Rights Of Refugees Research Articles

Degradation by design: women and asylum in northern Europe

The increasingly punitive measures taken by European governments to deter people seeking asylum, including increased use of detention, internalised controls, reductions in in-country rights and procedural safeguards, have a hugely damaging impact on the lives and wellbeing of women survivors of torture, sexual and domestic violence. This article, based on a two-year research project examining Britain, Denmark and Sweden, involved more than 500 hours speaking with people seeking asylum, as well as interviews with practitioners. It highlights among other issues non-adherence to the Istanbul Convention (for Denmark and Sweden, who have ratified it); non-application of gender guidelines; and significant wholesale violations of refugee rights. It demonstrates some of the ways in which increasingly harsh policies impact on women seeking asylum and highlights the experiences relayed by some who are affected: those stuck in asylum systems and practitioners seeking to provide support. Indeed, it indicates that women seeking asylum in Britain, Denmark and Sweden are made more vulnerable to violence due to the actions or inactions of the states that are supposed to protect them.

A declaração universal dos direitos humanos no atual contexto internacional dos movimentos migratórios

Os direitos dos refugiados assumem uma relevância crescente na atualidade, em consequência do aumento dos movimentos migratórios.As Nações Unidas criaram uma Carta Mundial de Direitos Humanos, onde se inclui o direito de asilo e os direitos dos refugiados, na aprovação da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos2, de dois Pactos Internacionais sobre direitos humanos, da Convenção de Genebra sobre o Estatuto do Refugiado e da Declaração sobre Asilo Territorial.A União Europeia, através do Sistema Europeu Comum de Asilo, tem desenvolvido a proteção internacional de asilo e dos refugiados, que vai para além do que consagra o direito internacional.

Courting Asylum: How Asylum Claimants in Greece are Using Judicial Power to Combat neo-Refoulement and the EU-Turkey Safe Third Country Agreement

The international refugee regime is marked by a widening gap between the constitutional democratic values of countries in the global north and the practices employed by their state executives. While states have committed to the rights of refugees by joining the 1951 Refugee Convention, they have simultaneously subverted the rule of law in the name of security by instituting practices that externalize asylum: neo-refoulement. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which judicial power can be used to combat executive practices of neo-refoulement. This article considers asylum claims heard in the Greek appellate court system pertaining to the safe third country agreement between the European Union and Turkey. The article concludes that, under a system of coequal institutions, judicial power and case law harbour the potential for necessitating the consideration of all individual asylum cases effectively disarming practices of neo-refoulement.

Norm contestation in the digital era: campaigning for refugee rights

Abstract Activists in the internet era are taking action through online petitions, twitter storms and by forming new digital advocacy organizations such as Campact, 38 Degrees and GetUp!. However, no International Relations (IR) scholarship has systematically examined the role of digital advocacy organizations in norm contestation. Digital advocacy organizations warrant study given their international reach, their large memberships, their longevity, their frequent campaigning activity and their claimed impact. This article focuses on the responses of three digital advocacy organizations in Australia, the UK and Ireland to the same external crisis: an increasing number of refugees worldwide. It asks: when and why did these organizations engage in behavioural norm contestation during the refugee crisis? Their use of behavioural contestation is a puzzle, given that digital advocacy organizations have low implementation power. The article draws on interviews with activists and experts, and finds that advocacy groups firstly use discursive contestation (debating the meaning and importance of norms), and then may engage in behavioural contestation (influencing the implementation of norms). Discursive contestation is less costly, and perceived to be less effective, than behavioural contestation. The article suggests that digital advocacy organizations can mobilize people online and offline, and IR scholars should examine this important source of power. This article forms part of the special section of the May 2019 issue of International Affairs on ‘The dynamics of dissent’, guest-edited by Anette Stimmer and Lea Wisken.

Why Are You Seeking Refuge? Conducting Evaluations of Central American Asylum Seekers

Asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle region in Central America, comprised of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, many of them unaccompanied minors and families with young children, are arriving at the U.S. border in record high numbers. Many of them have been exposed to trauma and violence in their country of origin and have suffered human rights abuses. Their reception in the USA is increasingly adversarial. Under the Trump administration, there has been a rise in policies that endanger the human rights of Central American immigrants and refugees. Mental health professionals can play an important role in protecting their human rights and helping them in the asylum process. They can assist asylum seekers through conducting culturally informed psychological evaluations and as expert witnesses, testifying in court and producing court reports. This paper includes an overview of the legal and international context of the asylum process and discusses geopolitical factors affecting asylum seekers from Central America. Case examples of evaluations of Central American asylum seekers that were conducted by the author are provided to illustrate key points of how social workers can assist applicants in their asylum applications, thereby supporting their human rights.

Parents in Exile: Challenges of Parenting among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Bulgaria

Purpose: This paper looked into the experiences of refugee parents with an aim to uncover the challenges of parenting encountered during and after the asylum procedures in Bulgaria - a country placed at the bottom of the asylum recognition scale in Europe. Methods: Qualitative research through semi-structured interviews of eight parents originating from Iraq, Syria and Palestine was conducted during the 3 months’ period in 2016. Results: Empiric research conducted revealed that procedural shortcomings of refugee protection system in Bulgaria causes severe psychosocial stresses to families in that the factors, such as slow and deficient asylum procedures, inadequate social protection and absence of integration programs, have a direct impact on the family life, parenting and children’s wellbeing. Discussion: These results point to a clear need for improvement of the access to asylum right and subsequent refugee integration in Bulgaria. They also call for a systemic approach in which the refugee rights are fully respected and vulnerability inherent to the refugee parents’ liminal position properly addressed. We further recommend the interventions of social work and mental health professions in ameliorating existent stresses of exclusion and marginalisation of refugee families with an aim to advance their full integration rights.

Bordering Practices Across Europe: The Rise of “Walls” and “Fences”

This article explores the recent bordering practices across and around Europe, with a specific focus on the construction of walls and fences. Since the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011, thousands of refugees fleeing persecution have risked their lives crossing dangerous maritime and land borders while attempting to reach Europe. In the face of this intensification of refugee movements and the subsequent mass death around the borders, European countries have decided to erect more walls and fences instead of offering a protection to refugees. Rather than a novel theoretical and conceptual framework, this article seeks to subject these bordering practices and their material and discursive underpinnings to critical–analytical scrutiny, drawing on the frameworks offered by critical border studies. Concomitantly, it reflects on the detrimental impacts these practices are having on the rights of refugees and problematizes the approaches of European countries vis-à-vis present-day refugee movements.

Universalist Rights and Particularist Duties: The Case of Refugees

The conflict between refugees’ human right to be admitted to a safe country and the right of states to exercise sovereign control of their borders, including the right to deny refugees entry, can be understood in terms of a normative conflict between two ethical systems, namely those of ethical universalism and ethical particularism. Here it is suggested that this conflict can be resolved by combining a universalist comparable cost argument with a particularist fair share argument. The comparable cost argument affirms that a state receiving refugees should allow at least the most basic rights of refugees to override less important rights of its own citizens. The fair share argument modifies the comparable cost argument by affirming that no state is morally obligated to sacrifice any of its citizens’ rights for the sake of protecting a larger share of refugees than what is fair, given its resources.

Bob Deacon, social solidarity, and the rights of migrants and refugees

Bob Deacon, social solidarity, and the rights of migrants and refugees

Deportation Platforms: The AWS-ICE Alliance and the Fallacy of Explicit Agendas

In this paper, I analyze elite discourse in the context of the increasing role played by large-scale corporate platforms in federal immigration enforcement in the US Specifically, I focus on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) alliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Incorporating Marx’s (2016) “fallacy of explicit agendas” as a heuristic for contextualizing recent employee challenges to company CEO Jeff Bezos, I show how the fallacy serves to conceal far more about the AWS alliance with ICE, an organization with a long track record of deeply troubling practices. The secrecy that is fostered by such discourse also obscures the growing dependency of government entities on large-scale technologies of marginalizing surveillance that threaten civil liberties and rights of refugees and immigrants.

War, Snipers, and Rage from <em>Enemy at the Gates</em> to <em>American Sniper</em>

Shooting people, murder and war are inherently violent activities to which the concept of rage might seem inextricably linked, but deeper examination reveals levels of complexity. Despite what we often perceive, soldiers are actually trained to operate in a calm and dispassionate manner. This is especially the case for military snipers, who perform the role of hiding in the battlefield, waiting for the chance to take single aimed shots to kill an unsuspecting enemy. My study examines the concept of rage and compares the level of rage in the film American Sniper (2014), set in the Iraq war with that of Enemy at the Gates (2001), set during the siege of Stalingrad in the Second World War. I argue that a form of controlled rage can be seen in the world of the sniper, and I set this against the acceptance of violence in an America where mass shootings appear to be an ever-growing expression of individual rage.

Human Rights, Income and International Migration

AbstractThis study contributes to the literature of migration studies by addressing the question: why does international migration persist despite welfare improvements in migrant‐sending countries? We propose that the human rights condition of the origin countries is an important determinant of global migration. Although the human rights issue is not new to researchers in migration studies, the concern is primarily about the rights of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers or migrant workers in a host country. We undertake a bilateral panel data analysis to examine the pattern of global bilateral migration between 1995 and 2010. We find that international migration is positively associated with human rights conditions and income. Similar results are also obtained when we control for multilateral resistance and possible sample selection biases in a panel context. Our study implies that efforts to promote human rights may also be assessed in relation to their contribution to migration flows.

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity in the European Constitutional Imagination

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity in the European Constitutional Imagination

Assessing the Relationship between Neoliberal Ideology and Reactions to Central American Asylum Seekers in the United States

AbstractAccording to the United Nations, there are approximately 22.5 million refugees in the world and this number is expected to grow due to war and environmental catastrophe. Additionally, contemporary U.S. society is marked by neoliberal ideology, increasingly coupled with nationalist discourses and policies. Noting the current U.S. sociopolitical context, there is great incentive to study how internalization of neoliberal ideology relates to engagement in efforts to support the rights of refugees. In the current study, we examine the relationships between internalized neoliberal ideology, moral exclusion of people seeking asylum from Central America, levels of ethnocentrism, and willingness to engage in efforts to support the human rights of asylum seekers. Participants (N = 270) were recruited through Prolific Academic and responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Findings illustrate a strong connection between endorsement of neoliberal ideology and the moral exclusion of Central American asylum seekers, as well as lower levels of willingness to engage in efforts to support the rights of asylum seekers and higher levels of ethnocentrism. Policy implications are discussed.

Asian Civil Society and Reconfiguration of Refugee Protection in Asia

Despite its long history of refugee crises, Asia lacks effective refugee protection mechanisms. Most Asian states resist ratification of the international refugee laws, and many international organizations are ineffective and lack concrete legal and political approaches to protecting refugees. Asian civil society, particularly Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), collaborates to protect refugees by employing alternative frameworks. This paper argues that Asian civil society aims to challenge the nature of refugee protection in Asia. Instead of encouraging states to ratify the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, APRRN stimulates national-level implementation of refugee protection principles and practices from below. It engages its members in global decision-making by mobilizing and sharing resources with them. APRRN frames refugee protection as international human rights issue instead of as a national security concern.

Statelessness, Refugees, and Hospitality

AbstractAs the war in Syria and the destruction of the Calais camp in France in 2016 bitterly demonstrate, declarations of human rights and asylum devolve into empty promises without a common sense of solidarity and an implicit understanding that we share responsibility for the world and one another. Today’s refugee crisis demonstrates that many of the problems that Hannah Arendt identified during the first half of the twentieth century are still with us. National security and the state of exception increasingly place refugees and migrants at the borders of international law. This article argues that Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Arendt’s postwar reflections on the stateless as modern pariahs continue to frame current debates on hospitality, human rights, and responsibility. Without a recognition of our common humanity and shared world, sovereign states will continue to find exceptions to the legal status of refugees and migrants, thus enabling their exclusion from political life and the very laws that should protect them. Falling outside human rights law and the rights of refugees leads to the uncertainty of the pariah.

International-domestic linkages in a developing-country context: the case of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh

ABSTRACTSince 1978, the Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar and taking refuge in Bangladesh. The state of Bangladesh is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention and does not recognize refugee rights, but the initial experiences with the Rohingya refugee population led the government to create a temporary and ad hoc domestic policy advisory and refugee management system, which eventually became highly politicized. There was also some degree of slow “externalization” of policy advice through the involvement of international organizations from 2006–2007 onward, mainly through the participation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Organization for Migration (IOM). Over 2017–2018, there was a massive influx of refugees from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The domestic advisory and refugee management system lacked the capacity to manage the crisis and had to quickly and greatly externalize policy advice and refugee management. The UNHCR and IOM came in with a host of international organizational networks and coordinated with each other and the state through a multi-sectoral approach to manage the crisis. This externalization led to the systematization and institutionalization of the state’s domestic advisory system. However the effect of externalization on politicization is equivocal; on the one hand it decreased politicization of the domestic policy advisory system, but on the other hand, it created new levels of politicization.

REFUGIADOS: QUESTÕES POLÍTICAS, JURÍDICAS E SOCIAIS

The increase in conflicts in the world and violations of rights, especially in the underdeveloped countries continue to cause entire populations to leave their homeland to escape hunger and continuous atrocities. This study, through bibliographical and documentary research, seeks to reflect on the situation of people in situations of refuge. It gives a brief explanation of international law and the context that motivated it. It then discusses Brazil's situation with regard to refugee protection and, finally, discusses refugee issues and concludes that guaranteeing the human rights of refugees is a major challenge, which must be tackled as this right was already violated when the individual fled from his country of origin.

Lisa Heschl, Protecting the Rights of Refugees beyond European Borders: Establishing Extraterritorial Legal Responsibilities

Lisa Heschl, Protecting the Rights of Refugees beyond European Borders: Establishing Extraterritorial Legal Responsibilities

“Displaced and Misplaced”: the Refugee Phenomenon and Evolution of the International Refugee Regime from the 19th to the early 21st Century

The article is based on an extensive historical and theoretical material examining the issue of refugees and the protection of forced migrants. The research investigates the reasons for occurrence of new norms and mechanisms of contemporary international refugee regime due to the major refugee crises in modern and contemporary history (special refugee status, a simplified naturalization procedure for refugees, political asylum, the principles of non-extradition and non-refoulement, etc.). The initial approaches were consolidated in common law. They dealt with the protection of forced migrants in the countries where they sought refuge. Historically, the extent of forced migration has been significantly influenced by age structures (for example, the European “youth bulge” was one of the most important factors affecting the Irish and Jewish emigration to the United States in the 19th century). In the 1920s — 1930s efforts were made under the League of Nations to regulate legal refugee status at the international level, to internationally and legally consolidate criteria according to which the refugee status can be acquired (depending on the origin, the affiliation of an exile to a specific state or specific ethnicity (Russian, Armenian, German, Austrian, etc.) and the principle of “lack of protection” from the country of origin). The regulations were summarized, extended and specified after World War II, which led to a more universal determination consolidated in the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the refugee status. The categories of forced migrants under international protection have gradually expanded in response to the forced migration crises of the second half of the 20th century. Today, UNHCR deals not only with refugees but also with the related categories of people who are in need of international protection. At the beginning of the 21st century the efforts of the global community have been primarily focused on the development of international cooperation to protect refugee rights and assist host countries, which was reflected in the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018.