Forced Migration Online: Blog

This podcast was recorded at the Refugee Studies Centre’s Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture which was on Wednesday 18th November 2009 at the Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford. The Harrell-Bond Lecture is held annually in honour of Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, founding former director of the Centre and of the academic field of refugee studies or forced migration studies. Jan Egeland, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and currently director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs gave the 2009 lecture on the subject of political deals and durable solutions for the displaced.

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Refugee Week is a UK wide series of events and activities that celebrate the contribution made by refugees to UK life and seek to promote a better understanding of why people become refugees.
Refugee Week takes place every year in June during the same week as World Refugee Day on June 20th. The main focus of Refugee Week activities in 2009 is the Simple Acts Campaign, which is about inspiring people to use small, everyday actions to change perceptions of refugees.

• Refugee Week
• Asylum Dialogues
• British Red Cross ‘Look beyond the label’
• FMO World Refugee Day and Refugee Week

“On this Human Rights Day, it is my hope that we will all act on our collective responsibility to uphold the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration. We can only honour the towering vision of that inspiring document when its principles are fully applied everywhere, for everyone.”
Ban Ki-moon,
United Nations Secretary-General

For resources and more information about Human Rights Day and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see the FMO resource summary and the selected digital library documents below.

• Resource summary
• The functioning of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights
• Protecting human rights: the challenge to humanitarian organizations
• A humanitarian practitioner’s guide to international human rights law
• Human rights at the dawn of the 21st century
• Human rights and refugees

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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This podcast was recorded by Radio Netherlands Worldwide at the first of The Hague Debates on Thursday, 22 May 2008 in the Peace Palace and is entitled ‘When home gets too hot: Human Displacement and Climate Change in International Law’. The debate features Professor Roger Zetter, Director of the Refugee Studies Centre.

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The latest podcast in a series recorded at the bi-annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) is now available online.

The third plenary event included a panel discussion ‘Regions at the Crossroads: Transregional Forced Migration’ chaired by Susan Martin, with presentations by Mark Schlakman, Aicha Belarbi, Jeffrey Crisp and Ahmet Icduygu and Susan Kneebone.

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The latest podcast in a series recorded at the bi-annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) is now available online.

The second plenary event began with the keynote address ‘Palestine refugees in the contemporary context: a view from UNRWA’ by Karen Abu Zayd, Commissioner General of UNRWA, followed by a panel discussion ‘The situation of refugees in the Middle East’ chaired by Maysa Ayoub, and including Helen Young, Patricia Fagen and Shahira Samy.

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The film Playing Between Elephants is now available to view online. The film was produced by Aryo Danusiri, Bruno Dercon and UN-HABITAT and has just won the Human Rights Award at the Jakarta International Film Festival 2007. It documents a post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, where an international body that is assigned to build houses, while an Acehnese village chief leads his people through the ups and downs of the ongoing reconstruction and rehabilitation process. The film very intimately shows how complicated it is to survive a traumatic event and then experience global intervention. Rebuilding a house in post-tsunami Aceh brings into play the whole world and forces the Acehnese people learn to deal with the friction between the global and local realms.

• Playing Between Elephants