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Abstract
Although Egypt has a long history of hosting refugees, legal aid programmes to assist these refugees have a much more recent history. Over the last decade and a half, formal and informal civil society organisations have developed programmes of legal aid, focusing on a number of different legal problems facing refugees and applying a number of different models of legal aid. Despite this variety, there has been very little application in such programming of the principles of legal empowerment. Beyond the generic barriers to employing these principles, the providers of refugee legal aid in Egypt are confronted by the tension between incremental and revolutionary change that can undermine legal empowerment strategies and ambiguities concerning the precise group to be empowered.
Acknowledgements
This note is based on my own personal opinions and does not necessarily reflect the views of any of the organisations with which I have been or am involved. I am thankful for the countless insights provided by colleagues at all organisations over the course of many years of discussions, including in particular the thoughts of Mohamed Bayoumi and Ahmed Badawy. Of course, I take full responsibility for all errors and omissions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Martin Jones is Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the Centre for Applied Human Rights of the University of York. He is also a co-founder and vice-chairman of the Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights and a trustee of AMERA-UK.
ORCID
Martin Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3786-3259
Notes
1 Sarah Mousa and Kareem Fahim, ‘In Egypt, a Welcome for Syrian Refugees Turns Bitter’, New York Times, 8 September 2013, p. A10.
2 See, for example, the recent International Center for Transitional Justice and Brookings collaboration on the contribution of transitional justice to the resolution of displacement. All of the 14 case studies of that project were situations in which refugees or internally displaced persons were considered in relation to transitional justice processes in their country of origin. See http://ictj.org/our-work/research/transitional-justice-and-displacement for further information on this project and its outputs.
3 Sarah Elliot, ‘Framed: Refugees and the Egyptian Revolution’, in Revolution as a Process: The Case of the Egyptian Uprising, ed. Adham Hamed (Bremen: Weiner Verlag für Sozialfurschung, 2014), 341–58 at 355.
4 This is a phrase used by an Iraqi refugee to explain his unhappiness with the Arab Spring in a May 2011 meeting with refugee community leaders organised by the EFRR.
5 Philip Marfleet, ‘Understanding “Sanctuary”: Faith and Traditions of Asylum’, Journal of Refugee Studies 24, no. 3 (2011): 440–55 at 442.
6 Namely, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 189 U.N.T.S. 150, entered into force 22 April 1954 (the ‘Refugee Convention') and the Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, 1001 U.N.T.S. 45, entered into force 20 June 1974 (the ‘OAU Refugee Convention').
7 Since 2004, Egypt has been a member of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner's Programme (colloquially known as ‘ExCom'), the body that advises the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and served as president of ExCom during its 63rd session (3 October 2010–7 October 2011).
8 Both the constitution of 1971 (amended in 1980) and the more recently adopted constitution of 2014 recognise the right to ‘political asylum' (in Articles 53 and 91, respectively) and the direct enforceability of international treaties (in Article 151 in both constitutions). The latter article unhelpfully, due to the lack of domestic legislation, requires the exercise of this right ‘according to the Law’.
9 Under the terms of a 1954 memorandum of understanding between the UNHCR and the government of Egypt, all activities pertaining to registration, documentation and refugee status determination are carried out by the UNHCR. See Article 2 of 9 Accord entre le Haut Comissariat des Nations Unies pour les Réfugiés et le Gouvernement Egyptien (Cairo, 10 February 1954).
10 The three ‘durable solutions’ of the international refugee protection regime are voluntary repatriation, local integration and resettlement. The protracted nature of the conflicts that drive refugees to Egypt makes voluntary repatriation unlikely for most refugees in Egypt.
11 For a discussion of the ‘protection space' approach more generally, see Martin Jones, ‘Moving Beyond Protection Space: Developing a Law of Asylum in South East Asia’, in Refugee Protection and the Role of Law: Conflicting Identities, ed. Susan Kneebone, Dallal Stevens, and Loretta Baldassar (London: Routledge, 2014), 251–70.
12 Over the last 15 years, new refugee legal aid organisations have been established in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco. Barbara Harrell-Bond, ‘Starting a Movement of Refugee Legal Aid Organizations in the South’, International Journal of Refugee Law 19, no. 4 (2007): 729–35.
13 The first legal aid programme, the Refugee Legal Aid Project, was established first at the American University of Cairo and then at the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights. The second legal aid programme was wholly Egyptian and operated as a programme of the Refugees Centre for Human Rights. While the Coptic Church and Islamic mosques have at various times provided support to refugees, this has not thus far extended to the provision of legal aid services.
14 The churches in question were Protestant (Anglican and United) churches which had both large numbers of expatriates in their congregations and a history of outreach to refugee populations in Cairo.
15 The Musa'adeen Project roughly translates (from Arabic) as ‘[Refugees] Helping Ourselves’.
16 The Musa'adeen Project was operated at four different churches and only loosely coordinated, with the practice at each church differing somewhat. For an account of the practice at All Saints Cathedral, see Michael Kagan, ‘Frontier Justice: Legal Aid and UNHCR Refugee Status Determination in Egypt’, Journal of Refugee Studies 19, no. 1 (2006): 45–68, esp. 51.
17 There is a widespread suspicion by many actors, including the UNHCR and states, that refugee legal aid facilitates the fabrication of refugee claims for status and other rights. As a result, most new programmes of refugee legal aid are keen to avoid being seen as advancing unfounded claims. See Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
18 ‘History' on AMERA-Egypt website, http://opencents.org/who-we-are/history/ (accessed 28 September 2014).
19 Mohamed Bayoumi led the refugee programme of AHRLA. The government closure of AHRLAwas subsequently overturned by the Egyptian courts after lengthy legal proceedings. Amnesty International, ‘Egyptian Association for Torture Victims Wins Court Case Against Closure' (31 October 2008), http://www.refworld.org/docid/4917f26c2f.html (accessed 15 July 2014).
20 Anna Lise Purkey, ‘A Dignified Approach: Legal Empowerment and Justice for Human Rights Violations in Protracted Refugee Situations', Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 260–81 at 263.
21 Kerry Rittich, ‘Remarks by Kerry Rittich' in ‘Is Legal Empowerment Good for the Poor?' American Society of International Law Proceedings 103, no. 145 (2009): at 150.
22 A recent survey of legal empowerment by Namati adopts the following definition: ‘[legal empowerment is programming by civil society that seeks] to increase the capacity of people to exercise their rights and to participate in processes of governing’. Laura Goodwin and Vivek Maru What Do We Know About Legal Empowerment? Mapping the Evidence (Namati, March 2014), at 9.
23 One of the notable exceptions is AMERA's use of refugees to provide summary advice to other refugees. However, as evidence of the limitations of refugee participation, the refugee staff performing this function are known as the ‘screening team' and serve as gatekeepers for more bespoke assistance provided by the largely non-refugee staff of other teams through traditional legal and psycho-social counsellor models of advice.
24 The cultivation of ‘the agency and power of the people' through their direct participation in programming is a key element of the legal empowerment approach. Vivek Maru, ‘Allies Unknown: Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment’, Health and Human Rights in Practice 12, no. 1 (2010): 83–93 at 85.
25 The two most recent mass arrivals of refugees in Egypt have been Arabic speakers from Iraq and Syria. The overwhelming majority (more than 80%) of refugees in Egypt are now Arabic speaking.
26 CCIP has developed an internationally renowned and innovative training programme that leverages the multi-lingual abilities of many refugees to provide them with professional status (and employment) as interpreters. The project is led by Alice Johnson ([email protected]). For further information see https://sites.google.com/a/aucegypt.edu/ccip/ (accessed 1 July 2014).
27 The EFRR and StARS are located in downtown Cairo. AMERA was previously located in Garden City and Maadi. While there are a growing number of refugees in Maadi, most refugee communities are located in the far-flung outer suburbs of Cairo and, increasingly, along the north coast and in the Nile Delta. Legality of operations, rental costs, perceptions of staff safety, proximity of operational partners, and location of police and judicial institutions all constrain the ability of legal advocacy organisations to locate themselves closer to the refugee communities with which they work.
28 StARS and AMERA have undertaken ‘missions’ to various locations, including Saloum and Aswan in recent years. The EFRR is opening an office in Alexandria and has developed a national network of refugee lawyers who are able to assist refugees outside of Cairo.
29 Roger Zetter, ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 39–62.
30 For example, at one community engagement session organised by the EFRR in 2011, protracted and ‘new' refugee communities expressed diametrically opposed desires about the importance of advocacy on the right to education of their children. For a more systematic study of how the declared priorities of refugee communities in Cairo differ, see Natalie Briant and Andrew Kennedy, ‘An Investigation of the Perceived Needs and Priorities Held by African Refugees in an Urban Setting in a First Country of Asylum’, Journal of Refugee Studies 17, no. 4 (2004): 438–59.
31 Funding agreements with major funders regularly require at least 80% of clients served by funded projects to be of Syrian (and previously Iraqi) nationality.
32 All three post-Mubarak governments of Egypt (that led by President Morsi; the military regimes that preceded and followed Morsi; and the new regime of President el-Sisi) have restricted the operating space of civil society, in particular human rights organisations. See the open letter signed by 29 human rights NGOs, ‘Proposed Government Law Makes NGOs Subordinate to Security and Ministry Control' (9 July 2014), http://www.cihrs.org/?p=8902&lang=en (accessed 14 July 2014).
33 Martin Jones, ‘We Are Not All Egyptian’, Forced Migration Review 39 (2012): 16–17.
34 For an articulation of these barriers in the context of work with other marginalised communities, see UNDP, Envisioning Empowerment: A Portfolio of Initiatives for Achieving Inclusion and Development (New York: UNDP, 2009).
35 A long-term refugee described the preoccupation with resettlement as a ‘poison' in so far as it acts as a psychological barrier to local integration. The refugee in question was subsequently resettled.
36 The international refugee regime has historically viewed resettlement as the final durable solution with less than 10 states offering more than a handful of resettlement spaces. Although the numbers of refugees resettled fluctuate, on average only 1% of the world's refugees are resettled every year. The response of resettlement states to the UNHCR protests was silence: ‘When asked about the protest in October, representatives from the Australian and the United States governments, which are among the handful of large donors to UNHCR and hosts to resettled refugees, affirmed their support for UNHCR's efforts and gave no indication of any change of policy regarding resettlement programs', in A Tragedy of Failures and False Expectations: Report on the Events Surrounding the Threemonth Sitin and Forced Removal of Sudanese Refugees in Cairo, September–December 2005, ed. Fateh Azzam (FMRS, June 2006), at 26.
37 An open letter to the UNHCR signed by refugee community leaders making this request was received by the EFRR in March 2011. Their call for resettlement occurred at a time when the Egyptian government opened a camp at Saloum, near the border to Libya, to receive (largely) displaced Egyptian migrant workers and from which to repatriate them.
38 Michael Kagan, The UN Surrogate State and Refugee Policy in the Middle East (UNHCR, New Issues in Refugee Research Paper No. 201, February 2011).
39 Carolina Moulin and Peter Nyers, ‘“We Live in a Country of UNHCR” – Refugee Protests and Global Political Society’, International Political Sociology 1 (2007): 356–72 at 370.
40 These reasons include the risk that is generated from work with refugees: increased bureaucratic ‘fluency' that allows their request for resettlement to be better understood; and the greater likelihood of possessing personal attributes (such as language ability and educational credentials) that facilitate selection for resettlement.
41 Amnesty International recently noted that when the Egyptian government changed its policy to restrict the entry of Syrians it neglected to tell even the Syrians – resulting in several days of chaotic airplane traffic from the region to Egypt carrying inadmissible Syrian refugees.
42 Barbara Harrell-Bond, ‘Building the Infrastructure for the Observance of Refugee Rights in the Global South’, Refuge 25, no. (2008): 12–28.
43 For example, the development of a programme of legal aid for those in detention has recently led to the development of a legal empowerment approach to detention monitoring, whereby refugee community leaders would visit and act as liaison between lawyers challenging detention and refugees in detention.
44 Barbara Harrell-Bond ‘Starting a Movement of Refugee Legal Aid Organisations in the South’, International Journal of Refugee Law 19 (2007): 729–35.
45 In the personal (and organisational) history of refugee legal aid in Egypt no person is of greater renown or importance than Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond who came to Egypt as a distinguished visiting professor at the American University in Cairo in 2000 and was the impetus behind and inspiration for many of the programmes of refugee legal aid described in this note. She is also the founder and a current board member of AMERA UK.
46 The past year has seen the launch of and request for funding for a number of initiatives by the EFRR, StARS and other organisations that more completely embrace the principles of legal empowerment. It remains to be seen whether these newly acted upon desires can be translated into effective programmes of legal empowerment.
47 The seminal Report of the Secretary General on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor and Eradication of Poverty Legal Empowerment of the Poor, UN General Assembly, A/64/133 (13 July 2009) at ¶ 3 defines legal empowerment as ‘the process of systemic change through which the poor are protected and enabled to use the law to advance their rights and their interests as citizens and economic actors’ (emphasis added).
48 UNDP, Envisioning Empowerment. Interestingly, both of the projects are listed as ‘global' projects and neither of them provides direct assistance to individuals or communities of non-citizens. The methodology of Namati's more recent mapping of the evidence on legal empowerment does not capture information about legal empowerment on issues related to migration status. Goodwin and Maru, What Do We Know About Legal Empowerment?
49 ‘Citizenship-centred' is used here to refer to both the legal and political aspects of citizenship. Legally, refugees do not have the same rights as citizens and politically they are not necessarily part of the same project.