North-South Civil Society Conference on Refugee Warehousing

Conference on Refugee Warehousing

When? September 25-26, 2005 (the two days before UNHCR’s Annual NGO Consultation; Proposals for presentations due July 15, 2005)

Where? World Council of Churches

150 Rue de Ferney

Geneva, Switzerland

Sponsors: Dutch Council for Refugees

Frontiers (Lebanon)

Refugee Consortium of Kenya

Refugee Council USA

Thai Catholic Commission on Migration

World Council of Churches

What? The North-South Civil Society Conference on Refugee Warehousing will gather advocates from refugee hosting and donor countries to learn from one another and to collaborate on tactics and strategies to win the basic rights of refugees elaborated in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and other human rights instruments to live free, dignified, and productive lives even as they await durable solutions. Special focus will be upon their rights to earn livelihoods—including the rights to work, practice professions, run businesses, and own property—and freedom of movement and opportunities for coordinated advocacy on current responsibility-sharing initiatives such as Targeted Development Assistance. The conference will also promote durable solutions as part of a multi-pronged approach to ending warehousing. The rights of women and children, who constitute the majority of the world’s refugees, will be highlighted in discussions throughout.

Who should attend? Refugees, refugee and human rights advocates, business and labor leaders, representatives of faith communities, writers and scholars, refugee service providers

Request for presentation proposals Presentations should be action-oriented. If you wish to make one, please send a short proposal to north-south@uscridc.org by July 15. (Selected presenters will be notified July 22.) The best presentations will be derived from actual advocacy experience in winning refugee rights. More academic treatments should be clearly linked to practical implications for policy change. Formal papers are desirable but not required. Some topics to address (others encouraged):

1. Host country strategies and tactics for winning refugee rights:

– domestication of international instruments of refugee protection (drafting, promoting, passing, and implementing legislation);

– identifying constituencies, mobilizing stakeholders, building coalitions;

– the utility of impact studies;

– using the media to cultivate popular support;

– collaboration with refugees and donor country counterparts;

2. Donor country responsibility-sharing

– pressing for equitable responsibility-sharing rather than subsidizing warehousing;

– development aid as leverage for rights (MCA, TDA, DAR, DLI, etc.);

– Good Humanitarian Donorship as an instrument of refugee protection;

– redirecting aid to rights-friendly modes rather than allowing it to be cut off on the pretext that rights alone should suffice;

– collaboration with refugees and host country counterparts;

3. Durable solutions and refugee rights

– refugee rights as preparation for durable solutions;

– strategic use of durable solutions (e.g. resettlement, local integration, or voluntary repatriation) to win rights for the refugees who remain in exile;

– strategic use of anti-warehousing advocacy to get durable solutions on track;

– pitfalls: the pursuit of durable solutions as alibi for neglecting rights in exile; framing rights as contingent upon availability of durable solutions.

4. Refugees

– from the camps to the web: using the internet to mobilize the immobile to advocate on their own behalves;

– Convention Travel Documents as tools of regional economic integration;

– demonstrating refugees’ potential as agents of development;

– collaboration with national and international civil society.

5. The commercial sector

– how do business and/or labor interests coincide (and/or conflict) with refugee rights?

– making the economic case for refugee rights.

6. Faith communities: bringing moral force to bear, locally and internationally, for refugee rights advocacy.

7. UNHCR: restoring the protection mandate. As an instrument of states, what can UNHCR do for refugee rights and how can it be held accountable to do it? What is its role as an advocate for refugees and custodian of international refugee law?

To register and/or submit a presentation proposal, please go to: www.refugees.org/warehousing