Audrey Macklin

Brazil's humane refugee policies: Good ideas can travel north, U of T expert says

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:42:23 +0000

Brazil's humane refugee policies: Good ideas can travel north, U of T expert says

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 02/12/2020 - 11:42

Cutline

In this March 2018 photo, Venezuelan children wait for a meal at a migrant shelter set up in Boa Vista, Roraima state, Brazil (photo by Eraldo Peres/AP Phot)

Audrey Macklin

Topic

Global Lens

Brazil

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Faculty of Law

Migrants

The Conversation

The global north tends to view the global south as a source of refugees, and it often implements policies aimed at preventing those refugees from reaching the global north.

Brazil recently set a bold precedent that should make those northern states adjust the lens. Its policy toward Venezuelan refugees, in contrast to its wealthier peers, is pragmatic, humane and sensible.

Venezuela’s political, economic and social collapse has generated a population hemorrhage: More than 4.5 million, or one in seven Venezuelans, have left, and most remain in the region. Colombia hosts around 1.5 million. About 260,000 have entered Brazil through its northern border with Venezuela at a rate of about 500 per day. Three elements of the Brazilian response stand out.

First, Brazil has provided basic shelters and services – not detention – to meet the urgent and immediate needs of people streaming across the Venezuelan border into Roraima province. Brazil partners with United Nations agencies, as well as international, regional and domestic aid agencies that contribute financial and logistical assistance. The Brazilian government has also initiated a policy to redistribute arrivals to the interior of Brazil to reduce the burden on Roraima.

In this February 2019 photo, Venezuelans stand behind a sign reading ‘Venezuela-Brazil Limit’ near a border checkpoint in Pacaraima, Roraima state, Brazil, on Venezuela’s southern border (photo by Ivan Valencia/AP Photo)

Next, Brazil has expanded the scope of entitlement to refugee status. The 1984 Cartagena Declaration adopted a regional approach to refugee protection, mindful of the history of Latin American states as both producers and recipients of refugee flows.

The international refugee definition contained in the UN 1951 Refugee Convention is individualistic and requires proof that applicants fear personal persecution. But the Cartagena definition supplements that narrow approach by including people who have fled their countries because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.

In June 2019, Brazil’s National Committee for Refugees issued a detailed report concluding that the crisis in Venezuela falls under the purview of the Cartagena Declaration. People labelled as migrants elsewhere because they fall outside the narrow terms of the UN Refugee Convention definition are included as refugees under Cartagena.

Bolder step

In December 2019, Brazil took an even bolder step: It dispensed with the requirement of individualized refugee status determination for each Venezuelan asylum applicant.

Applicants in Brazil, with documentary proof of identity and without a criminal record, will receive refugee status without an interview. Refugee status, in turn, entitles them to permanent resident status, access employment, public health care, education and other social services available to Brazilians.

After four years, they may apply for naturalization. Within the first month of the policy, about 21,000 Venezuelans were processed under this new system.

Put this in comparative perspective: Unlike the United States and Australia, Brazil has not set up detention centres, separated families and caged children in order to punish Venezuelans for fleeing intolerable circumstances.

That means that Brazil has not wasted scarce resources on vicious and futile deterrence strategies. Brazil also applies a refugee definition that responds to contemporary patterns of forced migration. And unlike other states with sophisticated refugee status determination regimes, Brazil’s group-based recognition of Venezuelans avoids the creation of a mammoth backlog of Venezuelan asylum applications.

Resources that would have been wasted processing individual Venezuelan asylum claims will be directed at managing settlement and integration, and on determining asylum claims from other places.

Some are just passing through

Not all Venezuelans who arrive in Brazil seek asylum.

Many transit through Brazil in order to rejoin family or friends in nearby states, such as Argentina or Chile. Others go back and forth between Brazil and Venezuela to deliver food, medicine and other necessities to family and communities who remain there. And some do not wish to see themselves as refugees and so do not claim that legal status.

Brazil also allows Venezuelans to obtain two-year renewable temporary resident permits that also give them access to employment and to public services like health care and education.

There is good reason to believe that whether they are admitted on temporary permits, or permanently as refugees, most Venezuelans will go home voluntarily if and when the circumstances that caused them to flee have improved. That’s another advantage of regional integration programs that enable people to live, work and continue their lives in proximity to their country of origin.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro plays with a Venezuelan boy at an event for beneficiaries of a program to receive Venezuelan migrants in January 2020 (photo by Eraldo Peres/AP Photo)

Regional solidarity plays a paradoxical role in Brazil’s initiative. The Cartagena Declaration, as well as a regional free movement initiative under the Mercosur trade bloc, show the emergence of South American co-operation in migration.

On the other hand, President Jair Bolsonaro has not distinguished himself in the past as a champion of refugees and displaced people. One wonders whether his antipathy toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have more to do with the Brazilian hospitality shown to Venezuelans fleeing Maduro’s regime than solidarity. One is reminded here of refugee politics during the Cold War. But whatever the motive, the current policy has much to commend it.

Not perfect

The system is certainly imperfect. Brazil is a middle-income country, and so the quality and availability of public services is uneven.

Bureaucratic inefficiency and lack of co-ordination among different branches of the state cause delay and confusion. Venezuela is not the only source of asylum-seekers; Brazil also receives asylum seekers from Haiti, Africa and the Middle East.

Local aid organizations struggle to fill service gaps, but their resources are also strained by the surge in Venezuelan arrivals.

The absence of habitable and affordable accommodation is also a massive and critical problem in Brazil. Refugees may have no alternative but to live in extremely dangerous and violent places. Language training is weak, though Portuguese is relatively easy for Spanish-speakers to learn. Even though refugees can lawfully seek employment, some employers still take advantage of newcomers by overworking and underpaying them.

These are problems. But they are better problems to have than thousands of severely traumatized children, thousands of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean and the abuse, torture, rape and killing of people seeking refuge in the detention centres of Libya or Manus Island.

We have something to learn from the Brazilians. If Brazil can find an efficient, pragmatic way to welcome, protect and integrate hundreds of thousands of forced migrants arriving at its border, so can more affluent states. Good ideas –like good people – can migrate north, and we should welcome them.

Audrey Macklin is a professor and chair in human rights law and the director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Jihadi Jack' and the folly of revoking citizenship: U of T expert

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 14:42:43 +0000

'Jihadi Jack' and the folly of revoking citizenship: U of T expert

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/21/2019 - 10:42

Cutline

Jack Letts has been in a jail in Syria since 2017. The British government just stripped him of his citizenship, but he has Canadian citizenship due to his father’s birth here (photo via Sky News)

Audrey Macklin

Topic

Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Faculty of Law

Global

The Conversation

The British government has just stripped Islamic State recruit Jack Letts of his United Kingdom citizenship.

In one sense, the move was unsurprising. The U.K. has been the undisputed leader in reviving banishment as punishment for “crimes against citizenship,” deploying it primarily against those deemed threats to national security.

The country’s Home Secretary favours stripping citizenship of nationals already abroad, which has the convenient effect of circumventing legal accountability and human rights impediments to deportation.

The mildly surprising feature of the U.K.’s decision is that it has opted to make Letts Canada’s problem. Letts is currently being held in a jail in northern Syria after being captured by Kurdish forces in 2017.

Letts’ father is a Canadian citizen and, therefore, his son is a Canadian citizen by descent. As a result, the U.K. can deprive him of citizenship without rendering Letts stateless because he will remain a citizen of Canada.

With limited exceptions, international law prohibits rendering people stateless, though the U.K. plays fast and loose on that front. It strips citizenship from not only those who are dual citizens as well as those who are not, but whom the Home Secretary speculates could, in the future, possibly obtain citizenship from some other country.

It doesn’t much matter to the U.K., really. Once discarded, the former citizen might be executed by drone strike, transferred elsewhere for prosecution or persecution or detained indefinitely by non-state armed forces. Wherever they go, it won’t be back to Britain, and whatever happens to them, they are someone else’s problem. That’s what makes citizenship deprivation, in the language of the British law, “conducive to the public good.”

No espionage or treason

Why another country should bear sole responsibility for a citizen that the U.K. disavows is an interesting question. These are not classic instances of espionage or treason, where the historic narrative underwriting stripping citizenship was that the individual betrayed one state in the service of the other state.

Shamima Begum, a British citizen who joined the Islamic State as a 19-year-old in 2015, was not working for Bangladesh in Syria. Jack Letts was not a Canadian spy.

I speculate that the British government has, until Letts, traded on a tacit understanding that British Muslims with brown skin inherently “belong” less to the U.K. than to some other country where the majority of people are Muslims with brown skin – even if they were born in Great Britain and have never even visited the other country of nationality.

On this view, stripping citizenship merely sends the targets back to where they “really” come from. Citizenship deprivation thus delivers an exclusionary message to all non-white, non-Christian British citizens that their claim to U.K. membership is permanently precarious, however small the literal risk of citizenship deprivation.

Indeed, British legal scholar John Finnis explicitly flirted with a similar idea a few years ago by proposing the “humane” expulsion of all Muslim non-citizens from Britain.

The Letts conundrum

But Letts is white, his parents are middle class and Christian in upbringing (though secular in practice). His other country of citizenship, Canada, is also predominantly white and Christian in origin.

John Letts, father of Jack Letts, is seen at a news conference in Ottawa in October 2018 (photo by Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Canada is a staunch British ally, an important diplomatic and trading partner and a G7 member. Queen Elizabeth remains the formal head of state in Canada.

The illogical underpinning of citizenship deprivation now emerges clearly, shorn of implicit appeals to racism, Islamophobia and colonial arrogance. Letts is no more or less a risk to national security in Canada than the U.K. In no sense does Letts “belong” more to Canada than to the U.K., the country where he was born, raised, and that formed him.

The world is not made safer from terrorism when the U.K. disposes of their unwanted citizens in Canada, Bangladesh or anywhere else. The very phenomenon of foreign fighters testifies to that.

Claims that “citizenship is a privilege, not a right” or that the undeserving citizen forfeits citizenship by his actions is flimsy rhetoric intended to distract from the grubby opportunism that motivates citizenship revocation.

The U.K. does this not because it enhances the value of citizenship or makes the world safer from terrorism. It does it because it can.

If the British government thinks stripping citizenship is a good way for a state to respond to the challenges of national security, it must think it’s a good idea for all states. So imagine that Canada also had a citizenship revocation law. In fact, Canada’s Conservative government did enact such a law in 2014 (inspired by the U.K.), though it was repealed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in 2017.

Here is the scenario: Letts, ISIS foreign fighter, is a citizen of the U.K. and of Canada. Neither country wants to claim him. Each has the possibility of revoking his citizenship as long as Letts is not rendered stateless.

The result?

An arbitrary race to see which country could strip his citizenship first. To the loser goes the citizen – maybe Canada, maybe the U.K.

This every-state-for-itself race to the bottom is the antithesis of co-operation in a global struggle against radicalizaton and terrorism; one need not be schooled in game theory to recognize it as counterproductive parochialism. Once states contemplate the possibility of being on the receiving end of citizenship stripping, the tactic doesn’t look quite so clever.

Until now, the U.K. has targeted individuals whose other state of nationality lacked the resources or diplomatic heft to challenge the British practice under international law. Maybe it’s time for Canada to step up, and to work with other countries, to pressure the U.K. and other states to abandon citizenship revocation as a means of disavowing “bad citizens.”

The Letts case reminds us that citizenship revocation policies can bite back. Any country that seeks to dispose of their citizens in this way may some day be a disposal site for other countries. If human rights aren’t enough of a reason to abolish citizenship revocation, and undermining global co-operation isn’t enough either, perhaps self-interest can tip the balance.

Audrey Macklin is a professor in the Faculty of Law and director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.