Forced Migration Online: Blog

A Forced Migration Review supplement ‘Islam, human rights and displacement’ is now in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).

The Forced Migration Review Editors have produced this 12-page supplement to enhance debate and understanding of the concepts and instruments of international human rights in the Islamic world.

The supplement includes the full text of the UDHR and the ‘Cairo Declaration’ in the hope that they will both inform and enable those concerned with assisting and protecting displaced people to advocate more strongly on their behalf. We have also included three articles that take up aspects of the debate over the applicability of international laws and conventions in Islam.

Full Issue

• FMR 2009, Supplement: Islam, human rights and displacement

Individual Articles

• Islam, international law and the protection of refugees and IDPs
• The rights of refugee women and children in Islam
• Child rights and Islam

‘Understanding and Addressing the Phenomenon of Child Soldiers’ by Ah-Jung Lee, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers, is now available online.

In the past 10 years, the phenomenon of ‘child soldiers’ has attracted enormous media attention and has also become a policy priority in the humanitarian field. In the global policy discourse, a ‘child soldier’ is commonly defined as ‘any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members’ (Cape Town Principles). The central thesis of the global discourse is that children have no place in war under any circumstance and that child soldiering is an unambiguous violation of universal children’s rights. With this belief, humanitarian organisations have lobbied for various international legal instruments that prohibit the military recruitment of under 18- year-olds and hold adults who recruit children criminally culpable for war crimes. At the same time, the images and tales of child soldiers have proliferated in such a way that ‘child soldiers’ has almost become a moral and emotional issue, with activists and organisations taking it on with almost missionary zeal.

• Understanding and Addressing the Phenomenon of ‘Child Soldiers’ (PDF file 272 KB)
• Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers

The Digital Library and Journals sections of this website were relaunched in December 2008, with substantial modifications and upgrades including moving the content to new servers (for better long term preservation) and a more precise search facility. This work was undertaken as part of the JISC funded OARS project, the aim of which was to improve the management of the underlying Digital Library content and make it more open and accessible to external systems such as Google. Searching and browsing Digital Library content is now faster and more accurate than before, and this content is accessed through an improved user interface. The FMO team welcomes feedback from our users.

• Digital Library
• Journals

A special issue of Forced Migration Review ‘Ten Years of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement’ is now in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).

This 40-page special issue of Forced Migration Review (FMR), published by the Refugee Studies Centre of Oxford University, reflects discussions at the international conference on the Ten Years of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (‘GP10’) held in Oslo on 16-17 October 2008.

The FMR special issue includes shortened versions of some of the conference presentations, plus a selection of other articles, most of which present case studies on the application of the Guiding Principles in different countries.

Full Issue

• FMR 2008, Special Issue: Ten Years of the Guiding Principles

Individual Articles

• The genesis and the challenges
• Achievements, challenges and recommendations
• Assessing the impact of the Principles: an unfinished task
• The Guiding Principles and the Responsibility to Protect
• Achievements and limitations of the Guiding Principles in Burma
• Protecting IDPs in Europe
• Experience of the Guiding Principles in Georgia
• Africa: from voluntary principles to binding standards
• Can the Guiding Principles make a difference in Kenya?
• Uganda’s response to displacement: contrasting policy and practice
• Guiding Principle 29 and the right to restitution
• Obstacles to realising Guiding Principle 29 in Afghanistan
• Seeking electoral equality for IDP voters
• Time to apply the Guiding Principles in Nepal
• Returnees in Sierra Leone
• Guiding Principle 27 and Philippine typhoon response
• Internal displacement in the Central African Republic
• UNHCR and the Guiding Principles
• Training to strengthen protection of IDP rights
• The future of the Guiding Principles