The Refugee Law Reader
Resource Person/Editor: Dr Maryellen Fullerton
Email: maryellen [dot] fullerton [at] brooklaw [dot] edu (maryellen.fullerton[at]brooklaw.edu)
The Refugee Law Reader was initiated and is supported by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and funded by the European Refugee Fund and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Hungarian Helsinki Committee can be contacted with regard to The Refugee Law Reader at reader [at] larc [dot] info (reader[at]larc.info).
The Refugee Law Reader: Cases, Documents and Materials (5th ed.) is a comprehensive online model curriculum for the study of the complex and rapidly evolving field of international refugee law. As a 'living book', new editions of The Reader always reflect the most important developments in International Refugee Law that have occurred since the first on-line publication in April 2004. The Fifth Edition introduces an expanded and universal scope to The Reader by providing sections on international and regional frameworks of refugee law, covering Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Adapted language versions will soon be available in French, Russian and Spanish.
The Reader is aimed for the use of professors, lawyers, advocates, and students across a wide range of national jurisdictions. It provides a flexible course structure that can be easily adapted to meet a range of training and resource needs. The Reader also offers access to the complete texts of up-to-date core legal materials, instruments, and academic commentary. In its entirety, The Refugee Law Reader is designed to provide a full curriculum for a 48-hour course in International Refugee Law and contains over 700 documents and materials. In recognition of the varied traditions and needs in teaching, training and advocacy around the world, editorial recommendations are provided for how class time should be allocated to cover each of the respective subject areas, and their sub-topics, for 24- and 12-hour modules, as well as for a 48- hour course.
The Reader is divided into six sections: Introduction to International Refugee Law, The International Framework for Refugee Protection, The African Framework for Refugee Protection, The Asian Framework for Refugee Protection, The European Framework for Refugee Protection and The Latin American Framework for Refugee Protection. Each section contains the relevant hard and soft law, the most important cases decided by national or international courts and tribunals, and a carefully selected set of academic commentaries.
To facilitate teaching and stimulate critical discussion, the Editors highlight the main legal and policy debates that address each topic, as well as the main points that should be drawn from the assigned reading. In many sections of the syllabus, readers may also access Editor’s Notes, which contain more detailed commentary and suggestions for teaching in a given subject area.
Because of the depth, scope, and flexibility of The Reader, it is now being accessed in several continents by over 20,000 users. The Fifth Edition’s new regional legal sections and three new adapted language editions allow The Reader to move towards an effective regional approach to refugee legal education that will overcome language and geographical barriers and can successfully serve a larger community of asylum experts worldwide.
Structure and Content
The Reader first deals with the international refugee law regime and its foundations: the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the expanding mandate of UNHCR and regional developments which have a bearing on the universal perception of the rights and duties of forced migrants. The concepts and the processes are analysed in light of the formative hard and soft law documents and discussed in an up-to-date, high standard and detailed academic commentary. Issues underlying the global dilemmas of refugee law are tackled, taking into account developments in related areas of human rights and humanitarian law, as well as research advances in the field of migration.
In addition to the examination of the classic problematique of international refugee law, The Reader also presents the major regional frameworks for refugee protection. The new African section includes the core legal instruments for refugee protection in Africa and focuses on the central legal and policy challenges in their implementation. East Africa is presented in the first of sub-regional case studies. Additional studies of refugee protection in Northern, Western and Southern African will be forthcoming in the 6th edition of The Reader. The Asian section presents the framework of protection on a continent where most States are not signatories to the 1951 Convention. It offers an overview of selected national refugee laws and policies on the continent and explores some of the broader protection challenges in the region. The European section presents the detailed pan-European asylum system that is under construction and that is creating regional norms and standards in the area of asylum that have been, and will continue to be, looked to by policy makers around the world. This section contains an excellent collection of the central instruments that are shaping regional law and policy. They are current up until October 2008. The final section considers the distinctive framework of refugee protection that has emerged in Latin America, presenting the regional instruments and jurisprudence alongside a thematic examination of internal displacement in Latin America that is explored in the context of a case study of Colombia.
The Reader is designed so that users across jurisdictions, and with varying objectives, can select their own focus for the material. The Editors’ focus on the main legal and policy debates and the inclusion of many Editors’ notes will help ensure that the central themes of The Reader are not discarded in this à la carte approach to refugee law.
Accessing Source Material
Over 80 per cent of the documents and materials contained in The Reader are accessible in their full text format to all users. For practical purposes, we have limited all assigned reading to English language materials.
The Reader uses James C. Hathaway, The Law of Refugee Status (Toronto: Butterworths, 1991) and G. Goodwin-Gill and J. McAdam, The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) as core texts. The Reader is able to provide open and full access to the assigned pages of The Law of Refugee Status. While it is likely that many university professors and students will have access to the Goodwin-Gill and McAdams 2007 third revised edition of The Refugee in International Law in their libraries or university bookshops, the Editors are aware that many of our users may not. These users, however, will still benefit from full access to the text of the assigned reading from the second edition of Goodwin-Gill’s The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hence, the Editors have included parallel citations for the 3rd and 2nd editions of The Refugee in International Law throughout The Reader to ensure that all can follow the core readings in the syllabus regardless of resources. The Editorial Board and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee would like to thank the authors and Oxford University Press for their invaluable support for making refugee legal education accessible across the globe.
With the very generous support of the publishers of the secondary literature that is included in The Reader, we are able to provide the professors teaching refugee law and clinics in Central and Eastern Europe and other developing regions with password-protected access to these documents. Other users who are engaged in teaching and training refugee law in a university or clinical context may also be eligible for a password to access protected materials. More information can be obtained by contacting the Hungarian Helsinki Committee at the email listed at the bottom of the page. As there are a large number of core and extended readings that are accessible in The Reader, we recommend that the reading should only be selectively printed out. Professors may wish to assign their students segments of the assigned readings, and many of the documents, and particularly lengthy legal instruments, can be effectively reviewed on-line.
One of the significant advantages of an on-line Reader is that it is able to provide access to instruments, documents and cases in their entirety, offering a rich source of material for academic writing. It should be noted that for purposes of citation, the process of downloading articles in PDF format does not always translate the page numbers of the original publication. Hence, please consult the full citation that appears in the syllabus to ensure accuracy.
Staff
Editor in Chief
Maryellen Fullerton, Brooklyn Law School, New York USA
Editorial Board
Ekuru Aukot, Kenya School of Law, Nairobi, Kenya
Rosemary Byrne, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
B.S. Chimni, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
François Crépeau, Université de Montréal, Canada
Madeline Garlick, UNHCR Brussels, Belgium
Elspeth Guild, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Lyra Jakulevièienė, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Boldizsár Nagy, ELTE University, Hungary
Luis Peral, Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies, Spain
Jens Vedsted-Hansen, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Editorial Staff
Tímea Szabó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Erik Rehó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
