Forced Migration Online: Blog

This podcast was recorded at a lecture organised by the Refugee Studies Centre and sponsored by Clifford Chance, the event was held on Wednesday 18th June 2008 at the offices of Clifford Chance, London. Lord Malloch-Brown, Minister of State for Africa, Asia and the UN gave the lecture which was entitled ‘Reputational Hazard: Rescuing Refugees in the Era of Illegal Immigration and Terrorism’.

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Bhutanese Refugees is a new website which is a collaboration between PhotoVoice and the Bhutanese Refugee Support Group, who have both have worked closely with Bhutanese refugees. The website includes audio and video of refugees telling their personal stories.

Situated between the emerging superpowers of India and China, the isolated Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, hailed by some as ‘the last Shangri-La’, has generated one of the highest numbers of refugees in the world in proportion to its population.

Since 1991 over one sixth of Bhutan’s peoples have sought asylum in Nepal, India and other countries around the world.

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In November 2007, the FMO team established a network of advisors for the OARS project, comprised of representatives of higher education (HE) institutions in the UK. Students, researchers and academics from universities and colleges form the backbone of FMO’s user community. It is therefore important to involve them in the FMO portal’s redevelopment and enhancement.

On behalf of the FMO team, the Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Professor Roger Zetter, wrote to academic departments and centres in the UK requesting their input. They were asked to complete a brief questionnaire about their usage and opinions of FMO. This information will be used to inform the team in its work to make the enhancements to FMO through the OARS project.

We would strongly encourage all users of FMO - whether or not they be in the HE sector and/or in the UK – to contribute to the OARS project and assist the team in making the most appropriate changes to FMO to benefit all users. Further details can be found on the OARS project website, and the questionnaire can be completed and submitted online.

When Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond came in to be interviewed for the first FMO podcast, she very kindly brought us some interesting documents from the Southern Refugees Legal Advocates Conference, which was held last January in Nairobi.

The conference’s tasks were to establish a code of ethics for refugee legal aid practitioners who work through NGOs and law clinics and to consider creating a ‘southern’ network to address common concerns and to advocate more effectively on behalf of refugees as a collective.

The resulting three documents, the Nairobi Code, the SRLAN Charter and the conference report are now in the digital library.

• The Nairobi code: model rules of ethics for legal advisors in refugee cases
• Charter Southern Refugee Legal Advocacy Network (SRLAN)
• Report: Southern Refugee Legal Advocates Conference

In this podcast Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and Prof Roger Zetter discuss the evolution of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) and of the academic field of refugee studies or forced migration studies. As the founding former director of the RSC and the current director respectively, and with a long shared history of collaboration since the centre was established, Harrell-Bond and Zetter are well placed to discuss its early years and the changes it has undergone. In this conversation, they also talk about the current state of refugee protection and the asylum process, and examine the responses of the international community, particularly UNHCR.

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