On 6th June 2013, the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) approved two new international legal instruments: the Inter-American Convention against Racism, Racial Discrimination and Related Forms of Intolerance (the Anti-Racism Convention) and the Inter-American Convention against…
Under Myanmar’s new Constitutional framework, and with legislative reform in process, it seems timely to consider whether a specific racial discrimination law could help address the entrenched issue of ethnic discrimination – and thereby reduce ethnic tensions, violence and the…
The Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Minimum Standards articulate the minimum level of educational quality and access in emergencies and express a commitment that all children, youth and adults have the right to safe, good quality and relevant…
“Lebanon is not a country of asylum” has been the official Lebanese cry for decades. Lebanon is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and lacks a comprehensive or adequate national refugee legal framework. Refugees…
The 1970s and a large part of the 1980s saw the countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America[1] governed by civil-military dictatorships. Inspired by the doctrine of national security, these governments implemented systematic plans for the violation of human…
Displacement in Kenya can be traced to a variety of sources which have forced Kenyans to move away from their habitual places of residence in search of safety: the colonial thirst for land, the punishing effects of global warming, development-related…
“The main challenges we face in these kinds of situations, especially with the typhoons and the tidal surge that they had here, is the damage to the infrastructure,” says Neil Murphy-Dewar, Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) Team Leader in Tacloban. “In…
On the FMR website it is possible to see the first edition of the Refugee Participation Network newsletter – the precursor to FMR – from April 1988. At first glance this scanned copy of a hand-typed and photocopied newsletter, complete…
While there was a growing number of people by the late 1990s who recognised the significance of internal displacement and were actively lobbying for greater international attention, there was as yet very little research on the topic. Since then, a…
For over 20 years, Kenya has been hosting refugees of different nationalities from across the region and is home to one of the biggest refugee camps in the world. Very few African countries can claim to have an asylum regime…