Rights in Exile: Janus-faced humanitarianism

I first met Barbara Harrell-Bond in the early 1980s. I was a researcher who knew something about human rights, but very little about refugees (the two topics of this book). And I was working with Ugandan refugees in Kenya, the two countries studied in detail here.

So, I did not know, for example, that officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees were not meant to be part of the status determination procedure in Kenya – rather they should be acting as advocates for refugees. My ignorance was perhaps excusable, since no one at UNHCR knew either. On the evidence of this book, things are just as bad 20 years on. And the status determination procedure is just the start of it.

Barbara dealt with my large areas of ignorance thoroughly and pretty impatiently, which is what she is like. In this book, however, the entire establishment of the refugee industry gets the treatment.

Faced with the task of reviewing a book as good as this one, the contrarian immediately goes in search of what is wrong with it. Actually the main thing wrong is fairly quickly apparent: the Foreword by Albie Sachs.

Justice Sachs seems to have misunderstood an important part of what the book has to say. The problem, he says, is that “Refugee law is glacially trapped in its 1950 format when its main focus was on enabling people to flee from persecution and then simply to survive.” Not only is that quite incorrect. It is almost the precise opposite of the conclusion that Verdirame and Harrell-Bond reach. They note that the scope of rights enjoyed by refugees under international law is fairly extensive – certainly far greater than is generally believed. The problem, documented in forensic detail in this book, is that these rights are widely ignored – by governments, non-governmental organisations and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international agency with primary responsibility for refugee protection. The word ignore can perhaps be used in both its senses. Refugee rights are systematically disregarded. But they are also too little known and understood (including apparently by South African Constitutional Court judges).

Sachs goes on to a rather extraordinary attack on the book that he is prefacing:

“Do I think the book is narrowly focused and too harsh on those that it criticises? I do. Do I think that this work pays insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees? I do.”

He then proceeds to recommend the book in these terms:

“One hopes that those who feel that their work has been treated with unnecessary harshness will read and study this book with an appreciation of the importance of dialogue over the issues that it raises.”

Personally, I don’t give a damn for the sensibilities of those criticised in this book. And I hope it gives them many sleepless nights.

So why bother with taking issue with a Foreword? First, for the minor reason that some people may pick up the book and judge it by what is written in the first few pages. But secondly, and more importantly, because in Sachs’s comments one can anticipate the response of the refugee industry to this book.

Is the book “narrowly focused”? The core of ‘Rights in Exile’ consists of two case studies of the treatment of refugees in Africa: Uganda and Kenya. The whole range of refugee rights are studied in those two countries, from rights on entry and through the status determination procedure, to civil and political rights, to economic, social and cultural rights. The authors describe it (rightly to the best of my knowledge) as the first academic work to look at this issue in depth. Of course, they might have chosen countries where the problems were less acute, but what they have succeeded in establishing is that their criticisms of the international refugee regime are not broad generalisations but can be precisely documented.

This is probably a matter of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”. Had they chosen to carry out case studies of more countries in less detail, they would have been accused of lacking academic rigour. As it happens, ten years ago I was involved in just such a non-academic study of African refugees’ rights on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. (The study receives a positive mention from Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, so here I must declare my interest.) We visited seven countries: Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Sudan and Zimbabwe. With some local variation our findings, though less well substantiated than those of Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, coincided precisely with theirs. Their work has a close focus, but not a narrow one.

Do they pay “insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees”? This is a curious criticism, since the entire book is about precisely this question. The authors certainly interpret this “dialectic of international responsibility” in a way that is inconvenient and unacceptable to those who wield power over refugees. Such people do not, for the most part, really care for Barbara Harrell-Bond. For the past quarter century or so, working always from the perspective of the refugees themselves, she has described, analysed and theorised on the reality of refugees’ experience and on the real meaning of the measures ostensibly put in place to help them.

In her 1986 book ‘Imposing Aid’ she showed clearly how refugee camps are designed to facilitate the delivery of assistance – to the benefit of the donors, not the recipients. She, and scholars of many disciplines at the Refugee Studies Centre that she founded in Oxford, have scrupulously researched a variety of inconvenient truths. That external assistance often undermines refugees’ own coping strategies. That refugees are the best protectors of their own physical environment, not a threat to it. That integration, not repatriation, is usually the most effective long-term solution for refugees.

This book has a similar disregard for orthodoxies and sacred cows. It is harsh, for example, on the role of many NGOs in delivering assistance – and failing to protect the rights of refugees. The fashionable and poorly reasoned “civil society” orthodoxy is speared almost in passing with an elegant reference to Gramsci.

More obviously, the UNHCR’s reinterpretation of its own mandate – away from refugee protection, towards ”humanitarian assistance” – is exposed as a betrayal of the whole purpose of the international refugee regime.

This regime of refugee protection was always envisaged as part of the international human rights system. This book explains how that link has been broken and sets an agenda for re-establishing it. It would be a mistake to see Rights in Exile as some sort of wacky, left-field contribution to a “dialogue” about refugees. This book sets the terms of the debate.

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