No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis. By Serena Parekh. Oxford University Press, 2020. pp. 247 (original) (raw)
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Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société
In Mohsin Hamid's celebrated novel, Exit West, 1 a young couple flees violent conflict in South Central Asia, trekking through magical doors to Europe and North America. The interiority of refugee experience is excavated, seared by familial, emotional, and spiritual wounds. "Encampment" as the reality of refugees adrift-finding only transient shelter across continents-shreds any claims to meaningful legal status. The scale of this reality raises grave ethical questions about the gap between what is owed to forced migrants and what part of this obligation societies will honour. Serena Parekh, a political philosopher at Boston University, is certainly concerned, in No Refuge, about doors turning into walls. But this is located within a crisis engendered by the "structural injustice" of a post-World War II system of dealing with displacement enacted by liberal western states. Her essential premise is that "refugees around the world are largely unable to get refuge, that is, they are unable to access the minimum conditions of human dignity while they wait for a more permanent solution" (p. 3). Most of the estimated thirty-three million people seeking protection across borders (as part of the over 103 million forcibly displaced worldwide) 2 will subsist in badly resourced camps or unaided internationally, in urban centres, in the global south. The overwhelming majority stay in limbo, indefinitely. From Myanmar's Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh and Somalis crossing the border to Kenya's Dadaab refugee complex, to millions of Syrians who have spent a decade in Lebanon and Turkey, and many more millions of Palestinians generationally living in sites across the Middle East, an "age of encampment" prevails. 3 The numbers would be worse still if internally displaced people (IDPs) and those wanting to flee severe repression, such as in Xinjiang (China), crossed borders. Asylum being a fundamental human right, what are forced migrants to do if the barriers are insuperable? Parekh's answer is human smuggling. It's the "price we
Human Rights and Refugee Protection
We would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to the organization (National Human Rights Commission) for giving us the golden opportunity to do this wonderful project on the topic Human Rights and Refugee Protection, which also helped me in doing a lot of Research and we came to know about so many new things we are really thankful to them for their able guidance and support.
REFUGEE PHENOMENA: PROBLEMS AND PRESCRIPTIONS
The issue of refugees has generated much controversy in the International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The plight of refugees has over recent years become a formidable problem of global significance and implications. It is against this background that this paper seeks to critically examine the problems relating to refugees with a view of proffering requisite prescriptions. The paper adopts a descriptive analytical method of analysis. Our findings revealed that though there are multifarious problems associated with refugee issue which borders on lack of security, hostility, poor standard of living etc. The paper concludes that these problems are not insurmountable and therefore proffered requisite prescriptions that will go a long way to ameliorate the problems confronting the refugees globally.
Refocusing the Refugee Regime: From Vagrancy to Value
Res Cogitans, 2010
This is an exploration of two moral-political accounts in my search to establish and frame better treatment of refugees. When regarding refugees as human beings whose lives lack sustainable levels of political, economic, and social stability, both of the frameworks I look at stress the importance of providing such persons with succor and alleviation. Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach posits the human body as a bearer of elemental rights that ought to be recognized and realized. Judith Butler presents an argument that focuses on life's precariousness and grievability. Situating the refugee in a normative context will, I think, strengthen the foundation needed for a focus on determining what sorts of actions should be taken to rectify the situations of increasingly protracted refugee populations which, arguably, consist of the world's most vulnerable political beings.
Refugee concept in the international context.
To date, the refuge and forced displacement globally remain as a serious problem that threatens peace and international security. The importance of the phenomenon is such that only in 2012, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) counted more than 1.1 million new cases of refuge all around the world (UNHCR, 2013: 2-3). The trend indicates an annual increase of displaced people, mainly because of internal conflicts. During 2012, 45.2 million people were in any kind of displacement situation, of which 10.5 million were refugees, 2.3 million more than in 2011. 80 % of all this refugee population are under the protection of developing countries. The 5 top countries with more refugees abroad are Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan. (UNHCR, 2013: 2). The worsening of this situation, however, has not kept pace with the insufficient response of the international community. Despite of the existence of an international legal framework within humanitarian law that recognizes the legal status of refugees in order to assist them, the existence of protracted refugee situations and the increase of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) has made increasingly difficult to define refugee, both in legal terms and in practice, therefore impacting on international political and economic aspects. Often, major refugee crisis lead to major diplomatic crises, economic conflicts or development of new dynamics of production or disagreements with the populations of the countries of arrival, among other obstacles of various kinds that are part of everyday life of IDPs.
Humanity and the Refugee: Another Stab at Universal Human Rights
This paper takes up the questions of (1) how the refugee crisis exhibits the fault lines in what might otherwise seem to be a robust human rights regime and (2) what kinds of ways of seeing and thinking might better attune us to solving these problems. There is surprising agreement internationally on the content of human rights, although there is a huge gulf between international agreements on human rights and the protection of those most vital. The subtitle of the paper, " another stab at universal rights, " has a double entendre: in the midst of a crisis that is stabbing international agreements on human rights to its core, I will take a stab at using the crisis situation to point a way forward toward a cosmopolitan social imaginary that uses human imagination, not just as an ability to represent in one's mind what one has seen elsewhere, but also as an ability to imagine something radically new. This social imaginary points to the necessity of according everyone, refugees included, as having a right to politics and thus a hand in shaping their own world, including their new, host communities.