New Journal Articles on Refugee Issues (weekly)

• Legal Status, Labelling, and Protection: the Case of Iraqi ‘Refugees’ in Jordan

  “Discussion of Middle Eastern refugee law and policy has focused largely on Palestinians, with relatively little analysis of non-Palestinian refugees and the legal framework that applies to them in Middle Eastern countries. This article seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging examination of the treatment of Iraqi refugees in Jordan (a non-signatory state to the Refugee Convention), following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In so doing, it also examines certain issues with wider global implications, such as the nature of refugee protection, the importance of identity, and the need for improved ‘burden sharing’. The article provides a brief outline of the background to refugees in Jordan, together with a discussion of the legal regime applicable to asylum seekers and refugees. It assesses the importance of legal status and labelling to the Iraqis in Jordan, not only for access to rights and provision of needs, but also for identity. The tension between UNHCR’s concepts of ‘protection’ and ‘protection space’ and the Jordanian Government’s own approach to sanctuary are explored, with reference to five key areas: employment, health, education, resettlement and return. The article concludes by reflecting on the extent to which the Jordanian case study can assist improved management of mass flight in the future. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law

  “In introducing her latest book, Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law, Jane McAdam makes the observation that the relationship between climate change and forced migration has recently emerged ‘as an increasingly studied – but contested – field of inquiry’. This may be the understatement of the decade. In political as well as scientific discourse, climate change has spawned what, after John Connell, McAdam calls a ‘garbage can’ effect, ‘where once isolated phenomena become systematically inter-related’. Likewise, on the advocacy front, in which the weapons of international law and global justice have been used without moderation, the climate change platform has become the ultimate bandwagon, to the legitimate irritation of those who have a clear sense of priorities – the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions being first and foremost among these. The causal chains both upstream and downstream (the famous ‘impacts’) of climate change are extraordinarily complex, and the risk of over-simplification is pervasive. Forced migration is a contested label in its own right – and the environmental/climate refugee discourse has fanned the flames of an old and rather sterile debate over voluntariness versus compulsion in human mobility, triggering in the process defensive, often parochial, reactions from both ‘refugee’- and ‘IDP’-centric communities.

  Finally, whether international law is able, as suggested by the book’s title, to capture and inform the complex connections between climate change and human displacement, is far from obvious, owing to the disciplinary constraints which McAdam acknowledges, including international law’s core objective to ‘universalize – to create norms that take the “particular” to a level of general applicability, that make individual rights “human rights” at one and the same time’. In short: it takes a brave person to engineer, with full knowledge of the dangers involved, conceptual, legal and policy bridges over such troubled waters. ”

  tags: newjournalarticles

• UNHCR and International Refugee Law: From Treaties to Innovation

  “The scale and complexity of the contemporary challenges of refugee protection and humanitarianism may not have been envisaged over sixty years ago, but the drafters of UNHCR’s statute1 did have the foresight to create a role for the organization that would allow it to guide and influence international refugee law. In doing so, as meticulously chronicled by Corinne Lewis, UNHCR has had significant influence on how international refugee law has evolved.

  Lewis takes a largely chronological approach to the link between UNHCR and international refugee law by beginning with an examination of the predecessors to UNHCR in order to demonstrate how the lessons learnt from their experience and ultimate demise influenced the strong emphasis on legal protection in UNHCR’s statute. Early emphasis in the book is on UNHCR’s statutory role, which Lewis identifies as comprising two separate functions, being the ‘development’ and ‘effectiveness’ of international refugee law. These functions, which are based upon paragraph 8(a) of UNHCR’s statute,2 are used throughout the book as the foundation for an examination of the evolution and challenges of UNHCR’s statutory role.

  As the focus shifts to the evolution of this role, which Lewis explores by reference to UNHCR’s statute, the means by which the organization interprets its own functions (that is, implied powers) and the development of ‘UNHCR doctrine’, the reader begins to get a sense of UNHCR as a dynamic and autonomous organization, rather than, as has been argued, a mere ‘handmaiden’ for states’ concerns.3″

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Shifting Borders and the Boundaries of Rights: Examining the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States

  “This article analyzes the Canadian Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal decisions assessing the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States (STCA). It examines how each court’s treatment of the location and operation of the Canada–US border influences the results obtained. The article suggests that both in its treatment of the STCA and in its constitutional analysis, the Federal Court decision conceives of the border as a moving barrier capable of shifting outside Canada’s formal territorial boundaries. The effect of this decision is to bring refugee claimants outside state soil within the fold of Canadian constitutional protection. In contrast, the Federal Court of Appeal decision conceives of the border as both static and shifting. In its treatment of the STCA, the Court conceives of the border as a moving barrier that shifts outside Canada’s formal territorial boundaries to extend state power outwards. Yet, in its constitutional analysis, the Court conceives of the border as a static barrier that remains fixed at the state’s geographic perimeter to limit access to refugee rights. By simultaneously conceiving of the border in these opposing ways, the Court of Appeal decision places refugee claimants in an impossible legal bind: it requires them to present at the (static) border to claim legal protection, but at the same time shifts the border in ways that preclude them from doing so. The decision thus suspends refugee claimants between two opposing directives, deprives them of otherwise actionable rights, and denies them recourse to meaningful legal action under Canadian law. The article argues that, in this key way, the Federal Court of Appeal decision does much more than clarify the executive discretion of the Governor-in-Council, as it purports. Rather, it redefines the Canadian refugee regime as fundamentally exclusionary towards STCA claimants, and calls into question the central principles by which this regime is distinguished and defined. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Non-Criminalization of Smuggled Migrants: Rights, Obligations, and Australian Practice under Article 5 of the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air

  “Article 5 of the United Nations Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air, to which Australia is a state party, requires states not to criminalize migrants for being the object of migrant smuggling. This international obligation raises questions about Australia’s response to migrant smuggling and its treatment of asylum seekers. This article examines the principle that smuggled migrants should not be punished for seeking refuge through illegal entry to a receiving state. It explores the extent of the obligations created by article 5, and, on that basis, assesses the compatibility of Australia’s legislative and practical responses to the smuggling of migrants. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Violence, trust, and trustworthiness: evidence from a Nairobi slum

  “We test with a field experiment in a Nairobi slum whether violence suffered during the 2007 political outbreaks affects trustworthiness when interethnicity becomes salient and participants face opportunism in common pool resource games (CPRGs) between two subsequent trust games (TGs). Our findings do not contradict previous one-shot results but qualify and extend them to a multi-period setting, enriching our understanding of the effects of violence on social preferences. More specifically, the victimized exhibit higher trustworthiness in the first trust game but also a significantly stronger trustworthiness reduction after experiencing opportunism and interethnicity in the CPRG game. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• ‘That I Live, that’s Because of Her’: Intersectionality as Framework for Unaccompanied Refugee Mothers

  “Unaccompanied refugee mothers—young mothers living in another country and separated from their parents—are, in research and migration policies, often defined in terms of four social categories: refugee, unaccompanied, adolescent and mother. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty unaccompanied refugee mothers from different countries of origin and now living in Belgium to listen, first, to their feelings and experiences. These narratives revealed four central themes in the mothers’ experiences (constrained and constraining daily living conditions, emotional challenges, connectedness and motherhood as a turning point), which appeared to be, in a second analysis, related to intersections between the four social categories. However, the intersectional analysis revealed large gaps between the mothers’ and migration policies’ interpretations of these categories: the mothers not only define the categories differently, but also set other priorities as they identify themselves first as mothers, while the policies prioritise their status as refugees. These findings, together with reflections on the value of adopting an intersectional perspective, lead to several recommendations for research, social work practices and migration policies. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• The British and the Balkans. Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900-1950. By Eugene Michail.

  “Older works on ‘the British and the Balkans’ traditionally focused on foreign policy and its role—whether benign or sinister, interventionist or absenteeist—in the development of national states in the region. More recently, especially in the 1990s against the background of the Yugoslav conflicts and issues of contested identities, a cultural turn was inaugurated, not only by literary historians Ludmilla Kostova (Tales of the Periphery, 1997), Vesna Goldsworthy (Inventing Ruritania, 1998), and David Norris (In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, 1999), but also by mainstream historians of the region such as Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans, 1997) and Mark Mazower (The Balkans, 2000). All these books identified stereotype-forming processes in British and other literature about the region and pondered their consequences. Subsequent books, such as Božidar Jezernik’s Wild Europe (2004) and Andrew Hammond’s The Debated Lands (2007), focused on travel writing; but while they brought … “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England. A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act. By David Glover

  “David Glover has written a magnificent book. It is a virtuously slim volume deriving from serious scholarship. Much could be said about it, but space permits me to address just a few of the most pertinent themes. First, the emergence of the figure of the ‘undesirable alien’ and its various cognates: the ‘destitute alien’; the ‘alien sweater’; with rather more precision, the ‘alien anarchist’; and, underwriting all these usages, the ’Jew’, and its derivative, the ‘indigent Jew’. These terms arose, in their modern meanings, from the intensification of global migration from the 1870s, which sparked the emergence of a new network of restrictions on where, and which people, could travel and settle, based on the putative imperatives of racial classification. Outside Europe the principal fear of white settlers turned on the role of the Chinese—the so-called ‘yellow peril’—while in Britain these anxieties came primarily to be articulated by the idea of the Jew, or of the destitute Jew. Here, as Glover shows, two discursive currents converged: the terminology of anti-Semitism, which entered the English language in the early 1880s, originally signifying a peculiarly continental distemper, and the notion of alien itself, which accreted a new set of racial–national associations. In consequence, the figure of the Jew evolved into the quintessential foreigner, a shift accompanied by the development of specialist knowledges wielded by socially recognized experts in the field: esteemed public figures who travelled to eastern Europe to investigate the ‘problem’ at first-hand; new public functionaries, … “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Legislating against Hatred: Meaning and Motive in Section Six of the Race Relations Act of 1965

  “The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Enduring Professional Dislocation: Migrant Social Workers’ Perceptions of Their Professional Roles

  “A large percentage of professionals, including social workers, practise in a country other than where they obtained their professional qualification. Reasons for migration have been well documented and vary by country and population. Common migrating factors for social workers include employment challenges and opportunities related to the aging population, increased government expenditure on health and social care services, and insufficient numbers of new graduates entering the profession. This article draws on research about the experiences of migrant social workers in New Zealand. It highlights this population’s perceptions of the status of social work as a profession and their own professional identity. The study utilised a combination of qualitative and quantitative strategies in a three-phased project. The findings provide insights into the nature of the transitional experience for migrant professionals and new vantage points on views of social work as practised in different contexts. We identified perceptions reflecting what we term ‘enduring professional dislocation’, and argue that maintaining a broad view of social work is the foundation for understanding the profession in a new country. We advocate for strategies to facilitate migrant social workers’ adjustment to a new setting, especially where some degree of social and cultural contextualisation in social work practice is required. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Children’s Drawings and Social Change: Food Insecurity and Hunger among Israeli Bedouin Children

  “Food insecurity and hunger, which are on the rise in affluent Western countries, may negatively affect children’s physical, social, emotional and cognitive functioning. Although there is growing evidence of the high rate of food insecurity and hunger among Bedouin families and their children in Israel, little is known about how the children themselves experience the problem and how it impacts their life. The present study sought to explore and clarify children’s experience of food insecurity. The research population included forty-two Israeli Bedouin impoverished children, aged nine to eleven. The analysis of children’s drawing was chosen as the research instrument because it enabled psychological as well as phenomenological insight into the children’s experience of food insecurity. This study, however, goes beyond the use of art to assess children’s emotional state, because enabling the children to draw food insecurity gave them a strong and communicative public voice of their own. After the study had been completed, the drawings also proved useful in efforts to promote awareness about the personal, community, cultural and social dimensions of the problem and the need for community action and policy change to mitigate and eliminate it. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Grassroots Responsiveness to Human Rights Abuse: History of the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights

  “The purpose of this article is to discuss how a community agency based in Washtenaw County, the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigration Rights (WICIR), emerged in response to increasing punitive immigration practices and human rights abuses toward the Latino community. The article discusses how WICIR is engaged in advocacy, community education on immigration issues, and political action toward a more humane immigration reform. Detailed examples of human rights abuses and the WICIR activities described in response to the abuses serve as illustrations of social work advocacy, education, and policy formulation that affect the general public, policymakers, and law enforcement officials. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Xenophobia among Youngsters: The Effect of Inter-Ethnic Contact

  “This study examines xenophobic attitudes of secondary school pupils in the Netherlands. This study builds upon a previous research in three ways. First, attitudes of pupils from both the ethnic majority and minority groups are examined. Second, the impact of positive as well as negative inter-ethnic contacts both within and outside the school environment is determined. Finally, hypotheses about inter-ethnic contacts are tested while simultaneously reckoning with alternative mechanisms that might explain xenophobic attitudes. Cross-classified multilevel regression analyses show that the level of xenophobia is lower when pupils evaluate their inter-ethnic contacts as positive, and higher when they perceive these contacts as negative. However, the impact of positive inter-ethnic contact in class disappears or even reverses when multiculturalism is more emphasized during lessons. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Reconsidering the Effect of Education on East–West Migration in Germany

  “This article analyses migration from East to West Germany, focusing on the influence of education on migration and on the self-selection processes involved in decisions regarding education and migration. Using human capital, signalling, and segmentation theory, hypotheses are derived on the influence of education on migration. The migration patterns for men and women are investigated on the basis of the German Socio-economic Panel data from 1992 to 2007. The results of the hierarchical logit regression models show that the level of education influences the migration decisions of both men and women. However, Heckman selection models reveal that only the migration patterns of women are defined by a selection of upper secondary education. For women, the results suggest that the same mechanisms drive their participation in upper secondary education and in migration. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Contextual Sources of Perceived Group Threat: Negative Immigration-Related News Reports, Immigrant Group Size and their Interaction, Spain 1996–2007

  “This study attempts to further our understanding of the contextual sources of anti-immigrant sentiments by simultaneously examining the impact of immigrant group size, negative immigration-related news reports and their interaction on natives’ perceived group threat. We test our theoretical assumptions using repeated cross-sectional survey data from Spain during the time period 1996–2007, enriched with regional statistics on immigrant group size and information from a longitudinal content analysis of newspaper reports. Drawing on multilevel regression models, our findings show that a greater number of negative immigration-related news reports increases perceived group threat over and above the influence of immigrant group size. Additionally, our findings indicate that the impact of negative immigration-related news reports on perceived group threat is amplified (weakened) in regions with a smaller (larger) immigrant group size. Collectively, these results testify to the importance of immigrant group size and negative immigration-related news reports as key contextual sources of natives’ perceived group threat. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• The Right to Information in International Human Rights Law

  “This article explores the conceptual basis for the recognition of a right to information. It commences by reviewing developments in the recognition of a right to information in international human rights law. The role of the right to freedom of expression in furthering the recognition of a right to information is highlighted while the engagement of other rights in such recognition is also explored. The article considers the contribution made by the instrumental approach to the recognition of a right to information in international human rights law. Finally it explores whether there might exist an intrinsic right to information independent of other rights. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• The Ban on the Veil and European Law

  “This article argues that the fate of veil bans under European law is uncertain. It shows that European commitments to free speech and freedom of religion cannot accommodate an absolute ban justified solely on grounds of the offensiveness of the veil. However, a ban that applies to public face-covering in general (rather than a ban that only targets the veil), that relates to the specific (though admittedly broad) context of social life and that provides some exceptions allowing the veil to be worn in specific religious or expressive contexts, has a reasonable chance of being upheld by European courts despite the significant infringement of personal autonomy it would involve. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• The Death of the Southern African Development Community Tribunal’s Human Rights Jurisdiction

  tags: newjournalarticles

• The International Court of Justice and its Use of Islam: Between a Rock and a Hard Place?

  “This article contrasts the approach of the ICJ with two other international courts/tribunals when, in disputes before them, they have had to consider Islam as a source of legal norms. The article assesses the approach of the ICJ to Islam; when it has referred to Islam; why the ICJ may not have done so more frequently; and what the risks and benefits of the ICJ referring to it are. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

• Advancing Debate about Religion or Belief, Equality and Human Rights: Grounds for Optimism?

  “Legal judgments concerning equality or human rights and religion or belief have frequently provoked controversy in Britain. This article examines why this has occurred. It does not attempt a detailed analysis of the case law; rather, it discusses how the law has been understood and invoked in public discourse. It argues that debate about religion or belief and its place in society has been unduly dominated by particular—and sometimes partial—understandings of legal judgments. It proposes that the most productive level of engagement for those who wish to advance debate, practice and understanding in relation to religion or belief is with ‘front line’ decision-makers, such as public servants and workplace managers. It ventures that in the long term an approach based on human rights principles is likely to be more satisfactory than one which is based principally on equality. “

  tags: newjournalarticles

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