitable efforts and the United Nations (UN) do to help displaced people. I thought we could start off talking a little bit about definitions and data, and the idea is that I only speak about ten minutes at this beginning part so that we can get to your questions all the more quickly. But for all of us to be on the same wavelength, let's recall that refugees, as a group, have an organization that is supposed to look out for them. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is the title of the number-one person in the organization, but the entire organization is known by that name, UNHCR, or the UN Refugee Agency. It also has a convention—the 1951 Refugee Convention—that came about after World War II and was very focused on not allowing to happen again what had happened during World War II where victims of the Nazis and, as time went on, people fleeing fascism, people fleeing communism, couldn't get out of their countries and were persecuted because of this. And there's a legal definition that comes out of the convention that different countries have, and the U.S. legal definition matches very much the convention's, which is that refugees have crossed an international border—they're not in their home country anymore—and once they've crossed an international border the sense is that they are depending on the international community to help them and that they're fleeing for specific purposes—their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their membership in a particular social group such as being LGBTQ, or political thought. And if you think back to the Cold War, these were some of the refugees coming out of the former Soviet Union, coming out of Eastern Europe, were people who had spoken out and were in trouble and so had to flee their home countries. So what are the numbers then? And I'm going to refer you to a very useful page on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees website, which is their “Figures at a Glance” presentation, and we're going to reference some of the numbers that are up there now. But those numbers change every year. They change on June 20, which is World Refugee Day. And so every year it hits the headlines that the numbers have gone up, unfortunately, and you can anticipate this if you think in terms of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It's usually June 20, 21, 22. So June 20, that first possible day, is every year World Refugee Day. So if you're working on behalf of refugees it's good sometimes to schedule events or anticipate newspaper articles and conversations about refugees ticking up in—at the end of June. So if you were paying attention last June for World Refugee Day, UNHCR would have unveiled a number of 82.4 million refugees around the world, and so this upcoming June what do we anticipate? Well, we anticipate the numbers will go up again and, in fact, yesterday the high commissioner was in Washington, met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and they met the press and Filippo Grandi, the current high commissioner, said that he thinks the number is closer to ninety-five to ninety-six million refugees. So, clearly, a couple things have happened since last June. One is that so many people are trying to flee Afghanistan and another is so many people have fled Ukraine. So if we went back to that $82.4 million figure that we know we have details on, we would find that this is the figure of people who are displaced because of conflict or persecution around the world. The ones that count as refugees who have actually crossed an international border is a smaller number. It's 20.7 million people that UNHCR is concerned about and then another close to six million people who are Palestinians in the Middle East whose displacement goes back to 1948, the creation of the statehood of Israel, and upheaval in the Middle East region as Palestinians were shifted to live elsewhere. And so—and they are provided assistance by a different UN agency, UNRWA—UN Relief Works Administration in the Near East—and so if you see a number or you see two sets of numbers for refugees and they're off by about five or six million people, the difference is the Palestinian, that number—whether it's being counted in, which is for worldwide numbers, or out because UNHCR cares for most refugees on Earth but did not have the responsibility for the Palestinians since UNRWA was set up with that specific responsibility. So what's the big difference then between the eighty-two million, now growing to ninety-five million, and this smaller number of refugees? It's internally displaced persons (IDPs). These are people who are displaced by conflict or are displaced by persecution, are running for their lives, but they haven't left their own countries yet. So think of Syrians who, perhaps, are displaced by war and they have crossed their own countries and gone to a safer place within their own country but they haven't crossed that border yet. Others who have crossed into Lebanon or Turkey or Jordan or Iraq or have gone further afield to Egypt, those would be considered refugees. Who's responsible for the IDPs then? Well, legally, their own countries are supposed to take care of them. But in my Syria example, the problem is Syria was bombing its own people in certain areas of the country, and so they were not protecting their own people as they should be. People can be displaced by things other than war and conflict and persecution, of course. More and more we talk about climate displacement, and this is a hot issue that we can talk about later. But who's responsible then when people are displaced by changing climactic conditions and it's their own governments who are supposed to help them? But more and more questions have been raised about, well, should the international community come together and do more for this group of people—for internally displaced persons—especially when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so? What about migrants? Who are the migrants? Migrants is a much broader term. Everyone I've talked about so far who's crossed a border counts as a migrant. Migrants are just people on the go, and the International Organization for Migration estimates there's about 281 million migrants on Earth today—about 3.6 percent of the world population—and one of the big issues I've pushed is to not see migrants as a dirty word. Unfortunately, it often is described that way—that migratory flows are bad, when, in fact, lots of people are migrants. Students who travel to the U.S. to take classes are migrants to our country. The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, who was himself for eleven years the high commissioner for refugees, he says, I am a migrant, because he's a Portuguese person working in New York City. People hired by Silicon Valley from around the world to work in high-paid jobs, legally in the United States, they are migrants. More concerning are vulnerable migrants, people who are displaced and don't have the wherewithal to, necessarily, protect themselves, take care of themselves, on the march or where they end up, or also if they're seen as traveling without papers, not welcome in the places where they're going, that can be a very, very dangerous situation for them. So be aware that migrants is a really broad all-encompassing term that can include travelers, businesspeople, as well as vulnerable and very poor people who are economic migrants. Finally, immigrants are people who set out and migrate because they intend to live somewhere else, and when we were talking about the Trump administration's policies to reduce the number of refugees coming to the U.S. we also see that immigration to the U.S. also was decreased during that administration as well. So both the refugee program and a lot of the immigration pathways to the U.S. are now being examined and trying to be not just fixed, because a lot of them have needed care for quite some time, but also put back on a growth trajectory. And then asylum seekers are people who get to a country on their own, either they have traveled to a border or they pop up inside a country because they have gotten in legally through some other means such as a visitor visa or business visa, and then they say, I can't go home again. It's too dangerous for me to go home again. Please, may I have asylum? May I be allowed to stay here and be protected in your country? So that's a lot of different terminology. But the more you work on it, the more these terms—you get more familiar using them and understand the differences between them that experts or legal experts use. So ninety-five to ninety-six million people, as we see another eleven million people fleeing Ukraine and of that four million, at least, have crossed the borders into neighboring countries and another seven million are internally displaced, still inside Ukraine but they've gone someplace that they feel is safer than where they were before. When we looked at the eighty million refugees and displaced people, we knew that two-thirds of that number came from just five countries, and one of the important points about that is it shows you what could happen, the good that could be done, if we were able to push through peace negotiations or resolutions of conflict and persecution, if we could just convince good governance and protection of people—minorities, people with different political thought, different religious backgrounds—inside countries. So the number-one country still remains Syria that has lost 6.7 million people to neighboring countries, primarily. Secondly was Venezuela, four million. Third was Afghanistan. The old number from before last August was 2.6 million and some hundreds of thousands have fled since. And the only reason there aren't more fleeing is that they have a really hard time getting out of their country, and we can talk more about that in a moment. The fourth are Rohingya refugees fleeing from Burma, or Myanmar. That's 1.1 million, and the fifth was Southern Sudanese, 2.2 million, who have fled unrest and violence in that country. So we know that we have not enough peace, not enough solutions, and we have too much poverty, too, and dangers. In addition to the Venezuelans, another group that has approached the U.S. from the southern border that were in the paper, especially around election times, is from the Northern Triangle of Central America, so El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These are people who could be fleeing because of economic situations and could also be fleeing from criminal violence, gangs, warfare, narcotraffickers. And so if they are fleeing for their lives and approaching our southern border, we are supposed to give them a hearing and consider whether they have a case for asylum, and the—unfortunately, that is not well understood, especially not by folks working at our borders. The Customs and Border Protection folks are more and more focused on, since 9/11, ensuring that bad guys don't come across, that terrorists don't come across, that criminals don't come across. And we heard in the Trump administration conversations about Mexicans as rapists, gang warfare being imported into the U.S. from Central America when, in fact, some of it had been originally exported, and this sense that people from the Middle East were terrorists. And so really harsh language about the types of people who were trying to make it to the U.S. and to get in. Some final thoughts so that we can get to the question and answer. The U.S. government has traditionally been the top donor to refugee and humanitarian efforts around the world. The bureau at the State Department I used to run, the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau, was a major donor to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—UNRWA—the International Committee of the Red Cross, and also the International Organization for Migration, which used to be an independent organization and is now part of the UN since 2016. We were also the number-one resettlement location, the formal program for bringing refugees to the United States, and when I was assistant secretary we brought seventy thousand refugees per year to the United States, invited them to come through a program that took eighteen months to twenty-four months, on average, to get them in because they had to be vetted for security reasons. They had to pass medical tests. Their backgrounds had to be investigated to see that they were who they said they were. And that number went higher in the last year of the Obama administration to eighty-five thousand refugees and, in fact, the Obama administration proposed some very strong additional measures to help refugees. But the Trump administration threw that all into reverse with a completely different set of policies. So the numbers then became reduced every year—fifty-three thousand in the first year of the Trump administration, 22,500 the next year, thirty thousand in 2019, 11,814 in 2020, a similar number in 2021, and slow numbers coming today, this despite bringing so many Afghans through an evacuation exercise last summer. Many of the people who were evacuated were American citizens or green card holders. Afghans who had worked for the U.S. but did not have their formal paperwork yet were brought in under what's called humanitarian parole, and the problem with that program is that it's no guarantee for a longer-term stay in the United States. So there's a bill in Congress right now to address that. A lot of the people who worked on that, especially within the U.S. government, are proud that they've scrambled and brought so many people so quickly—120,000 people brought from Afghanistan. At the same time, those of us who are advocates for refugees would say too many people were left behind and the evacuation should continue, and that's a real concern. In terms of resettlement in the U.S., it's a program run—public-private partnership—and we've never seen so many volunteers and people helping as there are right now, and initiatives to help welcome people to the United States, which is fantastic. I would say the program should be one of humanity, efficiency, and generosity, and that generosity part has been tough to achieve because the government piece of it is kind of stingy. It's kind of a tough love welcome to the United States where the refugees are expected to get jobs and the kids to go to school and the families to support themselves. So let me stop there because I've been just talking too long, I know, and take questions. FASKIANOS: It's fantastic, and thank you for really clarifying the definitions and the numbers. Just a quick question. You said the U.S. government is the top donor. What is the percentage of DVP? I mean, it's pretty— RICHARD: Tiny. Yeah. FASKIANOS: —tiny, right? I think there's this lack of understanding that it may seem like a big number but in our overall budget it's minuscule. So if you could just give us a— RICHARD: Yeah. It's grown in the last few years because of all these crises around the world to ten to twelve million—I mean, ten billion dollars to twelve billion (dollars) between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, which was bigger. It was around seven or eight billion (dollars) when I was the assistant secretary five, six years ago. But the important part of it was it provided the whole backbone to the international humanitarian system. Governments, some of them, saw Americans sometimes as headaches in terms of we, Americans, telling them what to do or we, Americans, having our own ideas of how to do things or we, Americans, demanding always budget cuts and efficiencies. But the fact is the whole humanitarian enterprise around the world is based on American generosity, especially the big operating agencies like World Food Programme, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN Development Program. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So now we're going to go to all you for your questions. Hands are already up and Q&A written questions. So I'll try to get to everybody as much as I can. I'm going to go—the first question from Rey Koslowski, and if you can unmute yourself and give us your institution that would be fantastic. RICHARD: Hi, Rey. Q: All right. Rey Koslowski, University at Albany. Hi, Anne. Good to see you. I'd like to pick up on the use of humanitarian parole. So, as I understand it, it's being utilized for Afghan evacuees, Afghans, who you mentioned, who didn't—weren't able to get on the flights and were left behind, but also for Ukrainians. You know, President Biden announced a hundred thousand Ukrainians. I mean, a very—we're using other channels but we've had, I believe, three thousand at the U.S.-Mexican border and, I believe, they're being paroled for the most part, right. As I understand it, we're—one DHS letter that I saw said that there were forty-one thousand requests for humanitarian parole for Afghan nationals. But I'm wondering about capacity of the USCIS to handle this, to process this, because, you know, normally, I think, maybe two thousand or so, a couple thousand, are processed, maybe a couple of people who do this, and also in conjunction with the challenges for processing all of the asylum applications. So, as I understand it, back in the fall there was some discussion of hiring a thousand asylum officers—additional asylum officers. I was wondering, what are your thoughts about our capacity to process all of the—the U.S. government's capacity to process the humanitarian parole applications and the asylum applications, and if you have any insights on new hires and how many— RICHARD: Well, you know, Rey, at Freedom House now I'm working on a project to help Afghan human rights defenders and— Q: Right. RICHARD: —the idea is that they can restart their work if we can find a way for them to be safe inside Afghanistan, which is very hard with the Taliban in charge right now, or if in exile they can restart their work. And so we're watching to see where Afghans are allowed to go in the world as they seek sanctuary and the answer is they don't get very far. It's very hard to get out of the country. If they get to Pakistan or Iran, they don't feel safe. They have short-term visas to stay there, and the programs that might bring them further along like resettlement of refugees are—take a much longer time to qualify for and then to spring into action, and so they're stuck. You know, they're afraid of being pushed back into Afghanistan. They're afraid of becoming undocumented and running out of money wherever they are, and so they're in great need of help. The humanitarian parole program sort of—for bringing Afghans into the U.S. sort of understood that our eighteen- to twenty-four-month refugee resettlement program was a life-saving program but it wasn't an emergency program. It didn't work on an urgent basis. It didn't scoop people up and move them overnight, and that's, really, what was called for last August was getting people—large numbers of people—out of harm's way. And so when I was assistant secretary, if we knew someone was in imminent danger we might work with another government. I remember that the Scandinavians were seen as people who were more—who were less risk averse and would take people who hadn't had this vast vetting done but would take small numbers and bring them to safety, whereas the U.S. did things in very large numbers but very slowly. And so this lack of emergency program has really been what's held us back in providing the kind of assistance, I think, people were looking for the Afghans. I was surprised we even brought them into the United States. I thought after 9/11 we'd never see that kind of program of bringing people in with so little time spent on checking. But what they did was they moved up them to the front of the line and checked them very quickly while they were on the move. So it was safe to do but it was unusual, and I think part of that was because the military—the U.S. military—was so supportive of it and U.S. veterans were so supportive of it and we had, for the first time in a while, both the right and the left of the political spectrum supporting this. So the problem with humanitarian parole is I remember it being used, for example, for Haitians who had been injured in the Haitian earthquake and they needed specialized health care—let's say, all their bones were crushed in their legs or something. They could be paroled into the U.S., get that health care that they needed, and then sent home again. So we've not used it for large numbers of people coming in at once. So what refugee advocates are seeking right now from Congress is the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would give people a more permanent legal status. They would be treated as if they were—had come through the refugee resettlement program and they'd get to stay. So you're right that the numbers being granted humanitarian parole at one time is just not the normal way of doing things. You're also right that the—this is a lot of extra work on people who weren't anticipating it, and more can continue with the hundred thousand Ukrainians who the president has said we will take in. And so the thing is when we have these kind of challenges in the United States one way to deal with it is to spend more money and do a better job, and that seems to be an option for certain challenges we face but not for all challenges we face. With these more humanitarian things, we tend to have tried to do it on the cheap and to also use the charity and partner with charities and churches more than if this were sort of a more business-oriented program. So we need all of the above. We need more government funding for the people who are working the borders and are welcoming people in or are reviewing their backgrounds. We need more assistance from the public, from the private sector, from foundations, because the times demand it. And it's very interesting to me to see Welcome US created last year with three former U.S. presidents—President Bush, President Clinton, President Obama—speaking up about it, saying, please support this, and people from across the political aisle supporting it. I wish that had existed in 2015 when we were grappling with these issues at the time of candidate Trump. So the needs are greater. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we have to just suffer through and struggle through and have long backups like we do right now. We could be trying to put more resources behind it. FASKIANOS: I'm going to take the next written question from Haley Manigold, who's an IR undergrad student at University of North Florida. We know that the war in Ukraine is going to affect grain and food supplies for the MENA countries. Is there any way you would recommend for Europe and other neighboring regions to manage the refugee flows? RICHARD: The first part of that was about the food issue but then you said— FASKIANOS: Correct, and then this is a pivot to manage the refugee flows. So— RICHARD: Well, the Europeans are treating the Ukrainians unlike any other flow of people that we've seen lately. It goes a little bit back and reminiscent to people fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s. But we saw that with a million people in 2015 walking into Europe from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan—mix of economic migrants and real refugees—that Europe, at first, under Angela Merkel's leadership were welcoming to these folks showing up, and then there was a backlash and the walls came up on that route from the Balkans to Germany and to Sweden. And so in the last few years, Europeans have not been seen as champions in allowing—rescuing people who are trying to get to Europe on their own. You know, especially the Mediterranean has been a pretty dismal place where we see Africans from sub-Saharan Africa working their way up to North Africa and trying to get from Libya across the Mediterranean to Europe. These are mostly economic migrants but not solely economic migrants, and they deserve to have a hearing and, instead, they have been terribly mistreated. They get stopped by the Libyan coast guard, the Europeans push boats back, and they are offloaded back into Libya and they are practically imprisoned and mistreated in North Africa. So that's a terribly inhumane way to treat people who are trying to rescue themselves, their families, and find a better life. And another point to the Europeans has been, couldn't you use these young people taking initiative trying to have a better life and work hard and get on with their lives, and the answer is yes. Europe has this sort of aging demographic and could definitely use an infusion of younger workers and talented people coming in. But, instead, they have really pushed to keep people out. So what's happened with Ukrainians? They're seen as a different category. They're seen as neighbors. There's a part of it that is positive, which is a sense that the countries right next door have to help them. Poland, Moldova, other countries, are taking in the Ukrainians. The borders are open. If they get to Poland they can get free train fare to Germany. Germany will take them in, and that's a beautiful thing. And the upsetting thing is the sense that there is undertones of racism, also anti-Islam, where darker-skinned people were not at all welcome and people who are not Christian were not welcome. And so it's probably a mix of all the above, the good and the bad, and it's potentially an opportunity to teach more people about “refugeehood” and why we care and why it affects all of us and what we should do about it and that we should do more. FASKIANOS: Thank you. All right, I'm going to take the next question from Kazi Sazid, who has also raised their hand, so if you could just ask your question yourself and identify yourself. Q: Hello. So I'm Kazi. I'm a student at CUNY Hunter College and I happen to be writing a research paper on Central American and Iraq war refugee crises and how international law hasn't changed the behavior of a state helping them. So my question is, how does confusion and ignorance of migration and refugee terminology by state leaders and the general populace impact the legally ordained rights of refugees such as having identity documents, having the right to education, refoulement, which is not being sent back to a country where they are danger? One example is like Central Americans are termed as illegal immigrants by the right wing but the reality is they are asylum seekers who are worthy of refugee status because gang violence and corruption has destabilized their country and the judicial systems. I think femicide in El Salvador and Honduras is among the highest and—so yeah. RICHARD: Yeah. Thank you for asking the question, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Hunter College. Only one of my grandparents went to college and it was my mother's mother who went to Hunter College and graduated in the late 1920s, and as we know, it's right down the street from the Harold Pratt House, the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I think a lot of what you—I agree with a lot of what you've said about—for me it's describing these people who offer so much potential as threats, just because they are trying to help themselves. And instead of feeling that we should support these folks, there's a sense of—even if we don't allow them in our country we could still do things to ease their way and help them find better solutions, but they're described as these waves of people coming this way, headed this way, scary, scary. And if you follow the debates in the United States, I was very alarmed before and during the Trump administration that journalists did not establish that they had a right to make a claim for asylum at the border. Instead, they talked about it as if it were two political policies duking it out, where some people felt we should take more and some people felt we should take less. Well, the issue that was missed, I felt, in a lot of the coverage of the Southern border was the right to asylum, that they had a right to make a claim, that we had signed onto this as the United States and that there was a very good reason that we had signed onto that and it was to make sure people fleeing for their lives get an opportunity to be saved if they're innocent people and not criminals, but innocent people who are threatened, that we'd give them a place of safety. So I agree with you that the lack of understanding about these basic principles, agreements, conventions is something that is not well understood by our society, and certainly the society was not being informed of that by a lot of the messengers describing the situation over the past few years. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I'm going to take the next question from Lindsey McCormack who is an undergrad at Baruch—oh, sorry, a graduate student at Baruch College. My apologies. Do you see any possibility of the U.S. adopting a protocol for vetting and accepting climate refugees? Have other countries moved in that direction? And maybe you can give us the definition of a climate refugee and what we will in fact be seeing as we see climate change affecting all of us. RICHARD: I don't have a lot to say on this, so I hate to disappoint you, but I will say a couple things because, one, I was on a task force at Refugees International, which is a very good NGO that writes about and reports on refugee situations around the world and shines a light on them. I was part of a task force that came out with a report for the Biden administration on the need to do more for climate migrants, and so that report is available at the Refugees International site and it was being submitted to the Biden administration because the Biden administration had put out an executive order on refugees that included a piece that said we want to do a better job, we want to come up with new, fresh ideas on climate migrants. So I don't know where that stands right now, but I think the other piece of information that I often give out while doing public speaking, especially to students, about this issue is that I feel not enough work has been done on it, and so if a student is very interested in staying in academia and studying deeper into some of these issues, I think climate migration is a field that is ripe for further work. It's timely, it's urgent, and it hasn't been over-covered in the past. I admire several people, several friends who are working on these issues; one is Professor Beth Ferris at Georgetown University who was, in fact, on the secretary general's High Level Panel on Internal Displacement and she made sure that some of these climate issues are raised in very high-level meetings. She was also part of this task force from Refugees International. Another smart person working on this is Amali Tower, a former International Rescue Committee colleague who started a group called Climate Refugees and she's also trying to bring more attention to this; she's kind of very entrepreneurial in trying to do more on that. Not everybody would agree that the term should be climate refugees since “refugees” has so much legal definitions attached to it and the people displaced by climate don't have those kind of protections or understandings built around them yet. But I think it's an area that there definitely needs to be more work done. So I think the basic question was, did I think something good was going to happen anytime soon related to this, and I can't tell because these crazy situations around the world, the war in Ukraine and Taliban in charge in Afghanistan—I mean, that just completely derails the types of exercises that the world needs of thinking through very logically good governance, people coming together making decisions, building something constructive instead of reacting to bad things. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from raised hand Ali Tarokh. And unmute your—thank you. Q: Yes. OK, I am Ali Tarokh from Northeastern University. I came here in the United States ten years ago as a refugee. And I was in Turkey—I flew Iran to Turkey. I stayed there fourteen, sixteen months. So this is part of—my question is part of my lived experience in Turkey. So one part is humanitarian services, helping refugees move into the third country, OK? The one issue I—it's my personal experience is the UNHCR system, there is many corruptions. This corruption makes lines, OK, produce refugees—because some countries such as Iran and Turkey, they are producing refugees and there is no solution for it, or sometimes they use it as—they use refugees as a weapon. They say, OK, if you don't work with me—Turkey sent a message to EU: If you don't work with me, I open the borders. I open the borders and send the flow of refugees to EU. Even some—even Iran's government. So my question is, how can we in the very base on the ground—the level of the ground—how can we prevent all these corruption or how can we work out with this kind of government, countries that are—I named them the refugee producers. And by the time there is two sides of the refugees—one is just humanitarian services, which is our responsibility, United States playing globally there; and other side it seems refugees issue became like industry. In Turkey, the UNHCR staff, some lawyers/attorneys, they take money from people, they make fake cases for them. Even they ask them: Hey, what country—which country would you like to go, United States, Canada, Scandinavian countries? So what is our strategy? What is our solution to help real refugees or prevent produce refugees? RICHARD: Well, there's several things that are raised by your question. Turkey and, now we see, Russia have both been countries where we have seen instances where they can turn on the flow of refugees and turn it off. And Turkey was watching people walk through Turkey, cross the Mediterranean is very scary, dangerous trip between Turkey and Greece in these rubber boats in 2015, 2016, and then they would make their way onward, and then, because of this big EU-Turkey deal that involved 3 billion euros at the time, all of a sudden, the flow stopped. And then in further negotiations going on and on, Turkey would say things that seemed like it came right from a Godfather movie, like, gee, I'd hate to see that flow start up again; that would be a real shame. And so it was clear it was sort of a threat that if you didn't cooperate it could play this very disruptive role on the edges of Europe and deploying people, as you said, which is so cruel not just to the people who are receiving them but to the individuals themselves that they're not being seen as people who need care but instead as a problem to be deployed in different directions. And we saw that also with Belarus and Poland and now also it may have been part of the thinking of Vladimir Putin that by attacking Ukraine, by going to war with Ukraine that there would be exactly what is happening now, people scattering from Ukraine into Europe and that that would be a way to drive a wedge between European countries and cause a lot of not just heartache but also animosity between these countries. So what the Russians didn't seem to appreciate this time was that there would be so much solidarity to help the Ukrainians, and that has been a bit of a surprise. So you've also talked about corruption, though, and corruption is a problem all over the world for lots of different reasons, in business and it's embedded in some societies in a way that sometimes people make cultural excuses for, but in reality we know it doesn't have to be that way. But it is very hard to uproot and get rid of. So I find this work, the anti-corruption work going on around the world, really interesting and groups like Transparency International are just sort of fascinating as they try to really change the standards and the expectations from—the degree to which corruption is part of societies around the world. So UNHCR has to take great care to not hire people who are going to shake down and victimize refugees, and it's not—there's never a perfect situation, but I know that a lot of work is done to keep an eye on these kinds of programs so that the aid goes to the people who need it and it's not sidetracked to go to bad guys. And the way I've seen it is, for example, if I travel overseas and I go to someplace where refugees are being resettled to the U.S. or they're being interviewed for that, or I go to UNHCR office, there will be big signs up that will say the resettlement program does not cost money. If someone asks you for money, don't pay it; you know, report this. And from time to time, there are mini scandals, but overall, it's remarkable how much corruption is kept out of some of these programs. But it's a never-ending fight. I agree with you in your analysis that this is a problem and in some countries more than others. FASKIANOS: So I'm going to take the next question from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who's the chair of the political science department at Xavier University in New Orleans. There are reports in some news feeds that African refugees from Ukraine are being disallowed entry to some states accepting refugees. I think you did allude to this. Is there evidence of this, and if so, can the UN stop it or alleviate that situation? RICHARD: We saw before the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that some European countries were saying it was time for Afghans to go home again, and the idea that during this war it was safe for Afghans to go back—and especially for Afghans who are discriminated against even in the best of times in Afghanistan, like the Hazara minority. It's just—I found that sort of unbelievable that some countries thought this was the right time to send people back to Afghanistan. And so at the moment there's a weird situation in Afghanistan because it's safer in some ways for the bulk of the people because the active fighting has—in large parts of the country—stopped. But it's deadly dangerous for human rights defenders, women leaders, LBGTQ folks—anyone who tries to stand up to the Taliban—you know, scholars, thinkers, journalists. And so those are the folks that, in smaller numbers, we need to find some kind of way to rescue them and get them to safety while they are still inside Afghanistan or if that's outside Afghanistan and in the region. The borders—the border situations change from time to time. For a while they were saying only people with passports could come out, and for most Afghan families, nobody had a passport or, if they did, it was a head of household had a passport for business or trade. But you wouldn't have had passports for the spouse and the children. And so this has been a real dilemma. We also see a whole series of barriers to people getting out; so first you need a passport, then you need a visa to where you're going, and then you might need a transit visa for a country that you are crossing. And what has come to pass is that people who are trying to help evacuate people from Afghanistan—a smaller and smaller number as the months go on; people are trying to make this happen because it's so hard—that they will only take people out of the country if they feel that their onward travel is already figured out and that they have their visas for their final-destination country. So the actual number that's getting out are tiny. And the people who have gotten out who are in either Pakistan or Iraq are very worried. And they're afraid to be pushed back. They're afraid they will run out of money. They are afraid—I think said this during my talk before—they're afraid that there are people in Pakistan who will turn them in to the Taliban. And so it's always hard to be a refugee, but right now it's really frightening for people who are just trying to get to a safe place. FASKIANOS: And in terms of the discrimination that you referenced for refugees leaving the Ukraine, I mean, there have been some reports of EU—discrimination in European countries not accepting— RICHARD: Well, like African students who are studying in Ukraine— FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: —who were not treated as if they were fleeing a country at war— FASKIANOS: Correct. RICHARD: —but instead were put in a different category and said, you know, go back, go home. FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: Yeah, that's—that is quite blatant— FASKIANOS: And there's— RICHARD: And that was happening at the borders. FASKIANOS: Is there anything the UN can do about that, or is that really at the discretion of the countries—the accepting countries? RICHARD: Well, the—yeah, the UNHCR has these reception centers that they've set up, including between the border of Poland and Ukraine, and I think the other neighboring countries. And so if one can get to the reception center, one could potentially get additional help or be screened into—for special attention for needing some help that maybe a white Christian Ukrainian who spoke more than one language of the region would not need. FASKIANOS: Great. So let's go to Susan Knott, who also wrote her question, but has raised her hand. So Susan, why don't you just ask your question? And please unmute and identify yourself. KNOTT: OK, am I unmuted? FASKIANOS: Yes. KNOTT: OK. I am Susan Knott, University of Utah, Educational Policy and Leadership doctoral program. I am also a practicum intern at ASU, and I'm also a refugee services collaborator. And I'm engaged in a research project creating college and university pathways for refugees to resettle. I'm just wondering what your feel is about the current administration efforts in seeking to establish the pathway model similar to ASU's Education for Humanity Initiative with Bard, and is there helping lead the Refugee Higher Education Access program that serves learners who require additional university-level preparation in order to transition into certificate and degree programs. And I just—I'm not just—and all of this buzz that's going on since all of terrible crises are occurring, I'm not seeing a whole lot that—based on my own experience working with refugee education and training centers at colleges—on the college level, and learning about the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Ed and Immigration. I'm just wondering—and they're saying let's have this be more of a privately funded or partnerships with the university scholarships and private entities. What about a federally-funded university sponsorship program for refugee students given that the numbers or the data is showing that that age group is the largest number of just about every refugee population? RICHARD: That's a really fascinating set of issues. I'm not the expert on them, so I'm going to disappoint you. but I appreciate that you took a little extra time in how you stated your intervention to add a lot of information for this group, which should very much care about this. I get a lot of questions every week about university programs that Afghan students could take advantage of. I don't have a good handle on it, and I'm trying to do that with—I'm overdue for a conversation with Scholars at Risk in New York. Robert Quinn is the executive director of that, I believe. And so I'm glad you raised this and I'm not going to have a lot of extra to say about it. FASKIANOS: Anne, are there—is there—there's a question in the chat in the Q&A about sources for data on U.S. initiatives toward refugees. Where would you direct people to go to get updates on the latest programs, et cetera? RICHARD: Sometimes I'm embarrassed to say the best summaries are done by not-for-profits outside the government than by the government. The best source for data on resettlement of refugees to the U.S. is a website that is funded by the U.S. government called WRAPSNET.org—WRAPS spelled W-R-A-P-S-N-E-T dot-O-R-G. And in double-checking some of the things last summer, I felt that DHS had better descriptions of some of the programs than the State Department did, and that's my bureau that I used to—run, so—but they are responsible for determining who is in and who is out of these different programs, so maybe that's why they do. So there's a lot on the DHS website that's interesting if you are looking for more information. And one of the things the Council does, it has done a number of these special web presentations: one on refugees that I got to help on a couple of years ago, and I think there's one up now on Ukrainians. And this is the type of public education function that the Council does so well I think because they fact-check everything, and so it's very reliable. FASKIANOS: Thank you for that plug. You can find it all on CFR.org—lots of backgrounders, and timelines, and things like that. So we don't have that much time left, so I'm going to roll up two questions—one in the Q&A box and one because of your vast experience. So what role do NGOs play in refugee crises and migration initiatives, particularly in resettlement? And just from your perspective, Anne, you have been in academia, you've worked in the government, you worked at IRC, and now are at Freedom House. And so just—again, what would you share with the group about pursuing a career in this—government, non-government perspectives and, what students should be thinking about as they launch to their next phase in life. RICHARD: Yeah, that we could have a whole ‘nother hour on, right? That's—(laughs)— FASKIANOS: I know, I know. It's unfair to, right, do this at the very end, but— RICHARD: NGOs play really important roles in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance overseas and the help for resettlement in the United States. In the U.S. there are nine national networks of different groups; six are faith-based, three are not. They are non-sectarian, and they do amazing work on shoe-string budgets to—everything from meeting refugees at the airport, taking them to an apartment, showing them how the lights work and the toilet flushes, and coming back the next day, making sure they have an appropriate meal to have, and that the kids get in school, that people who need health care get it, and that adults who are able-bodied get jobs so they can support themselves. The other type of NGO are the human rights NGOs that now I'm doing more with, and I guess if you are thinking about careers in these, you have to ask yourself, you know, are you more of a pragmatic person where the most important thing is to save a life, or are you an idealist where you want to put out standards that are very high and push people to live up to them. Both types of organizations definitely help, but they just have very different ways of working. Another question for students is do you want high job security of a career in the U.S. government—say, as a Foreign Service Officer or as a civil servant where maybe you won't move up very quickly, but you might have great sense of satisfaction that the things you were working on were making a difference because they were being decisively carried out by the U.S. or another government. Or do you prefer the relatively lean, flatter organizations of the NGO world where, as a young person, you can still have a lot of authority, and your views can be seen—can be heard by top layers because you're not that far away from them. And so, NGOs are seen as more nimble, more fast moving, less job security. Having done both I think it really depends on your personality. Working in the government, you have to figure out a way to keep going even when people tell you no. You have figure out—or that it's hard, or that it's too complicated. You have to figure out ways to find the people who are creative, and can make thing happen, and can open doors, and can cut through red tape. In NGOs you can have a lot of influence. I was so surprised first time I was out of the State Department working for the International Rescue Committee one of my colleagues was telling me she just picks up the phone and calls the key guy on Capitol Hill and tells him what the law should be. That would never happen with a junior person in the U.S. government. You have to go through so many layers of bureaucracy, and approvals, and clearances. So, really, it depends on the type of person you are, and how you like to work, and the atmosphere in which you like to work. I can tell you you won't get rich doing this type of work, unfortunately. But you might be able to make a decent living. I certainly have, and so I encourage students to either do this as a career or find ways to volunteer part-time, even if it's tutoring a refugee kid down the block and not in some glamorous overseas location. I think you can get real sense of purpose out of doing this type of work. Thank you, Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I have to say that your careful definitions of the different categories—and really, I think we all need to be more intentional about how we explain, talk about these issues because they are so complex, and there are so many dimensions, and it's easy to make gross generalizations. But the way you laid this out was really, really important for deepening the understanding of this really—the challenge and the—what we're seeing today. So thank you very much. RICHARD: Thank you. Thanks, everybody. FASKIANOS: So thanks to all—yeah, thanks to everybody for your great questions. Again, I apologize; we're three minutes over. I couldn't get to all your questions, so we will just have to continue looking at this issue. We will be announcing the fall Academic Webinar lineup in a month or so in our Academic Bulletin, so you can look for it there. Good luck with your end of the year, closing out your semester. And again, I encourage you to go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research analysis on global issues. And you can follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic. So again, thank you, Anne Richard. Good luck to you all with finals, and have a good summer. (END)
In this month's bonus episode, the team talks about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We get at the many ways our biases affect how politicians and the media are discussing the war and its refugees, the religious aspects of Putin's desire to take over Ukraine, how the invasion fits with a growing international movement of religious conservatives from predominantly white countries, and a lot more. Articles mentioned: * “The Secretive Prisons that Keep Migrants out of Europe” by Ian Urbina * “Next Year in Kyiv?” by Diana Butler Bass * “Why Far-Right Nationalists Like Steve Bannon Have Embraced a Russian Ideologue” by Brandon W. Hawk Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show at KTFPress.com. Hosts Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram. Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to shakethedust@ktfpress.com and we may answer your question on a future episode. TranscriptSuzie Lahoud: You know, I went to Russian school in the fifth grade and we were still reading books after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was late 90s and we were still reading books of “moya rodina,” and Mother Russia, the Motherland, all that stuff. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, how can they be teaching this propaganda?” But this is the same battle that's going on in the United States today when you look at the 1619 Project versus the 1776 Project, or whatever they're calling it. It's the same thing. We fight over our national narrative because the way that you construct the story about yourself then feeds into your foreign policy, then feeds into domestic policy, then feeds into your narrative about whose lives matter and whose death and suffering is acceptable to you as a nation. [The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. A podcast of KTF Press. My name is Sy Hoekstra, I'm here with Jonathan Walton and Suzie Lahoud, as always. We are going to be talking today about Ukraine and the conflict there, and the refugees leaving the country, and the ways that we have been talking about this war. Kind of like I said in the Afghanistan episode that we did during season one, we're going to stay in our lane a little bit here, talk about how the church talks about and thinks about this conflict. We're not going to be talking about international politics and military strategy or anything like that. We're going to be talking about how we think about, conceptualize the refugees, the white supremacy involved, the American exceptionalism, the Christian supremacy involved. We're going to talk a little bit about the religious aspects of this war, which is something that the media is not covering in anywhere near as much detail as just the economic and the geopolitical aspects of it. But before we get to that, really quickly, please just remember to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at KTF Press. Leave a rating and review on whatever your podcast app is. Also Substack, which is the company that runs our website, or that we use to run our website, just introduced an app, an iOS app. So if you have an iPhone, you can now, you as a subscriber, thank you so much, this is a subscriber bonus episode. You, as a subscriber, can listen to this podcast and read our newsletter and any of the articles we put out all from within an app, if you don't want it to necessarily come to your inbox. I am definitely someone who prefers an app over an inbox. So if that's you, go find the Substack app in the App Store. Okay. So we're going to get started now. We just, we want to talk a little bit about the white supremacy that is involved in our thinking and talking about the refugees, and in talking about this conflict. Jonathan, let's start out with you. How are you seeing this play out in the things that you're reading and watching? Jonathan Walton: Yeah, you know. Jump right in the deep end. Sy Hoekstra: For sure Jonathan Walton: I think it was… and I think the deep end, because it was pretty stark from the beginning, because we have so many references for refugees from Syria, from Mexico… through Mexico, but from dozens of countries, we have images. Like we have names, we have consistent media around engaging with immigrants, especially in Europe, coming from the coast of, coming from Morocco to France, or Morocco to Italy. And just, so we have this backdrop of Black and brown people fleeing armed conflict, fleeing climate change, fleeing violence— sometimes inflicted by us, like the United States. Then we have the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and there are millions of racially-assigned white, in our minds, Ukrainians. White meaning educated. White meaning like us. White meaning Christian. White meaning acceptable. White meaning can be integrated into our culture more easily. And these are quotes from Polish politicians, from Spanish politicians, from media members or like Prince William who can't believe this is happening in a country like this. Sy Hoekstra: In Europe. Jonathan Walton: In Europe, yeah. So Trevor Noah has said great things, Mehdi Hasan has said great things from The Intercept. There's no shortage of media calling out the hypocrisy of the European reaction, and by default, the American and global reaction because whiteness is ubiquitous across the world, of like how the hypocrisy of how these refugees are treated. Yeah, I think the best example that I found was the speech by one, the leader of the far-right party in Spain speaking to parliament. The quote is, in English, I won't say it in Spanish. The English is, “These are real refugees. Women, children and elderly should be welcomed to Europe. Now, everyone should understand the difference between these refugees and the invasion of Muslim youth of military age who've crossed our borders trying to destabilize and colonize Europe.” Like that is a mess of assumptions. That's a mess of racism. That's a mess of internalized prejudice and ethnic hatred. So often, I think that we think white supremacy, religious nationalism, Christian nationalism will be defeated by knowledge and clarity, and that's not true. Just because we know more and can see more and understand more, does not mean things will be different. I think that's what this is unearthing for me and proving again, there needs to be transformation. There has to be resistance. There needs to be Jesus and the Holy Spirit. People need to meet God, need to meet… There has to be a fundamental, internal change that leads to the social transformation that we actually all want to aspire to. It's not just a photo or an image of someone being pushed off a train. Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Boy, I just had like 800 different thoughts. Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I'm sorry. I said a lot, sorry. [Laughter] Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no. I just mean there's so much to talk about. I think one thing that I want to point out in the difference of how we're talking about these refugees versus those from other conflicts, most notably the Syrian conflict six or seven years ago, is that we have already welcomed into Western Europe and other places, so many more refugees from Ukraine than we ever did from Syria. But that was an utter panic. Like that was, how are we ever going to afford these people? We need to be really concerned about their extremism, like you just said, like characterizing them as military-aged Muslim men trying to come across and destabilize Europe, right? Suzie Lahoud: Right. Sy Hoekstra: When obviously the reality of Muslims is not, of course there are extremists among Muslims the way there are extremists among anybody else. But we don't care when it's coming from Europe. So the thing that I was thinking about a lot this week, and I have to be a little bit careful here, so bear with me. But among people in Ukraine, there are extremists. Of course there are, like there are anywhere else. And Putin has been using the extremists within the national guard of Ukraine as an excuse to invade. He's been talking about the denazification of Ukraine, which is propaganda. Like I don't want to give, I don't want to validate reasons for Putin's invasion. But at the same time there are actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine. I mean, there are neo-Nazis anywhere in Western Europe. But we're not concerned about them as radicals the way that we are concerned about Muslim terrorists or Muslim extremists, because they're our radicals. They're our extremists. They're the ones that we have already. We have among the people that we see as the true inheritors of Western Europe or the United States. Like we have lots of neo-Nazis. We have the far-right. Those already are here, and like we, so we're just not concerned. We're not saying, “Oh, we need to surveil these people.” We need to do all the things that we've done, like all the obnoxious things that we've done to Muslims to counter extremism, because these are basically our terrorists. And of course, when you talk about domestic terrorism in the United States post 9/11, it has basically been, as we've talked about before, all white men. It has been all disgruntled, many far-right, white men committing the mass shootings and the acts of terrorism that we've seen, almost without exception. Yet when it is a bunch of white men or white people refugees, like all we're talking about in the US is how many can we take and how do we grant them Temporary Protected Status and that sort of thing. So I will stop there. Suzie, what do you think? Suzie Lahoud: Well, I think it's telling even if you look at how we're framing what's happening right now, versus, again making the comparison to the, what happened in Syria. So then the conversation was all about the Syrian refugee crisis. So the crisis is that we have all of these people fleeing conflict, what are we going to do about these people? They're going to destroy our economies. They're going to threaten our way of life. There are going to be, as you all said, extremists among them. Whereas now we see today it's framed as the invasion of Ukraine. So the emphasis is on the violence being done to the Ukrainian people, that is entirely unjust, that is unacceptable, that is horrific. There is an empathetic response. There's a sense of compassion. And then you see that these European nations— and I have to give due credit to Volodymyr Zelensky, for putting out this rallying cry— that they are now essentially willing to shred their own economies to help save the Ukrainian people. So the conversation is no longer, “they're going to destroy our economy,” it's “we're willing to stop buying Russian oil. We're willing to put a hold on building this pipeline so that we can allow for this conflict to end and to preserve Ukrainian life and preserve the nation of Ukraine.” So it's a very different response, that double standard. Then also if you look at the language around it, broadening the comparison from just what happened in Syria versus what's happening in Ukraine, it was interesting the conversation around the time of the conflict in Syria, around the time that it started. There started to be more conversations around the distinction between refugee versus migrant, because you also had all of these people fleeing from countries in Northern Africa, and then certainly we have the, what we've been calling a crisis on our own borders in the United States. Which again, the framing of that is so problematic. But that distinction, even though international law does provide for special protections for refugees as people who are fleeing violence and armed conflicts specifically, the way that that's wielded isn't consistent. That distinction of migrant versus refugee, it's not always that clear cut. On top of that, states were being incredibly hypocritical and problematic in the ways that they were upholding the [1951] Refugee Convention in choosing to accept or not accept folks coming from places like Syria. So, for example, in Lebanon, and I think it's clear that we're always making distinctions between the governments of countries and the people of countries, especially in countries where people tend to be victims of their government. So I'm not talking about the Lebanese people here, but if you look at the country of Lebanon, one of the main issues that we were seeing there while I was working there was a violation of non-refoulement, that you cannot return a refugee to the country that they are fleeing from. That's illegal. And yet there were cases reported of that, and the government had sort of this backhanded way of trying to make life incredibly difficult and uncomfortable, and almost unlivable for folks who had fled from Syria. And I know that Lebanon was not the only case of that. So it's just such a stark contrast to what we're seeing now in Poland. Moms leaving strollers at the train station for Ukrainian moms who are fleeing across the border. Those women get to be mothers. They get to be people. They have their humanity versus the language of them, it being an invasion. They're subhuman somehow. They're almost like vermin who are coming and taking over and infesting the nation. And it's just, again, it just shows that we, not only have we become anesthetized to the suffering of Black and brown people, we enable it. We don't think that it's our responsibility. We don't see that we're actually a part of the problem. We don't see them as human beings bearing the imago Dei. So yeah, if you want to look at the church's response, it should be consistent with that theological truth. That you can't slap the label of refugee on them and think that that allows you to, that exonerates you from seeing them as an individual who is suffering. That it exonerates you from doing everything that you can to preserve their life and wellbeing, even to the point of sacrifice, which again, we're seeing in Europe. For everyone who said in the past that it's unrealistic to expect nations to sacrifice, to save life, we're seeing that happen today. So yeah, I think all of this is sort of broader political commentary, but I think it should be upheld first and foremost in the church if we call ourselves the people of God. Sy Hoekstra: Can I bring up really quickly the article that you brought up in a recent newsletter that was this long New Yorker article about the shadow immigration system in Libya? Suzie Lahoud: Yes! Sy Hoekstra: That the EU is basically funding immigration detention centers in Libya, for the Libyan government, for other people to grab people on their way to Europe and put them in detention, right? People coming specifically from Africa, because Libya geographically is on the Mediterranean and is a place where people leave on boats to try and reach Europe. The other thing, I'm only going to say this once, we don't need to go over it in a lot of detail. But the caveat we should probably say to this whole conversation is, we obviously don't want Ukrainian refugees to be treated badly, nor do we have any sort of… we just want everybody else to be treated the way that we're treating Ukrainians when they are suffering. We're not trying to sort of cast aspersions on anything that's going on here. We think all the efforts being made across Europe and in the United States for Ukrainians are great and should happen for everyone, and we applaud them, and we're denouncing a double standard. Jonathan Walton: We have to be able as people, in the same way that Jesus was fully God and fully man, there's like, we hold these things in tension of like, it's possible to call out white supremacy and racial prejudice and violence, and say, “isn't it amazing that the Ukrainian people are being accepted and received and loved?” Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think that, Jonathan, I think you just raised such an important point. And just to bring it back to the Bible, I feel like that's what prophetic ministry does. You can't say that as prophets the only job is to encourage folks and tell them where they're doing well. It's also to call people to attention in areas of individual and collective and communal sin. So I absolutely agree that those two need to be held in tension. That yes, absolutely, I think it's just sort of… what we're seeing today is the response that folks working on the front lines had hoped that we would see when everything was and continues to fall apart in Syria. Oh, and in fact, if we want to talk, to dig in a little bit to what exactly is playing out right now in Ukraine and part of why it is so horrific, I think if you want to see how far Putin is willing to go, you need to look at Syria. Because, as we know, Russia has been actively backing the Assad regime in Syria, providing the air power in that war. Essentially, Russia's the one that's enabled him to hold on, and what we're seeing on the ground right now is just this nihilism of Putin is now actively punishing the Ukrainian people for daring to stand up to him. For daring to act like they are not just sort of a vassal state of Russia. So if you want to see how bad this can get, you need to look at what has happened in Syria and the horrific loss of life. And all of the violence in so many different forms that's happened, all of the brutality. We allowed that to thrive elsewhere, and now it's coming home to roost in places where people now feel connected to it. They should have felt connected to it before. It should have been enough that Syrian people were being terrorized and murdered by their own government, but we didn't care enough to stop it, and now it's wreaking havoc everywhere. Sy Hoekstra: So I think we should transition a little bit then to talking about kind of the ways that American exceptionalism creeps into how we're approaching this conflict as well. And then I think tied up in that is Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy. We all had a lot of thoughts about this, so I'll just open it up to anyone who wants to talk. Suzie Lahoud: So one thing that keeps coming up that analysts keep pointing to is this concept that Putin has of “Russkiy mir.” The Russian World, or actually, it could almost be translated as Pax Russica. “Mir” in Russian means both world and peace. It's this idea that the sort of ideal Mother Russia, it's a linguistic unit of Russian-speaking peoples. It's also, obviously, there's a cultural element there, but then thirdly, there's a religious element of, essentially it's white, Russian-speaking Christians under the Russian Orthodox Church. So I think that's something we pointed to in our newsletter recently with the Diana Butler Bass piece, where she talks about this: that another component of this war is a response to this sort of schism that occurred within the Orthodox Church of Ukraine trying to come out with its own sort of Orthodox Church based in Kiev, and Russia is saying, “No, you can't do that. Kiev is the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's the center of our Christendom. It's our Jerusalem.” In an attempt to sort of reclaim it from any sense of Ukrainian nationalism. So I think it's, we need to, especially as Christians, we need to understand the religious elements that are at play here. We need to understand how dangerous that is and how religion fuels violence like this. And we need to understand how we are actually, with what we're seeing in the United States today, somehow connected to that. Again, going back to the Diana Butler Bass piece, which I highly recommend. I think she does a good job of giving just kind of a broad overview of what's happening, but she refers to this sort of “authoritarian, neo-Christendom triumvirate.” Where you see folks like Trump in the United States, trying to build this concept of a white Christian America, and rallying conservatives around that. You're seeing the same thing happen in Russia today in attempts to sort of create links between these sort of Christian empires, essentially. Again, that's just so destructive, so dangerous, so scary, because when you marry religious ideology to violence, the potential for destruction is almost endless. Sy Hoekstra: And it's not just those two places, right? It's also conservatives, a lot of conservative Catholics in Western Europe and some Protestants as well. But it is an actual international movement based around leaders who have, they have written extensively on their vision for where kind of the white world should go. It's this united, like you said, white Christian kind of international empire that is against at once, like Western secular decadence, and then also Islam and also China. They have very specific enemies, they know who they want to unite with and it's like a real international political movement. Diana Butler Bass linked to this interesting article by a medieval expert named Brandon Hawk, who kind of writes about how Putin and Steve Bannon and all these other groups are sort of looking… and by the way, these groups also have connections to like David Duke and the Klan. How they look back to medieval kind of imagery and iconography for their inspiration, because they really do believe that they are kind of the next Holy Roman Empire, or the next Constantinople. That's the historical vision that they see themselves in. It's like, “We are going to be the people who are in charge of,” as Hawk put it, “the earthly and the heavenly destinies of European white people.” So that's, I don't know, that's a vision that Putin has, has written about extensively. Suzie, you've clued me into this a little bit. I don't know, it's an angle of the war that we are not talking about as much in our media, because it's kind of, I don't know. It's just something that a lot of the Western, non-religious media doesn't have as much information or familiarity with, but it's very real in the minds of a lot of people who think like Putin. Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean… oh man, I just have so many thoughts. So something that is, to me, that is important, but also missing, is like, I think we are so ignorant and so myopic, yet also assume the best. Okay, so we are ignorant of the pervasiveness of white supremacy. The pervasiveness of Christian internationalism, as Diana Butler Bass calls it. The pervasiveness of an internalized imperial mindset and posture towards anybody that is not quote-unquote “like us”. And I'm included in that. Me and Priscilla, my wife is Chinese and Korean. She's like, “Jonathan, that is so Western in how you're thinking, and I don't have another way to think about it.” So I actually have to be quiet and listen to consider that there's another way of doing it, because I automatically think I'm right. I automatically think I'm just, and I automatically think I'm capital “G” good in how I'm thinking. So like, there's an ignorance to that, and then, to the pervasive internalized sense of that. Then there's a… and I don't mean to be like alarmist, but it's like people are sold out to like Steve Bannon's podcast or Alex Jones' podcast, or like all these things. Like a dude doesn't just show up at a pizza place in Washington D.C. to kill people unless they're sold out. And there are millions of people who are imbibing this every day. This goes back to Chuck Armstrong who is like our first or second episode. Of him talking like we're listening over and over again. So when Tucker Carlson starts hearkening to Putin, and hearken — and having these narratives start to play, dropping in replacement theory, dropping the — you know, the white supremacist notion that they are quote-unquote “going to be replaced” by brown people. Using words like “invasion” and “vermin,” and all these things. So we, as you were saying, Suzie, it's like we're anesthetized to it. There's a desperate need to, and not to use the word, in the 90s it'd be, “conscious,” today it's called, “woke,” but like to be aware and engage with the narratives that are happening, because they're all connected. And the most dangerous thing is the divination of it. Like this is a divine thing. Because once somebody believes God is behind it, it's done. Like it's… Yeah, how can you argue? Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think to put this, kind of drawing on that a little bit and going back to Sy's earlier point about some of the psychology behind this, because I think there are a lot of questions of how could Putin still be popular in Russia? Sy, you brought up a great point, that actually thousands of Russians are now fleeing Russia because of this war and… Sy Hoekstra: And protesting the war at great personal risk. Suzie Lahoud: Yes risking, literally risking their lives to stand up and protest. You have officials and leaders of government-sponsored groups like the symphony orchestra, who are taking a stand. So really courageous individuals. So it's not that the Russian people is necessarily fully behind this, but you do have a lot of folks who also buy into this narrative and you need to see that there's this whole picture behind it. And one way of framing the religious component, is this is as if our culture wars took on the form of aggression towards another state. But Sy's point about Putin seeing himself as standing up against the decadence of corrupted Western values, that's their culture wars. You also have to understand culturally, so I grew up in the former Soviet Union. So many people in the former Soviet Union, the United States to them is synonymous with like MTV. That's American culture, and like the worst of what we have to offer in terms of Hollywood. And I constantly had to fight that sort of stereotype about who I was as an American girl. There's just, that's what we've, we've exported the worst of who we are to the rest of the world and that's how they see us. So there's that side of it. But then also the psychology that's kind of at work, and I say that because it's dangerous how the psychology of the culture wars is being weaponized in the United States in ways that are destructive to people's lives. People are dying because of this. So I want to tear off the veil of what's happening in Russia to let us see that the same thing is happening in the United States as well. And in terms of, we always point fingers at Soviet propaganda and indoctrination. And I went to Russian school in the fifth grade and we were still reading books after the fall of Soviet Union— this was after, it was late 90s and we were still reading books of “moya rodina,” and Mother Russia, the Motherland, all that stuff. And I'm like, “oh my gosh, how can they be teaching this propaganda?” But this is the same battle that's going on in the United States today when you look at the 1619 project versus the 1776 project, it's like, or whatever, they're calling it. It's the same thing. We fight over our national narrative because the way that you construct the story about yourself then feeds into your foreign policy, then feeds into your domestic policy, then feeds into your narrative about whose lives matter and whose death and suffering is acceptable to you as a nation. Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. By the way, what natural allies with American conservatives, like you hate Hollywood and MTV and that's what churches in America have been talking about. We basically hate the same things about the West. We just have like a different kind of view of ourselves and who we essentially are, you know what I mean? We don't have the stereotypes of the MTV girl being all Americans, but we still are raging against those same things. Suzie Lahoud: We still decry it. Sy Hoekstra: So when factions of our society start linking up with the similar factions of Russian society, it shouldn't be a surprise to us. It should not be a surprise that Tucker Carlson kind of loves Vladimir Putin. Because I think a lot of people have been asking this question, I've seen this a lot in the media and on social media. When did it become cool for conservatives to start loving Russia? Because we're hearkening back to the Cold War era when conservatives were so very anti-Soviet Union, because they were ideologically opposed, they were communists. And I'm like, that doesn't, the idea behind hating Russia back then was not that those conservatives in America were anti-authoritarian, they were just anti-communist. They were not, if you want to talk about all the stuff that we did during the Cold War to try and suppress any sort of communist or leftist thought of any kind. It was extremely authoritarian. Like Joseph McCarthy was talking about what is unamerican and how do we blacklist it and ban it. I mean, we prosecuted people for advocating for communism. All those sorts of things. Suzie Lahoud: We toppled governments. Jonathan Walton: [simultaneously] Yeah, propped up authoritarian dict — yeah toppled governments and propped up… [laughs]. Suzie Lahoud: In foreign countries. Sy Hoekstra: Right, right. We propped up dictators all around the world in favor of, like we are fundamentally the conservative movement in the United States is not anti-authoritarian. There may be people who believed that it was and have philosophies of being anti-authoritarian, but that has not been the reality of what has been going on in the US over the past several decades. Jonathan Walton: Right. Yeah. The reality of the support of an illiberal democracy, basically. Like it is authoritarianism, but it wants to give the face of a democracy. So Putin is voted into office. Bashar al- Assad is voted into office, but obviously there is corruption and the crushing of dissent. Sy Hoekstra: There's another angle about this that I want to talk about, which is our framing of Ukrainian refugees as Christians. This is something I've been hearing both from Christians and from just kind of the media in general, that makes them the good guys a little bit. We're talking about the Christianity of the refugees and of a lot of people in Ukraine. There is a tendency among, I think, a lot of American Christians to try and separate good guys. Good guys are Christians and bad guys are not real Christians. We try and make, and this plays into how we have so many guardrails around our orthodoxy and our beliefs, and the things that we say make you a real Christian or don't make you a real Christian. It also plays into the ways that we separate ourselves from anything bad that Christians have done in the past, and we cling to and identify with things that they've done that are good. So in the American context, it's like we love Christian abolitionists and then we talk about Christian slaveholders as not real Christians. But what I'm getting at here is, Vladimir Putin is a Christian. You can't just say he's not a Christian because I don't think that he understands God the same way I do, he has different theology, he has different politics. The man is a Christian, like the same way that the slaveholders were Christians in the United States. We can't just push ourselves away from that and sort of absolve ourselves of like any identification with those people that way. That is not how God's vision of the church works. So what I mean is, even if you're talking about like, okay, somewhere in the Bible, people might have said you should excommunicate or cast people out if they do X, Y, or Z. But in every instance, like if Paul was talking about, saying, you need to separate yourself from some person who's doing something terrible, who's like harming the community in some way, the whole point of saying that was in the hopes that they would see the error of their ways and then come back into the community. Specifically because they were your sibling in Christ, right? We don't get to pick and choose who we think are Christian. We can say they're wrong. I can say, I believe that Vladimir Putin is absolutely wrong about the way he approaches Christianity. I can't say he's not a Christian. I can say he's a Christian who's wrong. Like he still is out there going to services and talking about worshiping God. There's no meaningful way in which I get to separate myself from Christians who have done bad things like that, just because I want to preserve the appearance of the goodness of Christianity. Does that make sense? Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. Because what you hear a lot of the time, is like you don't want to quote-unquote “compromise your witness.” But we don't say that when it comes to issues of justice usually. We don't talk about compromising our witness around things that are resistant to dominant culture. We don't. Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's very strategically deployed and we do it in a way to like… I don't know, it ends up looking kind of inconsistent and sort of absurd when you think about the different ways that we deploy that idea of compromising our witness, but it's, we put it out… When there's an opportunity for us to say these Christians are good guys, and that person is a bad guy, we just take, I don't know, we take every opportunity to do that. Jonathan Walton: And right now, I do think that is in a, we talked about this in the Hierarchy of Sins episode. There's a big argument and conversation, at least in my algorithm online, about who the real Christians are versus those who are not. And it is a, I think it's a very real thing, and it's been debated and argued since the Ascension and Pentecost. It's like, who is the real person that has the real truth and is doing the real thing? And I don't get to decide, at the end of the day, who goes to heaven, who knows Jesus, who's in relationship with him, what qualifies it. I don't get to do that, even though I would really like to, you know what I mean? Sy Hoekstra: I've pointed this out before, I'll be brief here. The Bible talks about the disciples of Jesus being disciples before they know anything about what he was going to do. They don't know about the crucifixion, they don't know about the resurrection, they don't know about the ascension, they don't know about all the things. Like they could not have written most of the Apostles' Creed, yet the Bible calls them disciples. Judas Iscariot, the Bible calls a disciple. So I just, our notions of who does and does not count as a follower of Jesus, as a Christian, are so, I don't know, bound up in our attempts to control our image and control how people think. And we need to just let go of that stuff if we want to think the way God thinks. Jonathan Walton: The reality that pre-Constantinople, the sermon that was preached, at least from the little bit that I read, was usually the Sermon on the Mount, which is full of being and doing in the world. Post-Nicene Creed and obviously looking back from that, the core question became, what do you believe? Which is a different way of embodying, it's not actually an embodiment at all, but it's a different way of practicing our faith, which actually requires little practice to then claim relationship with God. Christianity post its marriage to politics and nationalism that we're talking about stripped out the being and doing. And when it is fundamentally about belief, things change. You get to define then what the doing and the being is. Suzie Lahoud: I think too, just going to this element of certainty and kind of critiquing that a little bit. Kat Armas had a great post about this the other day, where she talked about, it struck her in the passage about the sheep and the goats that not only are the goats surprised that they're not the ones entering into heavenly rest, it's the sheep that are also like, “Whoa wait, we did it right?” And I think just, that's part of the point of why it's so important to be able to call these things out and to have prophetic critique in the church, because we need to beware of having the certainty of saying, “Yes, God should bless our armies.” And being able to say, as Sy said, “These are the good guys, these are the bad guys.” I think we constantly need to be checking our own hearts and questioning things and yeah, being wise as serpents and innocent is doves. Also kind of what we were talking about reminds me of a great quote, which I think is appropriate here by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either— but right through every human heart.” Sy Hoekstra: I like that quote, first of all. I've heard that many times before. I go back to it in my brain a lot. I think like, this is just another point that I wanted to make before we're done, is that it becomes extremely difficult for the United States, or any other Western power, to critique anything that's happening in Ukraine when we've been doing similar things all around the world for so long. And I don't just mean propping up the dictatorships and toppling governments that we did during the Cold War. I also mean the War on Terror. We have been invading and taking over countries on flimsy pretexts or for ideological reasons and for religious reasons for quite some time. Which is not to say that nobody in the US should call out anything bad that's happening, that Russia's doing. I'm just saying it's, on the international stage, the fact of the matter is we don't have any credibility to talk about this because of the things that we have done or allowed to happen, and the fact that we've never gone back and acknowledged all the harms that we've caused and tried to do anything to rectify those harms. So I just, I don't know, when we're talking about our judgment or when we are criticizing Putin, as we absolutely should be, I think keeping in mind that that line goes right down your heart, the middle of your heart, is important. Because we are genuinely no better than him. And I mean, that is hard, I think, for a lot of people to hear, but the three of us talk a lot about the piece that one of our previous guests, Wissam al-Saliby, wrote in our anthology, and how we like to pretend that there are false moral equivalencies to draw between the actions of the US and the actions of our enemies. And the reality just doesn't look that way for anyone who has experienced the, I don't know, just the suffering and the terror that the US has caused around the world for so many decades. Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. And I mean, probably Jonathan's the best person to make this point since you wrote a whole book about it. But let that be a critique of the misconception, the lie that America is judge because America is somehow synonymous with the will of God. America is not the judge of the world. God is the judge of the world. Let us be clear on that distinction. And I think too, because again, to Sy's earlier point, and I hope this goes without saying, but all of these ideas and points that we're raising are not to say that we don't stand in solidarity with the battle that Ukraine is fighting, the existential battle that Ukraine is fighting. And not that we don't stand with the Ukrainian people. I can speak for myself, I absolutely do. And I think one of the powerful things that Volodymyr Zelensky has done, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, is he has demonstrated moral power and has wielded that. He's called these leaders to account and said, “You need to stand behind your values.” All of our critiques earlier still stand, that it's striking that that's the rallying cry that these nations have responded to. So we got into that earlier, but just that point of the power of moral leadership, and that yeah, you need to be willing to stand up and have that voice and call nations like the United States to account. Because in the past we've spoken the language of values, but really we've been acting in our interest. Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think we are talking like very big picture, trying to make historical references like ground ourselves so that we can engage. But I think a worthy point also to make is like, if we love something, we can critique it. If, all of us are married, people who are listening, we are in deep relationships, if we love something, if we care about something, if we care about someone, we tell the truth. And I think we have to be willing in the church and outside the church, for the sake of the world and the gospel, to tell the truth. I don't know what that will cost me one day. I'm sitting in Queens, I'm fine. I have heat. I have electricity. I have clean water. I have hot water when I shower. I have all these things. Truth-telling does not cost me that much today. My prayer though, is that we would be people who are able to bear witness and tell the truth in word, in deed, in power, in the midst of even the gravest conflicts like what's happening in Ukraine, and pray that they're able to do so. Because I mean, I couldn't imagine, I know my ancestors had to do things like this. But I pray that one, I hope I never have to, but I pray that I would have the courage to respond in ways that are honoring to God and those I love and care about. Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think that's a good place for us to end it. Thank you all so much for listening. We've talked about a number of articles today. We will have those in the show notes for this episode if you want to reference them. Again, thank you to all of our subscribers for listening to this bonus episode. Please do follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at KTF Press, and leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you're listening. Okay, yeah, I think that is it then. So our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all for our bonus episode next month. [The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] Sy Hoekstra: It's 10:34. Gosh. Do you guys have — when are your end times? Suzie Lahoud: Marvin is not here, so I'm on my own the whole day. So it's until Nora gets sick of CoComelon. Sy Hoekstra: Oh, Jonathan? Jonathan Walton: Ideally, 11:30? Sy Hoekstra: We can definitely do 11:30. So I guess Nora's capacity to watch CoComelon is our limiting factor here. Suzie Lahoud: And I would guess that her limit on CoComelon is endless. Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Okay, cool. So we have till 11:30. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com
This week we speak to the Refugee Council Chief Executive, Enver Solomon who is unequivocal, the Nationality and Borders Bill is an attempt to ‘drive a coach and horses through the Refugee Convention' and will create a two tier system of deserving and undeserving Refugees. So are some Refugees more equal than other Refugees ? Listen.
According to article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” But that promise, which was enshrined three years later in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has never been completely honored. In fact, it has been progressively eroded in recent years across the Global North, even as the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers around the world have swelled. Just last month, the Parliament of Denmark passed a law allowing it to relocate asylum-seekers outside Europe while their claims are being processed. A similar measure is under consideration in the United Kingdom, while Australia has long maintained such a policy. Here in the United States, former President Donald Trump's administration enacted a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” under which asylum-seekers were forced to wait across the border in Mexico, often in unsafe environments, while their claims were processed. Today on Trend Lines, Khalid Koser, executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, joins WPR's Elliot Waldman to discuss the past, present and potential future of the right to asylum, and what it might take to revive this critical component of the international legal system. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you've read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe. Relevant Articles on WPR: Has the World Learned the Lessons of the 2015 Refugee Crisis? African Migration to Europe Is a Lifeline, not a Threat Biden's Immigration Imperatives Refugees Are Being Ignored Amid the COVID-19 Crisis Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie. To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.
What is life like as an Asylum Seeker? Why does Britain have an inhumane Asylum system? Why will Britain not expend all the patience and care and thought she possesses to help people in fear for their lives? The dynamics of prejudice, dehumanisation and maltreatment are hardly without historical precedent, they can be traced back to centuries of the slave trade, colonialism and Imperialism authored on this island. So it's not so much that any of this is new, it is the realisation that the deliberate and calculated nature of the mistreatment serves an incendiary electoral purpose. Beneath the ‘taking back control' slogans and toughening up the border regime is an inconvenient historical truth. When Britain led the drafting of the 1951 Refugee Convention in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, they didn't envisage that those who'd be arriving on its shores to seek protection would come from outside Europe, hence its initial temporal and geographical restriction, this changed when African, Asian and some Middle Eastern countries signed the 1967 protocol. What Governments of every colour have demonstrated through hostile Immigration rules is their uncomfortable with this reality, but rather than be grounded in truth, they've over two decades created a hostile and inhumane Asylum system. So what is one confronted with when they arrive on Britains shores to claim Asylum? We speak to three young women whose lived experience is harrowing. The system is broken and no one should have to endure the hostility and indignity.
Richard Hermer QC speaks to fellow Matrix barrister Raza Husain QC and Sile Reynolds the Lead Asylum Policy Advisor at Freedom from Torture about the Nationality and Borders Bill currently being steered through Parliament by the Home Secretary, Pritti Patel. The Bill, at least on its face, appears to be a radical redrawing of domestic law application of our commitments under the Refugee Convention and is described by Raza as "...the biggest legal assault on international refugee law ever seen in the UK” in a recent legal opinion commissioned by Freedom from Torture.
Hey everyone, it's Empowering Equalities here from AIESEC in Sunway with the last podcast session this year! Did you know that Malaysia is not a party of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Let's dive deeper into the rights of refugees in Malaysia and learn about the legal protection UNHCR card provides with our guest Mr. Joshua from HOST International!
Seventy years since the 1951 Refugee Convention was signed, forced displacement is at record levels – more than 82 million people at the end of 2020, and rising every year for the past decade. In the final episode of this series of Forced To Flee, we look at the long-term options for refugees, asylum-seekers and the internally displaced. We meet refugees who through courage and determination have overcome multiple obstacles to thrive in new places. But we also examine how some countries are making it harder to find refuge; how protracted wars – and political indecision – are forcing millions to wait for solutions; and how climate change, the biggest global challenge of our times, is already becoming a major driving force behind displacement.
Climate change is affecting more and more regions across the globe, threatening to create as many as 200 million environmental migrants by 2050. While Canada is seen as a top destination for refugee resettlement and is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the international agreement doesn't recognize climate threats as a reason for fleeing. As such, what should Canada's policy response be to address the issue of climate refugees? To discuss this question, we were joined by two special guests: Allan Rock and Bob Rae. Special thanks to junior producers Fatemah Ebrahim and Brody Longmuir, senior producer Robert Giannetta, and executive producer Vienna Vendittelli for their work with this episode.
World leaders at a UN Conference approved the 1951 Refugee Convention 70 years ago. This created the framework for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). To mark the milestone, the UNHCR has a new podcast called Forced To Flee. It tells the stories of a few of the more than 82 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. One such story is that of Mary Maker. She left South Sudan as a child, and now has a theatre scholarship at the University of Minnesota. We'll hear from her, as well as Gillian Triggs, Deputy High Commissioner for Protection with the United Nations Refugee Agency.
Our editors' weekly take on humanitarian news, trends, and developments from around the globe.
Driven by violent conflict and insecurity, the world is facing a new displacement crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated displacement trends, pushing healthcare infrastructure to the brink and creating dire economic conditions as countries struggle to contain the virus. Meanwhile, climate change uprooted more than 30 million people—the highest figure in a decade. On July 28, USIP hosted U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield to reflect on the 70th anniversary of the Refugee Convention and its critical importance in the current global context. The discussion took stock of the global community's efforts to protect the rights of refugees and asylum seekers under international refugee and humanitarian law and considered how the United States and its network of allies and partners can better protect those rights in a moment of profound global crisis and uncertainty. Speakers Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Lise Grande President and CEO, U.S. Institute of Peace For more information about this event, please visit: https://www.usip.org/events/convention-refugees-70-conversation-ambassador-linda-thomas-greenfield
In this talk, Peter Gatrell discusses the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva on 28 July 1951. He explains the circumstances leading up to the Refugee Convention and considers what it was designed to achieve: a commitment to recognise and protect refugees who have a well-founded fear of persecution. At present, although many of the world's refugees live in non-signatory states, the Refugee Convention remains a crucial element of international refugee law.His latest book is The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Penguin, 2021). Details of his current collaborative research project, "Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919-75" are also available.Speaker: Professor Peter Gatrell FBA, Professor of Economic History, University of ManchesterImage: New Temporary Refugee Camp In Lesbos Island. © Photo by Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images
According to article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” But that promise, which was enshrined three years later in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has never been completely honored. In fact, it has been progressively eroded in recent years across the Global North, even as the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers around the world have swelled. Just last month, the Parliament of Denmark passed a law allowing it to relocate asylum-seekers outside Europe while their claims are being processed. A similar measure is under consideration in the United Kingdom, while Australia has long maintained such a policy. Here in the United States, former President Donald Trump's administration enacted a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” under which asylum-seekers were forced to wait across the border in Mexico, often in unsafe environments, while their claims were processed. Today on Trend Lines, Khalid Koser, executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, joins WPR's Elliot Waldman to discuss the past, present and potential future of the right to asylum, and what it might take to revive this critical component of the international legal system. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you've read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe. Relevant Articles on WPR: Has the World Learned the Lessons of the 2015 Refugee Crisis? African Migration to Europe Is a Lifeline, not a Threat Biden's Immigration Imperatives Refugees Are Being Ignored Amid the COVID-19 Crisis Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie. To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.
In this special episode of The Gender Card podcast celebrating World Refugee Day, we walk through the multicultural streets of inner city Brisbane with local community leader Seble Tadesse. And we find out how the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention is being challenged around the world by speaking to two experts from Griffith University's Gender Equality Research Network - Emma Robinson and Thu Nguyen.As part of these discussions we talk about family violence and the violence that refugees sometimes experience and flee. If you need to seek counselling after listening to this please call 1800 Respect or Lifeline.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
بشار بربورة: "أصعب ما واجهت عند وصولي إلى أستراليا اللغة ومعرفة الأنظمة والقوانين". وعن لجوئه قال: "كتير صعب نترك جذورنا وماضينا".
In the Victorian era, Folkestone was a fashionable seaside resort in the UK frequented by artists and writers like Charles Dickens.Today, this pretty harbor town on the south coast of England is getting swept up in a bitter row over post-Brexit immigration. Over 1,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in the UK by inflatable dinghy in June alone.Related: Thousands of migrants leave Morocco for Spanish Ceuta Since late last year, the British government has been putting male asylum-seekers arriving on dinghies from France in a former base called the Napier barracks — a line of squat, red brick buildings surrounded by wire fencing. The Napier barracks on the southern coast of England once housed troops heading to the front lines of war in Europe in the 20th century. In the last nine months, the site has been hit by hunger strikes, suicide attempts, a fire and an outbreak of COVID-19 that infected nearly 200 men. Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World The complex once housed troops heading to the front lines of war in Europe in the 20th century. In the last nine months, the site has been hit by hunger strikes, suicide attempts, a fire and an outbreak of COVID-19 that infected nearly 200 men.Repurposing the barracks to hold migrants has been a source of controversy, and earlier this month, a high court judge ruled that the government had acted unlawfully by placing asylum-seekers here. In response, some have called for shuttering the barracks and for Home Secretary Priti Patel to resign.Related: Some migrants crossing the Mediterranean do not want to be returned“We said for a long time before people moved in that it's going to be very traumatizing for people who are victims of torture to come to what is obviously an ex-military facility surrounded by barbed wire.”Bridget Chapman, Kent Refugee Action Network“We said for a long time before people moved in that it's going to be very traumatizing for people who are victims of torture to come to what is obviously an ex-military facility surrounded by barbed wire,” said Bridget Chapman from the Kent Refugee Action Network, a local charity.Related: Displaced Syrians in Turkey say Syria's elections are a sham“People were told that the reason that COVID was spreading was that it was their fault; it's just ludicrous, it's inhuman and we should have never put anybody in this facility,” she said, adding, “The way to destroy the people traffickers' business is to issue humanitarian visas, to increase spaces on resettlement programs so that people have better options, safe options that work better for them and better for us.” Despite the government's portrayal of a crisis, overall numbers of asylum-seeker arrivals to Britain are down. Last year, less than 30,000 came to the UK, while in neighboring countries such as France and Germany, the numbers have been three or four times higher. Bridget Chapman from the Kent Refugee Action Network, a local charity, says the Napier barracks in the UK never should've been used to house migrants. Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World But whereas before they came hidden in trucks, the UK government's investment in French land border security has pushed people into taking boats instead.Several migrants at the barracks who spoke to The World said they preferred to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize their asylum claims.“The staff are quite good, helpful and cheerful, but it's still not the right place to be. Some British people may think that the people here have already suffered a lot so it's OK to keep them here, but that's an argument I don't agree with.”Syrian migrant“The staff are quite good, helpful and cheerful, but it's still not the right place to be,” a Syrian man said. “Some British people may think that the people here have already suffered a lot so it's OK to keep them here, but that's an argument I don't agree with.”Another young man from Iran has been here for over a month.Related: Afghans who fled to Turkey are worried — and hopeful — about the prospect of peace at home“You feel like you're a prisoner here,” he said, gesturing to the barbed wire.Though residents are usually free to come and go, he says that with 12 men sharing a room, the camp affords no privacy. COVID-19 tests are now done twice a week.When asked about the UK government's new strategy to dissuade asylum-seekers, he said: “I think it's not going to happen. I didn't have any plan before I escaped Iran, I didn't have any idea where I was going. And you can't just apply for asylum to the UK [outside of the country].”The barracks dispute comes at a time when Prime Minister Boris Johnson's hard-liner Home Secretary Patel is attempting to radically change asylum law. Patel wants to deny the right to claim asylum to those arriving irregularly, saying in parliament earlier this year that “the existence of parallel routes is deeply unfair, advancing those with the means to pay smugglers over those in desperate need.”The new immigration proposals call for more deportations for those entering irregularly and a much lower form of legal protection for those that cannot immediately be returned. But according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, asylum-seekers cannot be punished for how they enter a country.Jonathan Thomas, a migration researcher at the independent think tank Social Market Foundation, says that the government is walking a fine line between the expectations of its voters versus its international obligations.“A lot of immigration policy in practice is rather performative,” he said. “The government at all times needs to be seen to be doing something. There's always a tension between the fact that the government and majority of voters want some kind of control, and the international refugee system really doesn't give you that control.”Thomas thinks the UK is trying to copy models from other Western governments. In Australia, migrants arriving by sea are denied asylum — either turned away or sent to notorious offshore processing centers. In the US, the Biden administration does allow some asylum-seekers to enter the country but also has policies to turn them away automatically.“The UK is trying to move to a ‘no-to-asylum-seekers but yes-to-refugees' approach.”Jonathan Thomas, Social Market Foundation“The UK is trying to move to a ‘no-to-asylum-seekers but yes-to-refugees' approach,” Thomas added.In reality, the government has closed almost all legal resettlement routes in recent years and has still not released details of what could replace them. This is leading some Conservative Party supporters to push back on what they view as a hostile narrative.Shabnam Nasimi still has vivid memories as a child arriving in the UK hiding inside a refrigerated truck with her parents after they fled persecution by the Taliban in Afghanistan.“It was so pitch-black that we couldn't see each other so my father lit matchsticks one after another just so that we weren't scared,” she said. “It was terrifying. At one point we felt that we couldn't breathe.”Nasimi is now director of the London-based lobby group Conservative Friends of Afghanistan. Despite being a supporter of the prime minister and Brexit, she takes issue with the government's refugee policy. Shabnam Nasimi, director of the London-based lobby group Conservative Friends of Afghanistan, says that despite being a supporter of the UK prime minister and Brexit, she takes issue with the government's refugee policy. Credit: Courtesy of Shabnam Nasimi “How can you ask people not to pay smugglers to get to the UK when they have no other options? It's un-British. And what British values stand for is not to close the door to people who are in need at the most desperate time in their lives,” she said.Since 2015, the UK has resettled over 20,000 refugees that fled the Syrian conflict into neighboring countries in the Middle East. But for most other nationalities, including Afghans, no such arrangement exists.“No one wants to give up their dignity and respect to go through a journey like that, but you need to offer them legal ways of coming in. If the UK hadn't welcomed us, we wouldn't be where we are today, and I wouldn't be so proud to contribute to British society,” Nasimi added.In Folkestone's small museum, a painting hangs in the middle of the main exhibition room. It depicts bedraggled Belgian refugees arriving on the shore, having fled the horrors of World War I. Men, women and children from the town line up to welcome them after more than 16,000 arrived on a single day.More than a century later, post-Brexit Britain now faces a battle over what kind of greatness it wants to resurrect.
Britain is currently reforming its Asylum system and its Home Secretary, on the face of it, appears to have driven a coach and horses through the Refugee Convention of 1951. In this conversation with Dr Lucy Mayblin, A Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, she talks to us about the Convention and breaks it down to its simplest elements. Is Britain on the brink of breaching its obligations by contemplating these far reaching changes? She explores what connects Colonialism and contemporary Asylum Policy. She confronts questions that almost seem incendiary, Is the Humanity of people seeking Asylum in Britain at best ambiguous? Where do conceptions of Humanity and differential rights derive, she situates them with histories of Hierarchical and exclusionary ideas over time. A Must Listen!
Asyl im Dialog - der Podcast der Refugee Law Clinics Deutschland
Ein Gespräch mit Ulrike Krause, Juniorprofessorin für Flucht- und Flüchtlingsforschung am Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) und am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Universität Osnabrück Die Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention (kurz GFK) wird dieses Jahr 70 Jahre alt - ein guter Grund, sich diese mal näher anzuschauen. Insbesondere den Entstehungsprozess, denn am 28. Juli 1951 wurde sie auf einer UN-Sonderkonferenz in Genf verabschiedet.146 Staaten sind der Konvention bisher beigetreten - die GFK ist also das wohl wichtigste internationale Dokument zum Asylrecht. Wie sich der Eurozentrismus auf die Konvention ausgewirkt hat, welche Rolle der gerade unabhängig gewordene Staat Pakistan dabei für eine Rolle hatte und wie die Zukunft der Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention aussehen könnte, erfahrt ihr in dieser Folge. Februar 1946 – 8. Resolution der Generalversammlung der Vereinten Nationen: https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/8(I) August 1949 – Studie des Generalsekretärs der Vereinten Nationen: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae68c2d0.html Februar 1950 – 1. Bericht des Ad-hoc-Komitee der Vereinten Nationen: https://www.refworld.org/docid/40aa15374.html August 1950 – 2. Bericht des Ad-hoc-Komitee der Vereinten Nationen: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae68c248.html Dezember 1950 – Resolution 429(V) der Generalversammlung der Vereinten Nationen: https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/429(V) Juli 1951 – Final Act of the United Nations Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3e2becbb4.html Beiträge der Expertin: Krause, Ulrike (2021), 'Colonial Roots of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its Effects on the Global Refugee Regime', Journal of International Relations and Development, online first, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-41020-00205-41269. Krause, Ulrike (2021), 'Koloniale Einflüsse auf die Gründung der Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention', FluchtforschungsBlog und Völkerrechtsblog, https://blog.fluchtforschung.net/koloniale-einflusse-auf-die-grundung-der-genfer-fluchtlingskonvention/ und https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/koloniale-einfluesse-auf-die-gruendung-der-genfer-fluechtlingskonvention/. Krause, Ulrike (2021), 'Colonial effects on the founding of the 1951 Refugee Convention', FluchtforschungsBlog und Völkerrechtsblog, https://blog.fluchtforschung.net/colonial-effects-on-the-founding-of-the-1951-refugee-convention/ und https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/colonial-effects-on-the-founding-of-the-1951-refugee-convention/.
In Episode 5 of Series 6, Todd is talking to Mahi Ramakrishnan. Mahi is a refugee rights activist and runs a non-profit organisation, Beyond Borders Malaysia, which works to promote and protect the rights of refugees and stateless persons in Malaysia. 00.00 – 02.55 Todd begins by inviting Mahi to talk about refugee issues in South-East Asia. She explains that there are approximately 500,000 refugees in Malaysia and that: around half are from Myanmar the Rohingya make up the largest refugee group none of the refugee groups have any legal status in Malaysia, no rights to work, education or health care and are reliant on UNHCR for support Malaysia has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention 02.55 – 05.25 Todd asks Mahi to say more about the situation facing Rohingya. She says she visited Myanmar in 2017 and describes her shock at the lack of racial unity in the country. She explains that: prior to the 1960s the Rohingya were well integrated but the situation changed with the installation of the military government in the 1960s there followed mass migrations of Rohingya from Myanmar to Malaysia in the 1970s (Note: The Rohingya were declared stateless by the ruling Military Junta in 1982) Mahi says that there are currently 3 to 4 generations of Rohingya, in Malaysia and points to 3 specific issues for them: They have forgotten their culture Lack of access to education means that they occupy the lowest social classification in Malaysia Their community is characterised by a deep-seated patriarchy 05.25 – 09.50 Todd asks Mahi to expand on the issue of patriarchy and refers to her documentary film, Bou (Bride) which is about the trafficking of young girls into Malaysia to be child brides. Mahi points out that while the buying of child brides is not exclusive to the Rohingya it is a central part of their patriarchal culture. She reports on the purchase of Rohingya child brides by men, via traffickers and suggests that parents are complicit partly because marriage offers a semblance of security to the girls given their lack of legal status (in Myanmar). The girls are in a precarious position, abandoned when they become pregnant and/or subjected to domestic violence and abuse. Patriarchy is evidenced in the following ways: young Rohingya girls are preferred by the men over Malaysian girls because they will be more obedient girls are not allowed to attend school parents control children husbands control wives However, she notes that women are beginning to organise and stand up for themselves and their rights, despite negative reactions from men. 09.50 – 17.15 Todd moves on to ask about the impact that Covid-19 has had on the refugee community in Malaysia. Mahi refers to the continuous influx of migrants and refugees, which has led to a xenophobic reaction within Malaysia. Initially directed at the Rohingya, but now it is more widespread, directed towards all refugees and migrant workers. She refers to existing socio-economic tensions along ethnic lines within the country and the focus of that discontent on the refugee community and points to the lack of a comprehensive health care plan to protect all groups against the virus, especially the refugee/migrant community. She says that lockdowns and movement controls have made life very difficult for refugees and undocumented workers to travel for work. When asked about infection rates, Mahi reports that the majority of COVID infections are within the immigrant communities largely as a result of high density living conditions and the impossibility of social distancing at home and at work. She also notes high levels of infections in detention centres. Todd and Mahi agree that this feeds into a narrative that migrants are “bad” and need to be sent home. However, Mahi argues that the problem lies with labour agents and corruption,which leads to the exploitation migrant workers, who lose their documentation and forcing them to live and work in high density unregulated environments. 17.15 – 20.57 Todd's next question concerns the work of UNHCR, The World Health Organisation and the International Labour Organisations and whether Mahi sees any evidence of them working together for the benefit of refugees. She assumes that they have ongoing conversations but points to the need for them to work more closely with grass roots organisations and community leaders. She goes on to outline the work of Beyond Borders Malaysia. The principal aim is to give refugees a voice using art and performance as a vehicle and she references Refugee Festival July 2021, which is used as an advocacy tool. It is involved in discussions with lawmakers re; basic rights to health care, education and work. It undertakes projects like the Livelihood Initiative which involves women cooking food for sale and sharing in the profits. 20.57 – 26.45 Todd asks how the Festival has been impacted by the pandemic. Mahi notes a number of difficulties: the lack of freedom/requirement for permits to hold events at any time the backlash against migrants frightened off some from participating Mahi explains that in 2020 the Festival went online, and while that presented opportunities to reach a wider audience and involve more people from elsewhere including the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani, many refugees were afraid to take part. To mark this fact, Mahi had a fixed camera on an empty chair during a panel discussion. Mahi has passed the directorship of this year's festival to a refugee artist and hopes restrictions will be lifted and enable it to take place in a physical space. 26.45 - end Finally, Todd asks Mahi about signs of hope for the future. In her view, the current Malaysian government is very difficult to work with. However, she says she will try to use existing legislation to allow refugees to work. She will continue to try to persuade the existing government even though the conversations are difficult. Further links Human rights: reason to be joyful - Rights Track episode with Professor William Paul Simmons about marginalised groups Refugees: why hard times need hard facts – Rights Track episode with Gonzalo Vargas LLosa, UNHCR
Imagine having to leave your house because the sea rose into your village? For most of us, this scenario is hard to fathom. Yet, it is a reality lived by many people around the world. This week's episode paints the portrait of climate migration. Listen as Charlotte and Fernanda discuss the consequences of climate change on smaller countries. This week's discussion focuses on the Pacific Islands: you'll hear an expert and two touching testimonies of how the islanders are dealing with the climate crisis. Subscribe to our newsletter here. Read more about the 1951 Refugee Convention here. Learn more about the Pacific Island Student Fighting Climate Change here.
Over the past year, the Malaysian government has been criticised by various human rights organisations, for its treatment of refugees and undocumented migrants. However, the hard truth is, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention (which defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum) and so it becomes difficult to hold our governments accountable. But what if we do sign the 1951 Refugee Convention. What would change? How will it benefit our country? On this episode, Katrina Jorene Maliamauv and Aslam Abd Jalil join us on the show to discuss. Other episodes of the miniseries: > What if Malaysia… Has a Woman Prime Minister #1 > What if Malaysia... Decriminalised All Drugs For Personal Use #2 > What if Malaysia... Has Freedom of Speech Like the US #3 > What if Malaysia… Legalises Abortion (On-Demand)? #4 > What if Malaysia… Legalises Sex Work? #5 > What if Malaysia… Abolishes the Death Penalty? #6 > What if Malaysia… Has a Non-Malay Prime Minister #8 Image Source: Shutterstock
In part two of our look into the history of refugees, we talk with Peter Gatrell again about the creation of the UNHCR and the 1951 Refugee Convention. We also look at trends that lead the international framework from refugees from the early 1950s to now. Lastly, we get insight into how we should think about the current "refugee crisis" in context with history. You can check out Professor Gatrell's most recent book, The Unsettling of Europe, on Amazon or at most major booksellers. We encourage you to buy local if you can. https://www.amazon.com/Unsettling-Europe-Migration-Reshaped-Continent/dp/0465093612 Professor Gatrell was also recently awarded the 2021 Laura Shannon Prize in European Studies for The Unsettling of Europe! See more here: https://nanovic.nd.edu/news/nanovic-institute-awards-2021-laura-shannon-prize-to-peter-gatrell-for-migration-book/ Check out this article by Professor Gatrell for more on the historical context of the refugee crisis: https://origins.osu.edu/article/question-refugees-past-and-present Liked this episode? Want us to do more history episodes? Subscribe and let us know in the comments below! Connect With Us: If you or someone you know would like to share their personal refugee story, send us an email at seekingrefugepodcast@gmail.com or connect with us on any number of social media platforms: https://twitter.com/refugepodcast https://www.instagram.com/refugepodcast/ https://fb.me/seekingrefugepodcast Have a story you want us to cover? Let us know! Our Team: Patrick Anderson Jackie Burnett Victoria Halsey Esha Hegde Nathanael Lemmens Claire Mattes Aidan Thomason Music: Opening Track: Ketsa - Where We Are (http://bit.ly/2nKJWaW) Closing Track: Above and Below - Never Forget (http://bit.ly/2nNfw7Q) Sponsors: Special Thanks to Maxcy International House for all of their support. To find out more about what they do, go to https://maxcycollege.wordpress.com/about-the-blog/.
This is a recording of a webinar held on 4 June 2020, co-hosted by the International Law Association (Australia) and the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. What is changing in the so-called ‘new normal’, and what does it mean for the legal landscape facing refugees, people seeking asylum and other forced migrants? Find out when two preeminent legal minds discuss the key issues: Scientia Professor Jane McAdam, Director of UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, addresses the differential impact of the pandemic on displaced people and also considers the twin ‘crises’ of COVID-19 and climate change in the context of mobility in the Pacific region. Assistant Secretary-General Gillian Triggs, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, considers how COVID-19 has undermined the fundamental norms of human rights and refugee law as almost no other crisis has done, even as we reach the 70th anniversary of the Refugee Convention.
Book launch for the new book Palestinian Refugees in International Law by Lex Takkenberg and Francesca Albanese. Lex Takkenberg (Former chief of the Ethics Office at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) Francesca Albanese (The Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), Georgetown University) The Palestinian refugee question, resulting from the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel over seventy years ago, remains one of the largest, most protracted, and most politically fraught refugee questions of the post-WWII era. Numbering over seven million in the Middle East alone, Palestinian refugees’ status varies considerably according to the state or territory ‘hosting’ them, the UN agency assisting them and political circumstances surrounding the Question of Palestine. International law, while being crucial to the protection of these refugees, remains marginal in political discussions concerning their fate. This new book, building on the seminal contribution of the first edition (1998), aims to bring order and logic into a matter which is politically fraught, discussing the legal status of Palestinian refugees in a historical and factual fashion, building on extensive research of international and national legal norms and systems, doctrine and jurisprudence alike. It offers a comprehensive and compelling analysis of various areas of international law (refugee law, human rights law, humanitarian law, the law relating to stateless persons, principles related to internally displaced persons, as well as notions of international criminal law), and probes their relevance to Palestinian refugees. It so manages to be innovative in a field of study where much has been written in either general terms (discussing Palestinian refugees as part of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict) or specific terms (discussing specific issues pertaining to Palestinian refugees e.g. which UN agency is responsible for them, their right of return and compensation, Palestinian in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Egypt), without any other manuscripts being able to offer the broad picture of Palestinian (refugees’) continuous dispersal and protection issues. The new edition includes: a wealth of information concerning origins, crucial facts and legal tenets of the Palestinian refugee question; an updated analysis of the distinctive regime set up for them, made of a plurality of UN agencies (UNCCP, UNRWA and UNHCR); a rigorous analysis of current interpretations of Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the various definitions of Palestinian refugees; a detailed examination of specific rights of these refugees and a the protection regime they are afforded; an innovative framework for solutions, building on important development in the field of refugee law and practice and on a holistic rights-based approach. This book makes for an indispensable reading to anyone willing to get a better understanding of the Palestinian refugee question and its resolution. Being so painstakingly researched, this book is meant to be, for many years to come, the ultimate reference about Palestinian refugees.
The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are among the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Yet the universalization of the refugee status after the 1967 Protocol has given rise to a series of discrepancies between the letter of the Convention and the purposes it is being asked to serve. In particular, the five-protected categories specified by the Convention have come under criticism. There are also tensions between the Eurocentric discourse and jurisprudence of refugee protection and the fact that the largest numbers of the world's refugees are housed in Third World Countries. With globalization of the refugee condition, new trends have also emerged: States seek to create measures of “non-entrée”—no access—to their territories by various modes of outsourcing monitoring and enforcement. These range from the installation of refugee processing centers in bordering countries and along the Mediterranean seacoast in particular, to the signing of special bilateral agreements to prevent refugees from accessing the states' territory (as between the US and Mexico) and to the more radical measure of simply “excising” territory, that is, declaring it outside the bounds of the jurisdiction of that state. These trends, along with criminalization of the refugee status, have undermined the universal human promise of the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt). In conclusion I ask why cruelty is spreading in liberal democracies and discuss three normative responses to the current predicament: liberal nationalist, liberal internationalist and cosmopolitan interdependence. I suggest a fourth alternative which synthesizes elements of each. Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. This Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy was presented on January 15, 2020.
The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are among the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Yet the universalization of the refugee status after the 1967 Protocol has given rise to a series of discrepancies between the letter of the Convention and the purposes it is being asked to serve. In particular, the five-protected categories specified by the Convention have come under criticism. There are also tensions between the Eurocentric discourse and jurisprudence of refugee protection and the fact that the largest numbers of the world's refugees are housed in Third World Countries. With globalization of the refugee condition, new trends have also emerged: States seek to create measures of “non-entrée”—no access—to their territories by various modes of outsourcing monitoring and enforcement. These range from the installation of refugee processing centers in bordering countries and along the Mediterranean seacoast in particular, to the signing of special bilateral agreements to prevent refugees from accessing the states' territory (as between the US and Mexico) and to the more radical measure of simply “excising” territory, that is, declaring it outside the bounds of the jurisdiction of that state. These trends, along with criminalization of the refugee status, have undermined the universal human promise of the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt). In conclusion I ask why cruelty is spreading in liberal democracies and discuss three normative responses to the current predicament: liberal nationalist, liberal internationalist and cosmopolitan interdependence. I suggest a fourth alternative which synthesizes elements of each. Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. This Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy was presented on January 15, 2020.
On a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, everyone is on the move. Christmas Island, known for its brilliant red crab migration, is also home to a different kind of movement: it is the site of one of Australia’s largest immigration detention centers. In a place where movement is central to survival, what happens when these two migrations get too close? Producer: Stephanie Niu You can learn more about asylum seekers in Australia and ways to get involved by visiting the Asylum Seeker Resource Center website or the Refugee Council of Australia website. More on the 1954 Refugee Convention here. This episode was made possible by the support of the Beagle II Award and the generosity of the residents of Christmas Island and asylum seeker activists and allies in Melbourne. Many many thanks to Brigid Arthur, Craig Wood, Jahna Luke, Foo Kee Heng, Christopher Su, Karen Singer, Yit Meng Sho, Suzy Mathew, Mary Mathew, Mark Bennett, Gordon Thomson, Bluey, Max Orchard, Janet Pelly, Nicole Erlich, Choy Lan Seet, and Pamela Curr for sitting with me and sharing your stories. Jake Warga and Christy Hartman were instrumental in making this audio piece a reality. Thank you also to Gordon Chang and Hilton Obenzinger for your ongoing mentorship and support.
Climate change is affecting more and more regions across the globe, threatening to create as many as 200 million environmental migrants by 2050. While Canada is seen as a top destination for refugee resettlement and is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the international agreement doesn’t recognize climate threats as a reason for fleeing.Continue reading "Climate Refugees and Canada’s Role as a Middle Power"
Climate change is affecting more and more regions across the globe, threatening to create as many as 200 million environmental migrants by 2050. While Canada is seen as a top destination for refugee resettlement and is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the international agreement doesn’t recognize climate threats as a reason for fleeing. As such, what should Canada’s policy response be to address the issue of climate refugees? To discuss this question, we were joined by two special guests: Allan Rock and Bob Rae.Allan Rock is President Emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and a Professor in its Faculty of Law. Amongst other positions, Professor Rock practised in civil, administrative and commercial litigation and was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1993 and re-elected in 1997 and 2000. He was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Health, and Minister of Industry and Infrastructure. Before becoming the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, he was appointed in 2003 as Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.Bob Rae was elected eleven times to the House of Commons and the Ontario legislature between 1978 and 2013, was Ontario’s 21st Premier from 1990 to 1995, and served as interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. He currently works as a lawyer, negotiator, mediator, and arbitrator, and is a Fellow of the Forum of Federations. Professor Rae teaches at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Law, Massey College, Victoria College, and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.Special thanks to junior producers Fatemah Ebrahim and Brody Longmuir, senior producer Robert Giannetta, and executive producer Vienna Vendittelli for their work with this episode.
The Refugee Convention classes anyone as a refugee who fears persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. This does not include one group of people who are frequently persecuted for who they are, namely LGBTQ+ people. Yet many countries do recognise sexual orientation as a ground of asylum, at least in theory. In practice, LGBTQ asylum seekers face many obstacles in trying to prove their cases. The episode will mainly focus on the situation in Germany and in the UK. In this episode: Mengia Tschalaer - Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/spais/people/person/mengia-tschalaer/) Read more about Tschalaer's research here: https://www.queerasylum.org/ Kerri Woods, Lecturer in Political Theory at the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds (https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/politics/staff/111/dr-kerri-woods)
Yesterday Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced New Zealand will support the United Nations Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration after receiving legal advice from Crown Law. We voted for it at the UN overnight along with 149 other countries. Five chose not to vote and we had a handful of nations including the US and Australia who pulled out of the process well beforehand.Now I agree with the Crown Law summation and it is broadly similar to the editorial I wrote about the Compact three weeks ago. I have said repeatedly there is nothing to fear in the compact. We already comply and if the compact ever compels us to take any migrants against our will and our laws, or supplants our sovereignty, I’ll eat my hat. And I’ll eat yours too.Speaking about the compact this morning, Winston Peters said there had been unwarranted fear mongering over the thing and he blamed the alt-right. Well, he got that wrong. There were plenty of lefties freaking out too. My thought is that the opponents co-opted the compact as part of their personal political battles against immigration and the UN in general.But as I said yesterday, my beef with the Government is that they have failed to lead us through the debate. In fact, they just did just the opposite and ran away from it, saying they were thinking about it.So I’ve looked at other countries who like us have supported the compact. Let’s look at the UK. A country who pulled out of the EU with one of their major concerns being migration. But the UK has voted for the compact.In the UK a petition was raised against it which gained 100,000 signatures, out of a country of 67 million. Nigel Farage has railed against it and has been the go-to for Fox News. There he said what the UN wants to do is to make migration a human right. Countless people have rubbished that including the UK government itself who said, “It does not establish a ‘human right to migrate’ or create any new legal categories of migrant.” Rather it says migrants have human rights. It's called English, Nigel.Mr Farage also claimed it makes refugees and migrants the same thing. The Government reminded Mr Farage that Refugees are defined by the Refugee Convention of 1951. Which is, by the way, legally binding. The compact changes nothing.Meanwhile, the UK's International Development Minister Alistair Burt has been arguing for the compact for weeks now. He’s said the UK was a leading voice in the negotiations and their interests were paramount.Five weeks ago he said the compact has a clear differentiation between refugees and migrants; it recognises a state’s right to control their borders. It has proposals to help states build capacity in controlling their borders. And there is an explicit acknowledgement of states’ responsibility to accept the return of their nationals who no longer have the right to remain elsewhere.In other words what he’s saying is, the compact is going to affect the countries where the migrants are coming from, not where they’re going to. Which is the complete opposite of the argument you’re hearing from opponents like Nigel Farage.One side has been telling fibs in the debate and I’m pretty sure I know which one.But here in New Zealand, we’ve had none of that from our politicians.The Foreign Minister, Winston Peters revealed the Crown Law legal advice and our support for the compact simultaneously giving us no chance for public debate.He did so in the last hour of the last day of Parliament, denying debate in the House.The Government led us to believe that they hadn’t made up their mind until the last minute and then presented a fait accompli.I found that untenable. So much for being the most open and transparent government ever. They’re starting to look a bit tricky dicky and devious.
Mark Hetfield is the President and CEO of HIAS, the oldest refugee assistance organization in operation. We discuss our humanitarian obligations to refugees, the tremendous benefits that they bring to American society, and bust the misconceptions about the current refugee situation in the US. Taking refugees is an act of humanity: Refugees have escaped persecution, their country, their homes, and their jobs in order to survive. The Refugee Convention of 1951 is an international law that requires countries to give them protection. We bring refugees to the US because it’s a way to protect human rights and our collective humanity. Refugees are a tremendous positive force: They are among the most productive members of society because they have lost everything, and they know that they can’t take anything for granted. In the US, refugees have contributed many billions of dollars more than they take in services. Some of our most successful companies, such as Google and Intel, were started by refugees. We have enormous untapped capacity to resettle refugees: The US can take in hundreds of thousands of refugees without noticing the impact or the stress. Many faith-based agencies are clamoring to welcome and help more refugees, but the exhaustive and extreme vetting process to enter the country and the cut in funding will result in the resettlement of less than 20,000 refugees in the US this year. Find out more: Mark Hetfield is the CEO and President of HIAS, a refugee assistance organization, and a major implementing partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency and the U.S. Department of State.
Ai Weiwei’s Law of the Journey, 2017, an imposing installation featuring a 60-metre-long boat crowded with hundreds of anonymous refugee figures, provokes this frank discussion of Australia’s response to asylum seekers arriving by boat – and today’s approach to refugees globally. What is the relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention when more people have been forced to flee their homes now than at any time since the World War? How does international law influence domestic politics around the world? What are the repercussions of Australia’s bipartisan policy of offshore processing on Manus and Nauru, and is the country prepared to deal with current crises, such as the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, or future pressures of people displaced by climate change? International legal expert Guy Goodwin-Gill of UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law; lawyer and prize-winning Offshore author Madeline Gleeson; and award-winning Guardian journalist Ben Doherty talk law, policy, politics and solutions. The panel was moderated by Elaine Pearson, Australia Director, Human Rights Watch. Presented by the Biennale of Sydney and UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.
Helping Refugees & Conflict-Affected Entrepreneurs Launch & Grow Their Businesses in the Middle East: Alice Bosley & Patricia Letayf of Five One Labs. What do you think when you hear the word refugee? For Alice Bosley and Patricia Letayf, Co-Founders of Five One Labs, it makes them think of innovation, passion, creativity and grit. Since the war began in Syria in 2011, nearly five million Syrian refugees have been displaced across the Middle East and Europe. Five One Labs has launched a startup incubator in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to help some of the 250,000 Syrian refugees and over 1 million Iraqi refugees in the area rebuild their lives and livelihoods. The program is designed to provide training, mentorship, inclusive communities, and support to build businesses. The name “Five One” comes from the 1951 Refugee Convention that gives refugees the right to work. Their incubator will empower young men and women from displaced and host communities in starting scalable, innovative businesses - benefiting the entrepreneurs while also strengthening the local economy through training, mentorship and community building. Five One Labs first cohort is scheduled to begin this October in Erbil, Iraq and they are crowdfunding with a matching grant from the Tent Foundation via Indiegogo https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/five-one-labs-startup-incubator-for-refugees-entrepreneurship#/
In Episode 10 of Series 2 of The Rights Track Todd talks to Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR's Representative to the UK about refugees. We get some hard facts and statistics on numbers of refugees and where they're from, discuss the role of the 1951 Refugee Convention, ask whether Angela Merkel's open invitation to refugees was moral or misguided and whether the UK is playing its part in protecting those fleeing war, famine and persecution. 0.00- 5.30 Gonzalo provides some startling statistics on numbers of refugees (In 2016 65.6 million forcibly uprooted - more than 20 millions seeking safety across a border, 40 million uprooted but who stay within their country - 20 people displaced every minute of every day) Majority of refugees 55% come today from just 3 countries: Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan - Syria alone more than 5 million, South Sudan at highest rate Focus in the media has been on the arrival of refugees in Europe, but important to remember that 85% are in developing countries like Turkey, Pakistan, Iran who host millions of refugees - most refugees by far stay in their region of origin 5.30-15.40 Gonzalo talks about the ‘secondary movement' of refugees and explains that a significant drop in refugee funding to regions in the Middle East was a driver for refugees to leave and try to come to places like Europe. He says the emphasis needs to be on strengthening the aid to those developing countries so they can meet the minimum needs (water, food, health) of refugees in countries close to them and also provide them with new opportunities otherwise they will want to move. People think the majority of refugees are simply fleeing poverty but that is not the case Gonzalo explains how the rights of refugees are enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and how important it is that countries which have signed up to the convention live top to their commitments because it is a legal obligation Gonzalo rejects claims that the Convention should be revisited or scrapped, explaining it has helped save millions of lives. He believes the problem is not the convention itself, but the failure of certain Government to uphold their commitments Todd asks Gonzalo for his thoughts on the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's statement that all refugees were welcome and whether her statement was moral or misguided Gonzalo says her statement showed great leadership and that the problem was that other leaders did not follow suit - not enough solidarity within Europe Gonzalo believes there has been too much focus on stopping boats making the dangerous journey to Europe without thinking about the alternative and without providing the sort of aid that might help/encourage them to stay where they are 15.40-end Some discussion about the UK position. Gonzalo describes UK as one of the most important donors of humanitarian aid in the world, giving substantial funding for example to help Syrian refugees in places like Jordan and Lebanon. It has also stepped up numbers of Syrian refugees that it will help resettle Todd summarises some of the key points made by Gonzalo in the interview
Pull up a chair, and we'll pour you some tea. A recent Executive Order from President Trump has the world talking about the United States and refugees. This week, Megan asked Kelly to help her sit down and sort through the news, identifying facts, gathering some expert opinions, and listening to the stories of people close to the situation. It's a super-sized episode of Sorta Awesome (and they still didn't even come close to covering it all!), and of course, you'll hear your Awesomes of the Week! SHOW NOTES E Ku'u Morning Dew on Pandora Twice Removed President Trump's Refugee Order: 5 Things to Know, Preemptive Love Facts and Figures about Refugees, UNHCR Refugees are already vigorously vetted. I know because I vetted them, The Washington Post Five Myths of the Debate over Trump's Refugee Executive Order, National Review Terrorism and Immigration, A Risk Analysis, CATO Institute The 1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR Syrian Refugees Feel More Welcome in Europe that in the Gulf, Bloomberg What Trump's Executive Order on Immigration Does - and Doesn't Do, The Atlantic Gateway of Grace Kholoud Sews Find Kelly on her blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram! Find Megan on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! Visit sortaawesomeshow.com for show notes on this and every episode. And don’t forget to find us in the Sorta Awesome Hangout on Facebook , @sortaawesomeshow on Instagram, and @sortaawesomepod on Twitter!
Amber Moffett, Graduate Associate Director of the Human Trafficking Center, joins host Seth Daire for a discussion about how refugees and asylees are vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation. They explain the difference between refugee and asylee status, and how a ‘well-founded fear’ because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular group is required, along with a long vetting process. Those who lack citizenship rights to protect them are in a precious situation. While the United States can't take care of everybody, the current refugee crisis requires a thoughtful and compassionate response, as the effects ripple throughout the world, and demonizing refugees adds to their vulnerability, making them easier prey for human traffickers. Sources: Statelessness: http://cmsny.org/the-stateless-in-the-united-states/ 1951 Refugee Convention: http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/1951-refugee-convention.html Screening Process for Refugee Entry into the US: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/11/20/infographic-screening-process-refugee-entry-united-states Moffett, Amber. "Sending the Vulnerable to Traffickers: A discussion of refugee vulnerability and migration policies." 2015. Colorado Asylum Project
Chaotic flows of refugees and migrants – the most since World War II – have challenged leaders in Western Europe and North America. “The reactions to those big flows are undermining our institutions in important ways and degrading our politics,” says Wilson Center Fellow Joseph Cassidy in this week’s podcast. Before joining the Wilson Center this summer, Cassidy spent 25 years in the U.S. Department of State focusing on humanitarian and human rights issues and multilateral diplomacy. In a Wilson Council briefing taped before the close of the U.S. presidential election, Roger-Mark De Souza, director of population, environmental security, and resilience, talks with Cassidy about current humanitarian challenges. The inability of governments and institutions to effectively cope with the influx of displaced peoples has caused the politicization of what was once a bipartisan issue, says Cassidy. We have seen “the rise of demagogues who have identified refugees and other migrants as people worth resenting and fearing.” As a result, it has “coarsened” our politics. Anti-immigrant sentiment is not new, but Cassidy says it can be “mitigated by smart policies and principled politicians, [or] it can be exaggerated by bad policies and unprincipled politicians.” Part of the problem is an aging legal regime that needs updating. The UN Refugee Convention was adopted in 1951. The nature of conflicts has changed, as have the armed groups involved, the extent to which civilians are targeted, and the opportunities for victims to flee. Additionally, the Refugee Convention does not provide legal protections to particularly vulnerable groups that any modern negotiations would address, says Cassidy, namely women, children, indigenous people, LGBT individuals, or the disabled. Nor is climate change considered. However, many experts are concerned that re-opening the Refugee Convention in the current atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment would degrade the existing rights of victims, such as they are, and reduce the responsibilities of states. While acknowledging the risks, Cassidy noted there are numerous other frameworks to influence state behavior, including, international guidelines, regional arrangements, and national laws. According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, there are three main reasons for the current increase in refugee populations: 1) protracted conflicts, 2) an increased frequency in the prevalence of conflicts, and 3) a decreased capacity to accommodate refugees and internally displaced individuals. To reduce the number of displaced people and ultimately the pressure on Western institutions and politics, Cassidy believes “we we need to smooth the transition from humanitarian assistance to development assistance” and bring the two fields closer together. Many humanitarians worry development workers don’t take protection seriously enough, while development workers worry humanitarians do not think long term. Asked about his expectations for the tenure of new UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Cassidy noted five major questions to watch. Humanitarians are excited to have a long-time high commissioner for refugees at the helm, someone who is “well respected for his competence and his principles,” he says. The international community, in general, does not do enough to “identify…enhance…and utilize refugee value.” Guterres may help change this, bringing attention to refugee conditions and humanitarian needs. In September, the United Nations hosted two summits, the first of which launched a two-year negotiation aimed at addressing outstanding humanitarian problems, and the second of which collected pledges to increase humanitarian funding, refugee resettlement, and education and occupational opportunities. During his fellowship, Cassidy will be watching these processes closely and engaging with colleagues in related fields like environmental protection, economic migration, and conflict resolution. Joseph Cassidy spoke during a Wilson Council briefing on November 1, 2016. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play.
Guest expert: Jean-François DurieuxThe 1951 Refugee Convention was a major advance for the protection of people under persecution, defining the concept of refugees and the legal obligation of States to provide them with protection. However, the current system has been put under great stress by the scale and complexity of recent developments, which was the motivation for organizing the UN High-Level Plenary on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants in September 2016. Having an understanding of the relevant legal frameworks for the protection of refugees is, in this context, critical for those working in the humanitarian sector.This learning session provided an introduction to refugee law and other legal frameworks granting protection to refugees. Participants were provided with a presentation on the fundamental concepts in these legal frameworks and their legal and operational limitations. Following this, there was an opportunity for questions.Read more and access session resources at https://phap.org/21oct2016
Guest expert: Jean-François DurieuxThe 1951 Refugee Convention was a major advance for the protection of people under persecution, defining the concept of refugees and the legal obligation of States to provide them with protection. However, the current system has been put under great stress by the scale and complexity of recent developments, which was the motivation for organizing the UN High-Level Plenary on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants in September 2016. Having an understanding of the relevant legal frameworks for the protection of refugees is, in this context, critical for those working in the humanitarian sector.This learning session provided an introduction to refugee law and other legal frameworks granting protection to refugees. Participants were provided with a presentation on the fundamental concepts in these legal frameworks and their legal and operational limitations. Following this, there was an opportunity for questions.Read more and access session resources at https://phap.org/21oct2016
Thinking ahead: displacement, transition, solutions (Forced Migration Review 52)
A non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Lebanon does not grant refugee status to Iraqis, many of whom end up spending long periods of time in detention.
Thinking ahead: displacement, transition, solutions (Forced Migration Review 52)
There is little protection and assistance available for Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries, especially as these countries are predominantly non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is consequently hard for refugees to support themselves.
On 27 November 2014, migration and refugee expert Dr Khalid Koser addressed the Lowy Institute on why the 1951 UN Refugee Convention needs to be reformed.
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2014. Seminar by Jason Pobjoy (Blackstone Chambers) recorded on 5 February 2014 at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. International law has played an important role in advancing the rights of refugee children. In this seminar Mr Pobjoy considers how international refugee law and international law on the rights of the child might be creatively aligned to respond to the reality that a child seeking international protection is both a child and a refugee. Specifically, he examines three contexts – defined as ‘modes of interaction' – where the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) might be engaged to assist in determining the status of a child seeking international protection. First, the CRC may provide procedural guarantees not otherwise provided under international refugee law. Secondly, the CRC may be invoked as an interpretative aid to inform the interpretation of the Refugee Convention, and in particular the Article 1 definition. Thirdly, the CRC may give rise to an independent source of status outside the international refugee protection regime. These three modes of interaction provide a ‘child rights framework' for assessing the status of a refugee child.
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2014. Seminar by Jean-François Durieux (RSC and the Graduate Institute, Geneva) recorded on 12 February 2014 at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. What special sense of duty connects us to those people whom we call refugees, and how does this duty translate into asylum? What does the practice of asylum tell us about who we are, as individuals as well as members of political communities? How does one morally justify the special concern we feel for, and consequently the privileged treatment we give, refugees as compared with other foreigners in need? Revisiting the main features of the ethical debate over asylum and refugeehood, Mr Durieux argues that there cannot be one coherent set of answers to these questions, because in today's world the concepts of ‘refugee' and ‘asylum' describe not one, but three distinct realities. The 1951 Refugee Convention provides a coherent framework to explain the first asylum paradigm, centered on admission and on the figure of the refugee as a ‘moral comrade'. The concept of persecution, emphasising the prohibition of discrimination and the identifying value of tolerance, is key to understanding this first paradigm. However, one must acknowledge that a proper understanding of the moral duty to admit and integrate refugees does not suffice to explain contemporary state practice in dealing with the ‘refugee problem' as a matter of solidarity. Mr Durieux also discusses two additional asylum paradigms at work in today's world: one takes disaster as a motivation for action, and rescue as the underpinning moral and legal imperative; and the other rests upon a duty not to return individuals to specific forms of danger, absent affinity or even compassion. He examines some of the impacts which the co-existence of these three paradigms has on the global refugee regime, and their implications for law- and policy-making on asylum, both within and among states.
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2014. Seminar by Dr Ana Aliverti (Warwick School of Law) recorded on 29 January 2014 at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Fifteen years have passed since the High Court delivered the ground-breaking decision in Adimi [1999], in which Lord Justice Brown called attention to the scarce observance of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention in domestic criminal proceedings against asylum seekers arriving in Britain, or en route to another country, without proper documents. In response to the judgment, the British Parliament incorporated section 31 in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, providing for a defence for refugees against certain criminal charges under a number of conditions. While the then Attorney General stated that only meritorious cases would be prosecuted, recent Court of Appeal decisions (R v MV and others [2010]; R v Adom (Bismark) [2013]; R v Mateta and others [2013]) suggest that successful asylum claimants continue to be prosecuted for their illegal entry into or transit through Britain. Indeed, even if there are no precise figures about the number of asylum seekers who have been prosecuted in such circumstances, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) considered that the number of cases referred to it revealed a ‘significant and potentially widespread misunderstanding or abuse of the law' (CCRC, 2012: 15). Although these judicial developments concern cases at the appeal stage, little is known about the everyday work of the lower criminal courts and how working practices of prosecutors, defence lawyers and the judiciary influence the handling of cases involving asylum seekers accused of immigration-related crimes. Dr Aliverti argues that the examination of those practices can shed light on the reasons for the continuing criminalisation of asylum seekers, and perhaps the key to its undoing.
Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2013. Seminar by Professor Susan Kneebone (University of Oxford) recorded on 30 October 2013 at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. In this talk, Professor Kneebone explains the coincidence between the Australian governments ambivalent acceptance of its obligations under the Refugee Convention and its securitised approach to regional solutions for refugees under the Bali Process (that is, the Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime). Australia is situated in the Asia and Pacific region which is host to some 10.6 million people of concern to UNHCR, representing almost 30 per cent of the global refugee population. Yet few countries in the region are signatories to the Refugee Convention, and there is no effective regional engagement leading to durable solutions for refugees.Professor Kneebone explains how the highly politicised discourse in Australia on refugees reflects a long-standing culture of border control and the ability to use the legal system with impunity.
Current practice in African states highlights both the potential and the limitations of the 1969 African Refugee Convention in providing protection to persons displaced from fragile states.
Stopping the boats is not a pipedream, as too many in the commentariat claim. And far too much is made of the constraints imposed by the Refugee Convention. It is for us, the nation state, to interpret this and not interested lobbies. Not only should John Howard’s Pacific solution be restored, but asylum should only be considered for those coming direct from a place of alleged persecution. Further, those coming without papers from Indonesia or any other safe third country should be presumed to be acting in bad faith, and refused further consideration. In summary the government must stop outsourcing this part of the refugee programme to criminal people smugglers. If a government can’t govern, its leader should hand in her commission. The palliative of substantially increasing the refugee programme would be a serious mistake if this were to be as mismanaged as it has been in the last few years. It is essential that those chosen be likely to be contributors to Australia. There are, for example, Christian communities in the Arab world who live in fear for the property their persons and even their lives. On all experience they make excellent immigrants. The Rev Fred Nile persuaded the Howard government to give particular recognition to the plight of the Egyptian Copts, but this was subsequently abandoned.
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