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.
Securitization and Community-Based Protection Among Chin Refugees in Kuala Lumpur
This article examines refugee-led community organizations among Chin refugees from Myanmar in Kuala Lumpur. It uses a structuration analysis that recognizes refugee-led organizations as complex governance entities engaged in a dynamic relationship with (among others) national policies of securitization of forced migration and international humanitarian governance. This approach expands the existing literature on the securitization of forced migration by exploring refugees’ lived experiences in a context of south–south migration. It expands the literature on community-based protection by going beyond recognizing the existence of refugee-led organizations to analyse their construction, constitution and consequences. Three primary areas of work by Chin refugee groups are analysed in relation to their immediate activity and longer term effects: organization (‘building ethnic unity in adversity’), documentation (‘asserting a bureaucratic identity’) and socialization (‘learning to be illegal’). These long-term effects indicate the possible impact of local protection activities on macrostructural processes such as identity construction and migration choices.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.