International Response to the World's Refugees, Displaced Persons Must Be Revised...

International Response to the World's Refugees, Displaced Persons Must Be
Revised and Expanded, Say Leading Human Rights Authorities at Boston College
Conference

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass., Nov. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Change on an
international level is needed to address the severe plight of the world's 45
million forced migrants, refugees and displaced persons, according to two
leading authorities whose keynote addresses recently launched a global human
rights conclave at Boston College.

The international community's response to the displaced, expressed in the
mandate given to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, needs to be
revised and expanded, contended Susan Martin, president of the International
Association for the Study of Forced Migration, and one of the world's leading
scholars on refugee issues.

In her remarks at the three-day conference, which focused on the deeper causes
of forced migration and the identification of systemic response, Martin, who
is Herzberg Professor of International Migration at Georgetown University,
executive director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration
and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the International Organization
for Migration, focused on rethinking the international refugee regime in light
of human rights and the global common good.

It is not enough for the international community, including the United States
as a member of it, simply to respond to the needs of those who are being
persecuted, she said, referring to the current definition of who counts as a
refugee -- someone who flees home because of persecution.

Rather, Martin argued, we need to add the obligation to respond to others
among the 40 to 50 million displaced persons who are not persecuted, but who
face displacement by war and conflict, by environmental forces causing floods
and expanding deserts -- a problem that is becoming increasingly serious --
and by major economic crises, if their own states are unable or unwilling to
come to their aid.

This approach, she said, would provide vital assistance to a great many more
people than those who are now being aided.

Offering the Catholic Church's perspective on human rights as a framework for
advocacy on behalf of the displaced, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's
representative to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, called for an
international cooperation that aims to foster political stability and to
eliminate underdevelopment.

"The present economic and social imbalance, which to a large extent encourages
forced migration, should not be seen as something inevitable, but as a
challenge to the human race's sense of responsibility," he said. "An
international regime should be established to better manage all forced human
displacement, a social phenomenon that is trans-national by its nature."

Archbishop Tomasi also stressed that there are basic rights that all human
beings should have the freedom to enjoy, including the right to live a decent
life in one's own country, to move to escape violence, hunger or persecution
and to be treated with dignity in a host country. The identity of displaced
people in a new environment has to be respected, "especially their religion,
but also their cultural traditions and expressions and always within the
common good of the entire hosting society."

While illegal immigration should be prevented, "it is also essential to combat
vigorously the criminal activities which exploit illegal immigrants," he said.
"His irregular legal status cannot allow the migrant to lose his dignity,
since he is endowed with inalienable rights, which can neither be violated nor
ignored."

Organized by the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International
Justice, in conjunction with the Jesuit Refugee Service and Catholic Relief
Services, the three-day conference brought together leading scholars and
practitioners from agencies and universities around the world, including BC,
Georgetown, Harvard, Notre Dame, McGill, Oxford and Australian National
Catholic universities and Hekima College in Nairobi, Kenya; the Catholic Legal
Immigration Network, Inc.; the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office of
Migration and Refugee Policy; Oxfam America; and practitioners from South
Africa, Southeast Asia and Jamaica, among others.

Two days of seminars followed the keynote addresses, focusing on topics such
as the ethical and religious grounds for advocacy on behalf of forcibly
displaced people; human rights of forced migrants in light of culture and
gender; the causes of growing resistance to respect for the right to asylum in
the developed world, including U.S. detention and deportation of asylum
seekers; war as a cause of forced migration, and the plight of Iraqi refugees.

"Advocacy is something that you cannot do when you are spending all of your
time responding to the immediate needs in a refugee center in a camp or in an
urban setting where people are hungry and need help," said Rev. David
Hollenbach, SJ, director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights. "We
are trying to provide assistance at a more analytical level about how to
respond. We had a broad range of people from different backgrounds, both
academics and practitioners - people who are both on the ground working with
displaced people and those who are operating in a more policy-oriented
direction."

The task is a formidable one, said Fr. Hollenbach. "Of the huge number of
people displaced in the world today, a sizeable number of them are children. A
disproportionate number of displaced people are women with their children.
Many refugees wind up in protracted refugee situations - more than five years,
and more than half must live in refugee-like situations for over 15 years.
This is a very grim situation."

The conference presentations will be the basis for a book, tentatively titled
"Driven from Home: The Causes of Forced Migration and Systemic Responses," Fr.
Hollenbach said. The book would be the second to emerge from a conference
co-sponsored by the three groups. The first, "Refugee Rights: Ethics,
Advocacy, and Africa" (Georgetown University Press) resulted from a 2006
conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

SOURCE Boston College

Patricia Delaney, Boston College Office of Public Affairs, +1-617-552-3352,
delaneyp@bc.edu