User:ALHB/Fahamu Refugee Programme

Fahamu’s Refugee Programme is the new home of a refugee rights movement based on the urgent need among refugees in the global south for legal representation.In addition to protecting individual refugees from unfounded denials of refugee status and procedural irregularities, such representation fosters systemic respect for refugee rights. In response to this lacunae, there has emerged a small network of people and organisations committed to providing refugees in the global south with legal aid.

History

Outside South Africa, where a law clinic at Cape Town University's Faculty of Law started helping Mozambiqan refugees, the first such organisations were the Refugee Consortium of Kenya and the Refugee Law Project in Uganda. Both were founded in response to the express need of refugees for legal assistance that became apparent during 1997-2000 fieldwork in Kenya and Uganda, which Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and Dr Guglielmo Verdirame conducted for the book Rights in Exile. Similar needs were apparent in Egypt, where Dr Harrell-Bond was a professor at the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) of the American University. In response, Dr Harrell-Bond founded Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), a Cairo-based refugee legal aid organisation with its headquarters in the United Kingdom.

AMERA-Egypt became a centre for training in the provision of refugee legal aid and attracted individuals from around the world who were interested in its expansion. People trained at AMERA-Egypt went on to form other direct service organisations in, for example, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Tanzania, Thailand and Turkey. Organisations to fundraise for such direct services also developed in, for example, the Netherlands and the United States.

These and other organisations have formed a network, the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network (SRLAN or the Network), beginning with email contact in 2007. Among the Network’s first activities was the development of a code of ethics for providers of refugee legal aid, the Nairobi Code. Dr Harrell-Bond has been acting as SRLAN’s coordinator since 2007 and since 2008 has also directed Fahamu’s Refugee Programme. At a 2008 meeting of SRLAN, Network members elected Fahamu to act as the Network’s secretariat. Fahamu provides the ideal platform for this, with its global reach, information technology expertise and experience in fostering network development.

While organisations based in the global south provide direct services and northern-based organisations such as AMERA, Asylum Access and 3Rs fundraise for such services, Fahamu’s Refugee Programme consolidates, supports and expands refugee legal aid. It built and maintains SRLAN’s website, which will service refugee legal aid providers and promote the expansion of refugee legal aid throughout the global south. The Refugee Programme will continue to moderate an e-mail listserv, which refugee legal aid providers from around the world have used since 2007 to communicate about casework. It will conduct urgent advocacy using Fahamu’s e-newsletter Pambazuka News and produce its own newsletter. It will offer training in the provision of refugee legal aid and encourage the expansion of refugee law teaching. It will produce and facilitate rigorous research to underpin advocacy on key refugee rights issues and strategic litigation.

Activity so far

Despite its lack of core funding, the Fahamu Refugee Programme has begun to advance its objectives:

• The 2007 Nairobi meeting of SRLAN produced the Nairobi Code, which is now the standard by which the provision of refugee legal aid is governed;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme has built the skeleton of the SRLAN website and has populated many of the pages with information. Although the website is in its beta (testing) phase, many NGOs have made use of its resources;
• SRLAN’s e-mail listserv, which is hosted and moderated by the Fahamu Refugee Programme, hosts traffic at a rate of between five and 15 e-mail messages per day. List members forward information and refugee legal aid providers regularly use the listserv to pose questions and raise issues stemming from cases. Queries usually receive a number of responses, which the refugee legal aid provider draws upon in handling the case. Anecdotal evidence confirms that these e-mail exchanges have had a significant positive impact on cases;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme is developing its network of Resource Persons who will contribute to and provide resources for topic pages on the SRLAN website;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme has raised funds to establish a new refugee legal aid NGO, the Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights, whose primary focus is litigation of refugee rights in domestic (Egyptian) courts;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme has raised funds from the US Institute for Peace to provide training in the provision of pro bono legal aid in the Asia Pacific region over the next two years;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme launched its first major research and advocacy project, the PDRL, in October 2008;
• The Fahamu Refugee Programme sent a researcher to Burundi and Tanzania to investigate the forced repatriation of Burundian refugees. The resulting report was presented to UNHCR at its annual consultations with NGOs and published in Pambazuka News; and

Fahamu

The Fahamu Refugee Program is part of Fahamu, an NGO based in Oxford with offices in Cape Town, Dakar and Nairobi. It supports the strengthening of human rights and social justice movements by promoting the innovative use of information and communications technologies, stimulating debate, discussion and analyses, publishing news and information and developing and delivering educational courses.

Fahamu publishes the weekly newsletter Pambazuka News. With a readership of over 500,000 people, it is Africa’s largest circulation periodical and online platform dedicated to human rights and social justice. It publishes articles on a wide range of subjects in English, French and Portuguese, soon to expand to Arabic.

Fahamu’s portfolio of distance learning courses has been widely praised. Over 1,000 organisations and individuals have completed its courses since 2003, and other institutions such as the University of Oxford and United Nations Human Rights Council have adopted its methodology.

Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network

The Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network (SRLAN) is a group of non-governmental organisations working for the implementation of refugee rights enshrined in international human rights and refugee law.

The Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network was initiated to formalise cooperation, with a view to channelling disparate refugee rights organisations into a movement for refugee rights in the Global South. At the time of inception, the SRLAN concluded the Nairobi Code to which all members of the Network agreed to abide.

The particular challenges that refugees face with regards access to judicial recourse in the Global South have demanded an increase in rights-based advocacy for refugees, through pro bono legal aid, research and policy advocacy. The SRLAN member organisations are bound by a common desire to foster respect for the rights of refugees in the global south, whilst not all necessarily being based there. The SRLAN provides a platform for these organisations to learn from one another's experiences, and coordinate advocacy and legal challenges with the support and expertise of a network of practitioners.

History

The SRLAN was set up in 2007 at a five-day workshop held in Nairobi and attended by sixteen refugee advocacy and legal aid NGOs. the groups were meeting to outline a code of practice that would allow them to represent refugees in UNHCR's adjudications of refugee status. (UNHCR initially attempted to write this code itself but it included unacceptable clauses that, amongst other things, made the maintenance of attorney/client confidentiality impossible). This became the Nairobi Code.

The group also decided to form the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network and went on to produce a charter for membership. Several organisations have since joined and full or association membership is open.

Since 2008, the SRLAN has attached itself to Fahamu Fahamu, an NGO with offices in Brazil, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Oxford, UK. It aims to support human rights and social justice movements by promoting innovative use of information and communications technologies to stimulate debate, discussion and analysis.

Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond has argued that the main advantage of attaching the SRLAN to Fahamu is its wide global readership, now over 600,0000, and its freedom to do fearless advocacy that individual members,may be too vulnerable to achieve alone. The Fahamu Refugee Programme acts as a secretariat for the SRLAN.

Membership

Taken from SRLAN website

• Africa Middle East Refugee Assistance *
• African Women's Advocacy Unit
• Asian Women's Human Rights Council
• Asylum Access *
• Barnes & Daly Solicitors *
• Centre for Refugee Research (University of New South Wales)
• Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights *
• Fahamu Refugee Programme
• Frontiers Ruwad Association *
• Gonggam - Korean Public Interest Lawyers Group
• Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (Kenya)
• Helsinki Citizens Assembly *
• Hong Kong Refugee Advice Centre
• Iranian Refugees' Alliance
• Japan Association for Refugees
• Jesuit Refugee Service
• Lawyers for Human Rights *
• Legal Resources Foundation
• Refugee Consortium of Kenya
• Refugee Law Project *
• Struggle for Change Pakistan *
• Tel Aviv University Refugee Rights Program
• University of Cape Town Legal Aid Clinic
• US Committee for Refugeees and Immigrants
• WARIPNET

Member of SRLAN Steering Committee - *