NEWS: Refugee Law Conference a Success

Posted On: 08 October 2009

Refugee Law Conference

Monday 5 October 2009

On Monday 5th October 2009 the Murray Stable, in partnership with the Scottish Refugee Council, the University of Glasgow, and the Glasgow Immigration Practitioners’ Group, put on a day long refugee law conference at the Royal Faculty of Procurators’ Library, Glasgow.

The sole speaker was the world-renowned refugee law scholar, Professor James Hathaway, Dean of the University of Melbourne Law School.  The author of the 1991 ‘Law of Refugee Status’, Professor Hathaway is the institutional writer in the field.  In recognition of the speaker’s enormous international prestige, the event was chaired by Mungo Deans, Regional Senior Immigration Judge, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Speaking to a packed hall of Immigration Judges, legal practitioners, academics and students, who had come to Glasgow from all over the United Kingdom, Professor Hathaway tackled head on one of the foremost issues in international refugee law today.  Variously called “internal flight”, “internal relocation” or – Professor Hathaway’s preferred terminology – “internal protection”, the issue is essentially about the conditions prevailing in the home country of a refugee before he or she can claim asylum from the international community.  Can a Somali live safely in territory controlled not by the state but by his own clan?  Must a Ugandan fleeing the Lord’s Resistance Army in the north live in Kampala even if she can only live by prostitution?  Should a Darfuri move to a camp in Khartoum even though conditions are “appalling” there?  Professor Hathaway vigorously advanced a principled protection model, respecting core human rights, as opposed to current UK law, which takes an arbitrary and piecemeal approach.

Murray Stable Advocates have had a lead role in the development of refugee law in Scotland.  There was a palpable sense of excitement in the hall at the presence in our midst of the world leader in the field, and a sense that Scottish refugee law is achieving world recognition.  A dinner afterwards in honour of the Professor was well attended by a good cross section of solicitors, counsel, and Immigration Judiciary.