Monday, November 13th, 2017 Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: How to Move Beyond Crisis Thinking

Description

Is there really a global “refugee crisis” as much media suggests?

In this presentation, Professor Hathaway suggests that the language of crisis is overstated. There is of course little doubt that the international refugee regime as presently implemented is an abject mess; it does not meet the needs of developed countries, of the poorer states that host the overwhelming majority of the world’s refugees, much less of refugees themselves. Yet the regime as implemented bears little resemblance to the approach actually agreed to by international treaty. The challenge, then, is not to come up with new law, but is rather to adopt insurance-style mechanisms to do what we have already promised to do in a dependable and managed way.

Biographical Note:

James C. Hathaway, the James E. and Sarah A. Degan Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan since 1998, is a leading authority on international refugee law whose work is regularly cited by the most senior courts of the common law world. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam. He earned law degrees from the Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto) (LL.B. Honours) and Columbia (LL.M., J.S.D.), and has received doctoral degrees honoris causa from the Université catholique de Louvain (2009) and University of Amsterdam (2017).

From 2008 until 2010 Hathaway was on leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the Dean of Law and William Hearn Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, where he established Australia’s first all-graduate legal education program. He previously held positions as Professor of Law and Associate Dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada (1984-1998), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983-1984), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980-1983). He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, San Francisco, Stanford, Tokyo, and Toronto.

Hathaway’s publications include more than eighty journal articles and chapters, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, second edition 2014 with M. Foster; first edition 1991, republished in both Russian in 2007 and Japanese in 2008); of an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997); and of The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005, republished in Japanese in 2014, and in Chinese 2016), the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention. He is the founding Editor of Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies; Senior Advisor to Asylum Access, a non-profit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the global South; and Convener of the biennial Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law. Hathaway regularly advises and provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.