Legal Refugee Recognition in the Urban South: Formal v. de Facto Refugee Status
The legal relevance of the “urban refugee” concept in the Middle East and Africa stems from the practice of practicing different forms of refugee status determination (RSD) in rural as opposed to urban areas. Urban refugees are usually subject to rigorous individual adjudication, while rural refugees are typically recognized on a prima facie basis. This difference in procedure has no basis in the substance of refugee law, and it marginalizes urban refugees in two key ways. First, in Africa and the Middle East, refugee status recognition is used by host governments to prevent refugee integration, to force refugees to live far from population centres, and to transfer responsibility for their welfare to international agencies. Second, individualized RSD procedures in wide use by the United Nations generally lack key fairness safeguards, increasing the risk that genuine refugees will be wrongfully rejected. This phenomenon means that urban refugee populations will often be systematically undercounted, and will include a significant number of de facto refugees who are in fact refugees in danger of refoulement, but whose applications were rejected and who thus have no access to the protection and resources otherwise targeted at refugees.
Sweden’s Floating Refugee Camp: A New Form of Spatial Segregation?
Sweden’s Floating Refugee Camp: A New Form of Spatial Segregation?
Language in the Courtroom
Publisher Summary This chapter describes various aspects related to language used in a courtroom. In the last 5 years, a new interdisciplinary field has emerged, the study of language as it relates to the law and to the legal process. Two complementary trends account for the consolidation of interest in law and language. Social scientists interested in the law are beginning to look to language and to ideas and methods from sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, as a way of illuminating the legal process, as it works in practice. Growing institutional support for sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic work using legal materials is evident from the fact that three language conferences have featured sessions on law and language since 1976. The two basic functions of law in society are to organize things so that society can go about its daily business and to provide a means to resolve disputes when order breaks down so that society can return to its business. The facilitative–regulative function of law provides recipes for living, for doing, for creating relationships where none existed before.