Asylum In France Research Articles

Navigating Asylum, Resettlement, and Integration: Syrian Refugees in France Beyond the Suffering Slot

Abstract This article addresses the way that humanitarian conditioning continues in the lives of refugees after receiving asylum in Europe while also highlighting the perspective of refugees as they experience official and informal processes of integration. The ways the rhetoric of suffering must be invoked at various times throughout the asylum process are well documented. Less attention, however, has been paid to how asylum recipients in Europe continue to navigate these structures. Drawing on over 20 months of ethnographic research in Paris, France, this article explores the way that these resettled Syrian refugees encounter the rhetoric of suffering and other asylum structures in their everyday lives as an ongoing form of humanitarian conditioning. Through a focus on capabilities and aspirations, this article ultimately reveals how resettled refugees navigate this humanitarian conditioning to carve out lives and create new trajectories of integration in the wake of asylum in France.

Female genital mutilation/cutting as a ground for asylum in France

AbstractThis study examines how France's national asylum legislation has changed politically and ideologically from following a gender‐blind policy to recognizing gender‐based violence as a ground for asylum. Among European countries, France receives the largest number of female asylum seekers (FAS) from sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries, where female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is practiced. Although France was one of the first countries to recognize FGM/C as a reason for granting asylum, it was reluctant to accept FAS as a “particular social group (PSG).” This article analyzes the increase in asylum claims based on FGM/C in the 2000s and examines the political discourses on changing asylum legislation up to the 2010s. Data from official reports of government organizations were examined to investigate the decisions on asylum applications involving FGM/C. France changed its policies in the 2000s to include gender equality in its republican identity due to ultra‐right party and social campaigns criticizing male members of minority groups for violence and discrimination against women. The then conservative government exploited these circumstances and enacted restrictive immigration laws that addressed FGM/C grievances partially; the succeeding socialist government recognized FGM/C as a ground for asylum. This study concludes by arguing that the 2011 European directive was a turning point for French asylum legislation to include gender‐sensitive interpretation of the grounds under the Convention on the Status of Refugees, in line with European policy. However, the status of SSA women and girls remains uncertain while they are subjected to medical examination and the application range of PSG could be reconsidered.

Palestinians and Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’ Seeking Asylum in France in the Wake of the Syrian War

AbstractThis article examines French immigration policy through the experiences of Palestinians displaced by the war in Syria who are currently residing in France. In response to the Syrian refugee crisis, France has instituted an ‘asylum visa’ that enables refugees from Syria who are awarded the visa to travel legally from the Middle East to France to apply for asylum there. The asylum visa, also referred to as a ‘humanitarian visa’, extends to Syro-Palestinians. Humanitarian visas have been celebrated by some as a means by which individuals in need of international protection can seek asylum in Europe in a dignified and safe manner. I argue that it is too early to celebrate the French asylum visa. Indeed, evidence shows that steps to provide legal routes to Europe for asylum-seekers through humanitarian visas coexist with rather than overturn broader policies that seek to deter the majority of asylum-seekers from entering Europe.

Clinical agreement with self-report of physical violence and torture in women seeking asylum in France

Women are a particularly vulnerable group among persons seeking asylum but are still required to provide clinical evidence of acts of violence inflicted against them. In this study the authors describe patient histories, dermatological lesions and other injuries arising from physical violence and torture in female asylum-seekers attending a specialist outpatient service in France. Twenty-seven women were assessed during 2016-2018. Clinical corroboration of lesions with patients' self-reports was affirmative in >90% (25/27) of cases. Health care services in recipient countries must be configured and resourced to support women seeking asylum, and health care professionals must be receptive and sensitive to women's self-reported histories.

Sprawy Czesława Miłosza w zapiskach osobistych Marii Dąbrowskiej i Anny Kowalskiej

One of the threads of the dailies and the correspondence of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska published so far in excerpts is the so-called “Miłosz’s case”. The poet became the cause of a conflict between these two writers of a purely personal nature, which also influenced their evaluation of the poet’s work and life decisions. They also referred to Czesław Miłosz’s decision in 1951, when he applied for asylum in France, which was perceived by many in the literary and political circles both in Poland and abroad as an act of treason. The article shows some of the less known circumstances of the complicated “Milosz’s life affairs” from those years, seen from the perspective of both writers and their immediate environment.

Evidence of physical violence and torture in refugees and migrants seeking asylum in France

ObjectivesThe increasing numbers of migrants and refugees to Europe include persons seeking asylum, many of whom will have experienced physical violence and torture. Here we describe the personal histories and clinical evidence of violence and torture among attendees at a public health specialist service in France. MethodsPhysicians in a multidisciplinary team conducted examinations to corroborate refugees’ skin lesions and other signs of injury with self-reported histories of physical violence and torture to provide evidence for asylum applications. ResultsThe 240 asylum seekers assessed between October 2016 and September 2018 were mostly male (89% (213/240)) with median age 29 years (IQR 26–34 years) and originating from north and west Africa. Consultations took place on average 15 months after arrival in France. In most cases (58%) the reason for seeking asylum was political persecution. Almost all attendees (94%) presented with scars. The most common mechanisms of injury were beatings (84%), burns (32%) and cuts/stab wounds (15%). Sexual violence was reported for 37% of women (10/27) and 4% of men (9/213). Police tended to use multiple methods for inflicting injuries, whereas the army and non-state actors mostly inflicted beatings. Sexual violation was most commonly reported for violence inflicted by family members or partners. Corroboration of lesions with patients’ histories of physical violence and torture was affirmative in 93% (224/240) of cases. ConclusionFor this ethnically diverse group, a specialist service which can provide clinical corroboration of self-reported histories of physical violence and torture to support asylum applications is an essential minimum.

Clothing and refugee identity in Des sneakers comme Jay-Z

This article presents and analyzes how clothing shapes refugee identity in Des sneakers comme Jay-Z, an engaged photographic project from 2018 by French photographers Frédéric Delangle and Ambroise Tézenas. Commissioned by the association Emmaüs Solidarité, the series features forty-six portraits of men seeking asylum in France. The refugees wear outfits they selected from available donations at the Centre de premier accueil de la Porte de la Chapelle in Paris. First-person texts featuring the men’s thoughts about their clothing choices accompany the images. I contend that vestimentary choices in Des sneakers comme Jay-Z reflect each man’s sense of agency in the social construction of his nascent transnational identity as he adapts to life within the French Republic. Although casual, everyday outfits rarely draw engaged reflection by those around us, photographing the refugees in their selected outfits and questioning them about these items creates a project that defamiliarizes common garments to encourage viewers to reflect on clothing’s role in fashioning new subjectivities. Reading the accompanying texts through the lens of the sociology of clothing and fashion, the article investigates how the men’s apparel choices reflect both nostalgia for their homelands and a desire to integrate into French society. Through the shared human experience of self-presentation through dress, Des sneakers comme Jay-Z thus constructs a narrative emphasizing refugees’ basic humanity in order to contest anti-migrant discourses.

Seeking Asylum in France

Seeking Asylum in France

Censorship Towards Czesław Miłosz in Poland in the Fifties after Having Chosen the Emigration

This article shows the outline of problems connected with censoring Czesław Miłosz’s literary output in Poland in the 1950s, when the poet breaks off with the national government and chooses political asylum in France, becoming an émigré. The article looks into (in the space of decade) the periods of particularly tightened control towards Miłosz, shows how the censorship was tightening and relaxing when it came to his name. In the Polish October several poems and an excerpt from the novel The Seizure of Power was published, though – despite publishing advertisements – none of the poet’s books came out.

Networks and refugees: Salomon Grumbach's activism in late Third Republic France

This case study of Salmon Grumbach offers new perspectives on French Jewish use of the public sphere during the interwar years, particularly during the refugee crisis of the 1930s. An Alsatian Jew, journalist and interwar socialist politician, Grumbach cultivated a web-like system of connections with diverse individuals and groups, from official organizations in Paris to efforts well outside the capital. He used this informal network to influence public opinion on political and human rights issues, even when not in elected office. In the 1930s, as an anti-fascist politician and a vocal champion for refugees he received hundreds of written appeals from persecuted foreigners seeking asylum in France, many of whom were Jewish. In attending to their pleas for travel papers, residency permits and liberation from French internment camps, Grumbach used his network to employ all means possible to help them, even when popular opinion worked against him.

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

L’argent des aliénés : pécule et monnaie de nécessité à l’hôpital psychiatrique autonome de Cadillac

The in-house rules at lunatic asylum in France allowed them to issue necessity money (tokens and gift vouchers) as payment for work performed in the hospital therapeutic workshops. The Psychiatric Hospital in Cadillac, France, was thus able to issue its own private money (aluminium coins and notes marked in French francs) for the benefit of inmates working in the hospital from 1949 to 1957, i.e. a period of eight years. This internal and very specific form of retribution for inmates’work, which allowed them to purchase goods at the hospital canteen, seems to have been extremely rare in the history of French psychiatry.

Assommons les pauvres! by Shumona Sinha

Monzó’s Guadalajara, brilliantly translated by Peter Bush: a normal world has nothing to do with the normal. Both Franz Kafka and John Barth (whom Monzó has translated, along with J. D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway ) are heavy influences on several of the stories. In one titled “Gregor,” Monzó rewrites The Metamorphosis as a beetle waking up to find himself as an overweight teenage boy. As he struggled to control his new burdensome body, “his family stared at him from one corner of the room with a mixture of admiration and panic.” In “Centripetal Force,” a man tries to leave his apartment only to find himself back in his hallway. When he tries to enlist the help of firemen, they too get stuck in a stairwell reminiscent of an M. C. Escher print. Monzó’s gift isn’t in creating existential loops, but in creating characters who will do anything to escape these traps. The second of five sections of the collection, in which Monzó rewrites myths and fairy tales through a contemporary , thus cynical, lens, reveals Monzó’s Barthian influence. In “Outside the Gates of Troy,” Ulysses and his soldiers fester in the wooden horse for days, waiting for the Trojans to fall for the simplistic trap. “Helvetian Freedoms” follows up William Tell, this time focusing on his son, Walter. Now a grown man, Walter recalls to his teenage son the legendary story of his father shooting an apple off his head. “How could you let him do that?” his son asks, making Walter reexamine that moment: if William cared for him, Walter reasons, his emotions would have made his hands tremble, making him miss his target. Though one of the pitfalls of existential or absurdist literature is the sacrifice of “heart” and emotion for “ideas” and philosophy, Monzó, in small, masterful strokes, gives his stories a full-bodied existence. In “Gregor,” for example, as the transformed beetle-now-boy lies naked on the floor, helpless in his predicament, his mother, still a bug, strokes her son’s eyelashes with her antennae. In Guadalajara, Quim Monzó joins contemporary short-story writers such as Etgar Keret and George Saunders with the ability to show the absurd in the real, and how the absurd reveals the real. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Shumona Sinha. Assommons les pauvres ! Paris. Editions de l’Olivier. 2011. isbn 9782879297866 Shumona Sinha was a prizewinning poet in Bengali before moving to France ten years ago. This is her second novel in French. The title is taken from a prose poem of Baudelaire’s, translated as “Let’s beat up the poor.” The narrator, like the author herself until recently, works as an interpreter in a government service investigating the claims of refugees for asylum in France. She is torn between sympathy for these refugees and her desire to be part of a more elitist French culture. She feels different from the other interpreters and sits alone, reading a book, while they gossip. She is both aware of her skin color (which she terms “slate”) and the attraction of the blond, blue-eyed woman with whom she works. (There is an element of sexual as well as cultural ambiguity in her narrative.) Arrested after she hits a poor refugee on the head with a bottle, she tells her story to a police investigator, ominously named Monsieur K. He is quickly aware of how she needs to be different from the refugee clients with whom she has worked, which he misinterprets as hatred for the poor. Her gesture, however, rather like that of Baudelaire in his poem, is a way of making contact with those she both pities and scorns. The men scorn her as well, as a woman who does not fulfill a traditional role, and she knows the horrors of life in the suburban ghettos. While she has chosen to come to Europe, the refugees from the subcontinent are the victims of politics but also of nature, Partition, and floods. They must recite stories to try to impress the French government. There is considerable humor in her description of how the refugees cannot remember the stories told to them by those who brought them to France...

Author Profile: Atiq Rahimi

March 09April notebook NEW BOOK RELEASES:Old City Hall byRobertRotenberg,ShadowandLight by Jonathan Rabb,Pieces for the Left Hand by J. RobertLennon MOREON PAGE6 44 Icame to understand my delusions,and the realization that Ihad been cutofffrom societybyexile and that Icould no longer be usefulto it and serve itto thebest ofmy abilities, aspirations, and talents. I know that I was condemned for my dreams,my ideas. ^ ?Fyodor Dostoevsky, SelectedLetters (1987) Have a comment or suggestion? Send a letter to the editor via the feedback link on our website or mail to: WLT Letters 630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110 University ofOklahoma Norman,OK 73019-4033 USA Author Profile Atiq Rahimi Born inKabul in1962,Atiq Rahimi livedin Afghanistanuntilhis early twenties. After the Soviet invasion, Rahimi fled to Pakistan, where he remained until receiving political asylum in France. After earning a doctorate in audiovisual communications at the Sorbonne, he directed documentaries and commercials for French television. Since 2000, he has publishedfournovels, including Earthand Ashes, which received several awards for its film adaptation in 2004. Rahimi received the Prix Goncourt last November for Stone of Patience?a novel that explores a woman's struggle to care for her husbandwho was paralyzedbya battle injury. Stone of Patience was written after his 2002 return to Afghanistan. Rahimi currently spends time in both Kabul and Paris. Compiled by Kate Long U Rahimi's Syngue Sabour (2008) isa magnificent novel about patience, love,and the crueltyof thewar in Afghanistan. His writing is limpid,straightforward,and poetic}} ?Tahar Benjeiioun March-April 2009 i5 ...

Women Seeking Asylum

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees has been a major source of debate in European countries in recent years. However, little attention has been paid to the gendered impacts of recent developments in asylum policy and legislation. This article will explore the experiences of women seeking asylum in France in order to analyse the way that the asylum decision-making process operates through gendered lenses that ignore the complexity of women's experiences. The multiple actors involved in the process, and the role played by discretionary power in the decision making on asylum means that it is impossible to point to just one source of gendered inequalities within this process, and thus a careful unpacking of legislation, jurisprudence and official policies but also of more informal procedures and practices is required.

Comparative Perspectives of Constitutional Asylum in France, Italy, and Germany: Requiescat in Pace?

Most countries provide asylum through domestic legislation, such as a statute incorporating the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. France, Italy, and Germany stand out as three of very few European countries specifically to guarantee a right of asylum in their national Constitutions. The origin, wording, and scope of these constitutional provisions vary, depending on historical factors specific to each country. This article examines the right of asylum guaranteed in the Constitutions of France, Italy, and Germany from a historical perspective. It discusses how this right has evolved in all three countries, especially in light of the Refugee Convention and recent European Asylum Legislation. It concludes that however unique and individual constitutional asylum has traditionally been regarded as in France, Italy, and Germany, international obligations and recent European commitments have absorbed its distinctiveness, making it a redundant, almost obsolete, concept.

Human Rights in a Globalizing World: Who Pays the Human Cost of Migration?1

IntroductionUndocumented people from Mexico, Iraq, and other countries of the Global South risk their lives every day to enter the United States, France and other countries in the Global North, and many lose this wager on their lives. On May 13, 2003, at least 75 people, mostly from Mexico and Central America, who had just illegally crossed the US border, were packed into a 48-foot long truck trailer in order to sneak by a Border Patrol checkpoint approximately 45 miles inside the United States. Locked in the trailer, eighteen died that day from heat, dehydration and a shortage of oxygen and 56 others were caught by police, one of whom died later. The driver was arrested and, after a trial in late 2006, found guilty of smuggling resulting in death. In the penalty phase of the trial, in early 2007, the jury determined that the driver should be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.2Two years earlier, on February 17, 2001, the freighter East Sea that was carrying 912 migrants, most of who were Iraqi Kurds, was abandoned by its crew of smugglers and ran aground on a French Mediterranean beach. Although the migrants were crammed into holds in unhygienic conditions during the entire six-day voyage from Turkey and 22 had to be taken to French hospitals, none of them died. The migrants were given time to apply for asylum but more than a third of them disappeared without attempting to obtain asylum in France.3Many of those who have died trying to reach France or European countries further north such as Germany, Netherlands, or the United Kingdom, lost their lives in attempting to enter Spain or Italy from North Africa. At least 13 sub-Saharan Africans died trying to climb over the fences around the Spanish enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, in Morocco in October 2005, and in 2006 many more died attempting to cross the Atlantic ocean from the western coast of Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal to the Spanish Canary Islands, or the Mediterranean Sea from Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya to Malta and Italian islands. Precise estimates of those who have died in the water are not possible because many boats and bodies are never found.4One study analyzed the remains of those who were believed to have died during an unauthorized transit from Mexico to the United States between January 1, 2002, and December 31, 2003, in any county along the 650-mile section of the US-Mexican border from Yuma, Arizona to El Paso, Texas. Among the 409 migrants who died, environmental heat exposure (n=250; 61.1%) was the leading cause of death, followed by vehicle crashes (n=33; 8.1%) and drowning (n=24; 5.9%). Male decadents exceeded female decadents by nearly 3 to 1. More than half of those who died were known to be Mexican nationals (n=235; 57.5%) and were aged 20 to 39 years (n=213; 52.0%); the nationality of the others who died could not be determined.5These data cause us to question why people from Mexico and other countries are willing to risk their lives to emigrate. One analyst points out that on the African continent which is torn apart by poverty, disease, violence and corruption, a demographic and social time bomb ticks: half of Africa.s 900 million and growing population is under 17, and 40 percent live on less than $1.20 per day.6 There is a similar situation for the population in Mexico, 31 percent of which is under 15 years of age, and which has experienced a 25 percent decline in wages since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Along the US Border, the wages for many workers in the maquiladoras, the multinational sweatshops, are from 60 cents to $1 per hour,7 far below a living wage in Mexico.The younger populations in Mexico, Africa and other geographical areas often believe that they can get better jobs and provide more for their families and relatives by working in the United States, France and other countries in the Global North and they willingly put their lives at risk to reach these destinations. …

The Evolution of Asylum in France

The Evolution of Asylum in France

Les réfugiés en France sous la Monarchie de Juillet : l'impossible statut

The years from 1830 to 1848 constitute a turning point in the history of political asylum in France. During this period, for the first time ever, the political authorities were obliged to reflect on asylum and to establish a large-scale policy in order to cope with the arrival of almost 20,000 Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German refugees. The impossibility of defining this section of the population in conformity with juridical criteria or with well established frontiers is clearly reflected in the dictionaries of the French language, in the debates in the parliamentary assemblies as well as in the legislation adopted and its inapplicability. In view of the absence of a definition of a refugee, could the asylum policy under the July Monarchy be perceived as if it were based on law ? Wouldn't it be more accurate to argue that what prevailed should rather be defined as charitable measures ? This article aims at answering these questions and thereby understanding the nature of the principles that governed the treatment of refugees in France in this period.

From Sarajevo to Vichy: French Intellectuals and the Wages of Commitment in the Balkans

From Sarajevo to Vichy: French Intellectuals and the Wages of Commitment in the Balkans Richard J. Golsan IN A RECENT ARTICLE assessing the impact of the war in the former Yugoslavia on France's intellectual community, Emmanuel Wallon asserts that not since the Dreyfus Affair has a single event so profoundly affected traditional political allegiances and alignments as well as prevailing notions of civic responsibility as the conflict in the Balkans. Wallon adds that the nature and intensity of the commitments of any number of intellectuals confirm that for these individuals the issues raised by the conflict greatly surpassed strictly political concerns.1 Indeed, in his detailed account of his own engagement on behalf of Bosnia, Le Lys et la cendre, Bernard-Henri Levy describes the manner in which his involvement affected his worldview, his emotions, his friendships and even his self-image. By the time the Dayton peace accords were signed, Bosnia had become for Levy a seconde patrie, and he describes his passionate involvement on behalf of the Bosnian people as une histoire d'amour.2 If political considerations of the moment do not suffice to explain the intensity and duration of the commitments of Levy and many others including Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Edgar Morin, André Glucksmann, Annie Lebrun and Jacques Julliard, what was it about the Balkan conflict or the manner in which it was perceived that made it such a cause célèbre among many of France's most visible intellectuals? Even Levy, while describing the passion of his own commitment to Bosnia, notes that the country whose cause he espoused "n'était pas de mon genre" (Le Lys, 10). Indeed, as Wallon observes, the Parisian sound and fury aroused first by the war in Croatia and especially by the brutal conflict in Bosnia were disproportionate both to a traditionally limited French interest in the area and the modest size of the countries involved (376). Tony Judt, for one, attributes the French intellectuals' engagement in part to their abiding concern for broader issues which were central to the Balkan conflict and especially to the Bosnian war. These include the defense of the rights of the individual and of ethnic minorities—above all VOL. XXXVII, NO. 2 79 L'Esprit Créateur the right to self-determination—and an outspoken faith in the ideal of "Europe," which, as Judt insinuates, remained nevertheless fairly vague and ill-defined in the writings Finkielkraut, Levy, et al. devoted to the conflict. Judt also asserts more cynically that the defense of the breakaway republics—and especially Finkielkraut's championing of Franjo Tudjman's Croatia—coupled with assaults on the Serbian cause, put the French intellectuals in their favorite position, that of opposing the stance of their own government.3 If not overtly or systematically pro-Serb, François Mitterrand remained at best largely neutral throughout the conflict . As Bernard-Henri Levy recounts in Le Lys et la cendre, Jacques Chirac, for his part, refused to intervene until late in the game.4 Judt cites other motives for the engagements of the intellectuals as well. These include the opportunistic urge to be where the spotlights are as well as a desire to make amends for the errors of an earlier generation of French intellectuals, the majority of whom wrongly championed the communist East European dictatorships in the forties and fifties despite the horrors perpetrated by these regimes. This particular line of reasoning is of course in keeping with Judt's own assessment of that earlier generation as described in Past Imperfect,* but it also coincides with the view expressed by Finkielkraut in Comment peut-on être Croate? According to Finkielkraut, those Western Marxist intellectuals spared the terror of the Eastern Bloc were nonetheless blinded by it ideologically, even to the point of branding as reactionary bourgeois its dissidents seeking asylum in France.6 Finkielkraut's own engagement on behalf of Croatia clearly derives in part from his acute awareness of his predecessors' cecity. As he remarked in a 1994 essay in Le Messager Européen, for the sins of the fathers, today's French intelligentsia "éprouve le besoin irrésistible de se faire pardonner."7 The motives Judt offers to...