Harrell-Bond

Refugees in the 'Global South' face many serious violations of their rights. Several major host states have failed to ratify both the Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. However, even among those states that have ratified one or both, few have enacted the domestic legislation to implement the provisions, and no state in the South has made a serious effort to bring domestic law in into harmony with the rights of refugees and their international commitments. This paper presents a multi-faceted proposal, a guide to building a new global infrastructure for the protection of refugees. An important precursor is a rapid expansion in the teaching and studying of refugee law. Today’s students of refugee issues are tomorrow’s researchers, lawyers, and scholars, all of which are desperately needed to help refugees navigate the process of status determination and resettlement, to advocate more generally for the rights of refugees, and to monitor states’ compliance with international obligations. Human rights NGOs need to embrace the fact that refugees are human beings, and refugee rights are human rights. Furthermore, advocacy groups, legal aid organizations, and other NGOs need to understand that advocacy, legal assistance, and research must go hand in hand: the provision of legal assistance to individual refugees not only makes the use of their life stories for research and advocacy more ethical, it improves the quality of the research and advocacy as well. Perhaps most importantly, all the groups working with refugees throughout the South must communicate with and assist each other.

Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond OBE is a leading figure in the field of refugee studies. She founded the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University, the world's first institution for the study of refugees. It now hosts an annual lecture series in her name. On retirement, she conducted research on the extent to which refugees enjoy their rights in exile in Kenya and Uganda. She has also founded or helped to found refugee legal aid organizations in several locations, including the Refugee Law Project in Uganda and AMERA (Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance) inEgypt. In 2000 she was invited to the American University in Cairo to establish another refugee studies programme. In 2005, Harrell-Bond was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to refugee studies.In September 2008, she returned to Oxford where she is establishing an 'information platform', a web site for legal aid practitioners in the global south.

Harrell-Bond was born and raised in South Dakota. She attended Asbury College in Kentucky where she studied music, married, had three children, and began studying anthropology at the University of Oxford in 1965 where she earned an M.Litt. and a D.Phil. in social anthropology. Prior to founding the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, she was employed by the Department of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, the African Studies Centre, Leiden, Holland, the School of Law, University of Warwick, and the American Universities Field Staff.

Books

• Modern Marriage in Sierra Leone (1975) ISBN 9027978719
• Community Leadership and the Transformation of Freetown (1978) ISBN 9027975256
• 4 June: A Revolution Betrayed (1982, as Barbara E. Okeke)
• Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (1986) ISBN 0192615432
• Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism (2005, with Guglielmo Verdirame) ISBN 1845451031