In celebration of the World Refugee Day
World Refugee Day has been celebrated on 20 June since 2001, as an international day to honor the people who have been forced to flee from conflict or persecution in their home country. The Nordic Journal of Human Rights (NJHR) is proud to launch this inaugural thematic collection of previously published articles on World Refugee Day, doing what we can for focusing global attention on the situation of refugees as the UNHCR encourages. As an international human rights journal, NJHR takes the unequivocal view that refugee rights are human rights as we take “a broad, multi-disciplinary view of human rights”. Accordingly, we have a long history of publishing contributions on refugee rights. We strongly believe that the protection for refugees means not only granting the right to asylum, but also the fulfilment of their human rights in general. The heightened vulnerability of refugees to human rights violations warrants the amplified academic attention that our journal also contributes to. In addition to the submissions specifically on refugee rights, we include here articles discussing other vulnerable migrants, which often face human rights challenges similar to those of refugees, and sometimes there are no clear boundaries between these two groups. In this collection, we have initially selected five articles from the archives of NJHR, which in different ways discuss refugees’ human rights and their “hope away from home” (which is the theme of World Refugee Day 2023). The challenges discussed in these submissions span the topics of the detention of child asylum seekers, adequate shelter, sexual and gender-based violence, indigenous people on the move and displacements due to climate change. This non-exhaustive list demonstrates how wide-ranging the everyday struggles of refugees are around the world. Beyond highlighting our past submissions, NJHR encourages authors to submit their manuscripts related to refugee rights in the future.
Edited by
Professor Kjetil Mujezinović Larsen(Department of Public and International Law, University of Oslo)