Event Review: University of London Refugee Law Initiative Conference
From June 21 to 23, 2023, I attended the University of London’s Refugee Law Initiative Annual Conference entitled “Inequality and Fairness in Refugee Protection,” held in London, England. Housed in the historic Senate House next door to the British Museum and down the street from University College London’s (UCL) campus, the conference hosted experts and practitioners from around the world to discuss significant challenges to refugee protection. The major questions revolved around the notion of inequality, specifically about how international protection systems and laws perpetuate racial and gender inequality, how different definitions of refugee at the global and national levels contribute to unequal treatment and protection outcomes, and how to respond to these challenges through government, NGO, and private sector participation and cooperation.
The conference consisted of multiple panels on all three days, where participants could attend the ones that matched their personal or professional interests. Additionally, each day had a keynote speaker from a noteworthy domestic or international organization on a topic related to the conference. I attended an interesting panel entitled “Evolutions in International Refugee Law: Addressing or Reinforcing Inequality.” The four panelists included a representative from each of the University of New South Wales and University of Tasmania in Australia, a researcher from UNHCR headquarters, and a legal assistant from the International Criminal Court. The panelists brought up many thought-provoking points, including how regional refugee protection frameworks in regions such as Africa and Latin America—which grant increased protections compared to the international standard— are being ignored, thereby withholding individuals their legally provided rights.
Additionally, they brought up a good point that I have been thinking about a lot in my professional work, which was that the proliferation of temporary protection pathways in developed countries—primary examples include temporary protection programs in the United States and European Union—is a primary reason why refugee protection is failing or at least not as strong as it should be. This is because providing temporary protection that can be discontinued relatively quickly is usually much more politically viable than providing permanent protection such as refugee resettlement and integration if short-term solutions continue to be the chosen vehicle to provide migrants with needed protection, which undermines the global refugee protection system.
A troubling concluding point made by one of the panelists was that the European Union does not seem to have an exit strategy of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in the EU that have been granted temporary protection due to Russia’s unlawful invasion. The EU has already extended temporary protection to Ukrainians, but that protection is due to cease in March 2024 or March 2025 at the latest. After these dates, there is no clear EU strategy on what to do with these people who will technically be in the EU illegally if the war is still going on, which has the potential to present a massive humanitarian crisis on top of the ongoing war.
I also attended a panel session entitled “Solutions to Refugee Situations.” The five panelists included two professors from the University of Oxford, two from the University of London, and one from Loughborough University. This panel discussed the many conflicts in refugee resettlement between the state's visions and the refugees' needs. One of these conflicts is the timeline of assistance. The state desires to provide the least protection possible due to the time and resources required to resettle and integrate recently arrived refugees adequately. However, refugees are in need of long-term care and assistance, especially as they settle into new surroundings and try to incorporate into a new culture, language, and way of life. A way proposed to overcome these challenges is to apply local integration methods. These would include allowing refugees to feel part of the community they are physically in and create lives in multiple different places, such as their home country, spaces of work, and local neighborhood. The panelists argued that states are under the misimpression that once they grant refugees citizenship, their responsibilities end. However, citizenship is not an end but rather a tool to allow refugees to increase their mobility and achieve their own goals. They also stated that a possible outcome of these conflicts not being solved could be increased statelessness as individuals no longer have nationality from their home country, and their host country does not have the necessary legal and personal support systems to allow for successful integration.
A final highlight of the conference was a poster session held on the first day that presented the research projects of academics and practitioners from around the world. Topics covered at the session included refugees and irregularity, humanitarian parole, climate change and refugee movements, and legal obstacles to protection. A poster that caught my attention due to my previous work on the subject was one discussing a court watch program in the UK for asylum seekers. The project revolved around attending immigration court proceedings and documenting how the court applied the relative laws and associated punishments. Findings from this research included that many defendants were encouraged by their legal counsel to plead guilty to close any legal challenges, there were many challenges with language interpretation leading to much confusion among defendants, and the denial of bail for defendants due to the lack of family connections in the UK even if they had relatives in the country..
In sum, the conference was an eye-opening and enriching learning experience where I spoke with experts from around the world on issues that I deal with every day in my professional life. The amount of expertise and knowledge on display was breathtaking, and the thought-provoking ideas explored at the conference left me thinking even more about what options exist to address immigration-related problems in the U.S. Being able to see how other countries are dealing with similar issues and what solutions they have implemented and their impacts can provide some sort of insight into what strategies could be successful in the U.S. The issues discussed impact the entire world, and without a global solution, these challenges will likely not be solved thoroughly or adequately, leaving people in need of protection in precarious and vulnerable positions.
Author: Joshua Rodriguez
Managing Editor: Sebastian Reyes
Web Editor: Shreya Lad