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.
read full article
https://www.iar-gwu.org/blog/iar-web/event-review-university
