The first analysis of decisions at all four levels of the asylum adjudication process : the Department of Homeland Security, the immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the United States Courts of Appeals. The data reveal tremendous disparities in asylum approval rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. After providing a thorough empirical analysis, the authors make recommendations for future reform. From publisher description.
This book, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his remarkable escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as U.S. government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya. As we travel with Kenney through the bureaucracies that regulate immigration, we learn that despite this country's claim to welcome political refugees, our system is too often one of arbitrary justice highly dependent on individual public officials. A story of courage, love, perseverance, and legal strategy, Asylum Denied brings to life the human costs associated with our immigration laws and suggests policy reforms that are desperately needed to help other victims of human rights violations.
Asylum medicine, a field encompassing medical forensic evaluations of asylum seekers, is an emerging discipline in healthcare. In a time of record global displacement due to human rights violations, conflict and persecution, interest in the medical and psychological evaluation of individuals subjected to torture and other ill-treatment is high. Health professionals are uniquely qualified to use their skills to make contributions to a group of vulnerable individuals fleeing danger and death in their home countries. Health professionals involved in asylum medicine perform medical and psychological forensic evaluations of asylum seekers. Their educational background prepares them to examine and describe physical and emotional scars related to trauma, and further training allows them to assess these scars in the context of persecution, describe them in a medical-legal affidavit and support these findings with testimony. Providers of asylum medicine are often involved in advocacy, as many governments become increasingly hostile to asylum seekers. Books on human rights exist, but there is no authoritative text of asylum medicine. This book presents a comprehensive overview of asylum medicine, with emphasis on the historical and legal background of asylum law, best practices for performing asylum examinations, challenges of examining detained asylum seekers, education of trainees and advocacy. Written by experts in the field, Asylum Medicine: A Clinician's Guide is a first of its kind resource for health care providers who practice asylum medicine.
FIRST PRIZE WINNER OF THE SLS BIRKS PRIZE FOR OUTSTANDING LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP 2011 How are we to assess and evaluate the quality of the tribunal systems that do the day-to-day work of adjudicating upon the disputes individuals have with government? This book examines how the idea of adjudicative quality works in practice by presenting a detailed case-study of the tribunal system responsible for determining appeals lodged by foreign nationals who claim that they will be at risk of persecution or ill-treatment on return to their country of origin. Over recent years, the asylum appeal process has become a major area of judicial decision-making and the most frequently restructured tribunal system. Asylum adjudication is also one of the most difficult areas of decision-making in the modern legal system. Integrating empirical research with legal analysis, this book provides an in-depth study of the development and operation of this tribunal system and of asylum decision-making. The book examines how this particular appeal process seeks to mediate the tension between the competing values under which it operates. There are chapters examining the organisation of the tribunal system, its procedures, the nature of fact-finding in asylum cases and the operation of onward rights of challenge. An examination as to how the tensions inherent in the idea of administrative justice are manifested in the context of a tribunal system responsible for making potentially life or death decisions, this book fills a gap in the literature and will be of value to those interested in administrative law and asylum adjudication.
This book assesses the role of the federal judiciary in immigration and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and the US Courts of Appeals. Neither court has played a static role across time. By the turn of the century, a division of labor had developed between the two courts whereby the Courts of Appeals retained their original function as error-correction courts, while the Supreme Court was reserved for the most important policy and political questions. Law explores the consequences of this division for immigrant litigants, who are more likely to prevail in the Courts of Appeals because of advantageous institutional incentives that increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome. As this book proves, it is inaccurate to speak of an undifferentiated institution called 'the federal courts' or 'the courts', for such characterizations elide important differences in mission and function of the two highest courts in the federal judicial hierarchy.
The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law is a comprehensive, critical work, which analyses the state of research across the refugee law regime as a whole. Drawing together leading and emerging scholars, the Handbook provides both doctrinal and theoretical analyses of international refugee law and practice. It critiques existing law from a variety of normative positions, with several chapters identifying foundational flaws that open up space for radical rethinking. Many authors work directly in the field, and their contributions demonstrate how scholarship and practice can mutually inform each other. Contributions assess a wide range of international legal instruments relevant to refugee protection, including from international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international migration law, the law of the sea, and international and transnational criminal law. Geographically, contributors examine regional and domestic laws and practices from around the world, with 10 chapters focused on specific regions. This Handbook provides an account, as well as a critique, of the status quo, and in so doing it sets the agenda for future academic research in international refugee law.
Under what circumstances can a state refuse refugee status to a person whose risk of persecution exists in only part of her country of origin? This book is the first monograph to examine the treaty basis and criteria for the ‘internal protection alternative’ (IPA), an exception to refugee status increasingly invoked by state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Through a critical analysis of the relationship between refugee law and related fields, Schultz finds that the legal scope for IPA practice is narrower than is commonly claimed. Since persons subject to an IPA analysis have a well-founded fear of persecution within their countries of origin, any limit on their right to refugee status must involve a careful balancing of the impact of continued displacement against the state's interest in preserving its restricted protection resources. She argues that the doctrine of implied limits in human rights law can provide analytic structure to the IPA concept and reduce the risk of overly broad application.
Millions of people are today forced to flee their homes as a result of conflict, systematic discrimination, or other forms of persecution. The core instruments on which they must rely to secure international protection are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. This book, the leading text in the field, examines key challenges to the Convention such as the status of refugees, applications for asylum, and the international and domestic standards of protection. The situation of refugees is one of the most pressing and urgent problems facing the international community and refugee law has grown in recent years to a subject of global importance. In this long-awaited fourth edition each chapter has been thoroughly revised and updated and every issue, old and new, has received fresh analysis. The books includes: analysis of internally displaced persons; so-called preventive protection; access to refugees; safety of refugees and relief personnel; the situation of refugee women and children; a detailed examination of the role of the UNHCR and the Palestinian situation; and an assessment of the protection possibilities (or lack of them) in the European Convention on Human Rights. This new edition has been expanded with coverage of forced migration and displacement as a result of disasters and climate change. It is once again an unmissable reference work for practitioners and students in the field.
‘The refugee problem’ is a term that it has become almost impossible to escape. Although used by a wide range of actors involved in work related to forced migration, these actors do not often explain what exactly ‘the problem’ is that they are working to solve, leading to an unfortunate conflation of two quite different ‘problems’: the problems that refugees face and the problems that refugees pose. Beginning from the simple, yet too often overlooked, observation that how one conceives of solving a problem is inseparable from what one understands that problem to be, Saunders’ study explores the questions raised about how to address ‘the refugee problem’ if we recognise that there may not be just one ‘problem’, and that not all actors involved with the refugee regime conceive of their work as addressing the same ‘problem’. Utilising the work of Michel Foucault, the book first charts how different ‘problems’ lend themselves to particular kinds of solutions, arguing that the international refugee regime is best understood as developed to ‘solve’ the refugee (as) problem, rather than refugees’ problems. Turning to the work of Hannah Arendt, the book then reframes ‘the refugee problem’ from the perspective of the refugee, rather than the state, and investigates the extent to which doing so can open up creative space for rethinking the more traditional solutions to the refugee (as) problem. Cases of refugee protest in Europe, and the burgeoning Sanctuary Movement in the UK, are examined as two sub-state and popular movements which could constitute such creative solutions to a reframed problem. The consequences of the ‘refugee’ label, and of the discourses of humanitarianism and emergency is a topic of critical concern, and as such, the book will form important reading for a scholars and students of (international) political theory and forced migration studies.
In international law, the refugee definition enshrined in Article 1A(2) of the Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol is central. Yet, seven decades on, the meaning of its key terms are widely seen as unclear. The Refugee Definition in International Law asks whether we must continue to accept this or whether a systematic legal analysis can shed new light on this important term. The volume addresses several framework questions concerning approaches to definition, interpretation, ordering, and the interrelationship between the definition's different elements. Each element is then analysed in turn, applying Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties rules in systematic fashion. Each chapter evaluates the main disputes that have arisen and seeks to distil basic propositions that are widely agreed, as well as certain suggested propositions for resolving ongoing debates. In the final chapter, the basic propositions are assembled to demonstrate that in fact there is now more clarity about the definition than many think and that considerable progress has been made toward achieving a working definition.
