Deciding Who is a “Foreigner”: The Situation in the Indian State of Assam from a Legal Perspective

The State of Assam in the Union of India has a peculiar history of the movement of people from across India’s international borders into Assam. This has become a point that has been abused by those in power to utilise local sentiments regarding the dilution of “Assamese culture” by “outsiders”.

This seminar discusses briefly the timelines leading up to the amendment of India’s Citizenship Act which carved out a special provision for Assam and ultimately led to the Supreme Court judgement directing the preparation of a National Register of Citizen (NRC). While examining the Supreme Court judgement, the seminar then discusses the ad-hocism in rule-making regarding the inclusion into and exclusion from the register. It will highlight examples of the nightmare that befell fellow countrymen from Assam as a result of the NRC. When the Supreme Court ordered the preparation of the NRC in Assam, it also directed the creation of Foreigner’s Tribunals in Assam and left this task to the High Court of Assam. The seminar talk critically assesses these Foreigner’s Tribunals to show how a “wartime/colonial” legislation intended to remove foreigners from (British) India summarily is now being used, and how its working leaves much to be desired when it comes to compliance with the essential principles of the rule of law.
It concludes by arguing that the Government’s sovereign power to count its “citizen” must only be exercised after judicial paraphernalia to remedy executive excesses is in place.

Mr Talha Abdul Rahman obtained his law degree from NALSAR University of Law in 2008 with several gold medals and then pursued a Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford University as Shell Chevening Scholar in 20082009. He has been practising in India since 2009 and has been an Advocate on Record before the Supreme Court of India since 2017. He has assisted Justice JS Verma Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law (2013), set up in the wake of the gruesome rape in Delhi. He has worked on various public interest matters, including the communal riots of 2012 in Faizabad, Muzaffarnagar Communal riots, right to privacy cases, matters concerning the reform of the criminal justice system, and appointment of an ombudsman. He advised NGOs in their engagement with the legal system. He is presently involved in litigation concerning the prescription of procedure for Foreigners Tribunal in India and those challenging the amendments to the Citizenship Law.

Uncertain Futures: EU Citizenship in the Shadow of Brexit

If the UK leaves the European Union, over 60 million British citizens, including over 1.2 million living in the EU-27, face being stripped of their EU citizenship rights, and 3.8 million EU-27 citizens resident in Britain face an uncertain future in the UK in terms of the continued exercise of their EU citizenship rights. Which remedies are suitable for their predicament? and what do they tell us about the nature, pedigree, and future of (supra-national) citizenship?.

Dr. Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler is Associate Professor in International Refugee Law at the University of Reading, School of Law, where he is the Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes. Ruvi is an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple; Research Associate of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Co-convenor of the Migration and Asylum Section of the Society of Legal Scholars; Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative (Institute for Advance Legal Study, University of London) and Editor-in-Chief of its Working Paper Series. Ruvi's public engagements include serving as Chair of the Board of Trustees of New Europeans Association UK; Chair of the Oxford European Association; A Britain in Europe academic expert; and an advisory council member of Rene Cassin. Previously, Ruvi was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic and with the Human Rights Program; and a Tutor in Public International Law at Oxford. Ruvi's recently published book is Voting Rights of Refugees (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Ruvi's areas of research interest include International Refugee Law, Electoral Rights and citizenship, Comparative Constitutional Law, and International Humanitarian Law. Ruvi holds DPhil, MPhil, and BCL degrees from the University of Oxford. For more information and a list of publications: www.reading.ac.uk/law/about/staff/r-ziegler.aspx

The Global Compacts: A Missed Opportunity or a Promising Tool?

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees(GCR) were broadly adopted in December 2018. The adoption of the global Compacts has been one of the main developments on international migration governance for decades. This talk will explore the process for adoption of the Compacts focusing particularly on the GCM and also looking at its content. It will explore whether the Compacts could be used as a tool or whether their adoption has been a missed opportunity. The talk will also focus on the global architecture for implementation of the global Compacts and how new mechanisms and processes are developing.

Carolina Gottardo is a lawyer and economist who has worked on human rights issues for more than 20 years in different countries and contexts. Carolina's areas of specialization are gender, asylum and migration. She is the Director of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), Australia. Previously she was the director of a women's rights organisation working with refugee and migrant women in the UK for 6 years. Carolina has been in senior management for more than 15 years at the British Institute of Human Rights, British Red Cross and Womankind Worldwide in the UK and the Refugee Council of Australia. She worked for the Constitutional Court and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in her native country, Colombia.

Carolina has served on a number of boards in London, Brussels, Bangkok and Melbourne including law centres and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM). Carolina is currently the co-chair of the End Child Detention Coalition (ECDC) Australia and the chair of the women and girls group, member of the board and focal point on the Global Compact on Migration at the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN). She is also a board members of the global International Detention Coalition (IDC). Carolina has excellent advocacy experience at national, regional and UN levels. She is a member of the UN Women’s global Expert Working Group to address the human rights of women in the Global Compact on Migration.

From Muddy Boots to Business Class: To the Emergency Frontlines and Back

While these children have been quickly left unremembered, the recurrent multilayered yet somehow homogeneous narrative of a very large number of children displaced, missing, and dead invokes anxiety, demands our attention and underlines a central problem – we simply do not know enough about the dynamics and complexities of children and young people on the migration pathway. There are a lot of assumptions about children’s displacement but not enough research-informed understanding of this phenomenon.

How can we make sense of such constructions of innocence and vulnerability and the contradictory state practices and strategies that exacerbate protection risks? This presentation provides insights from three recent global emergencies, and reflects on how evidence-based research and learning from experience can be used to strengthen global protection mechanisms.

Bina D'Costa is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. She is also the school’s Deputy Director - Education. At the height of Europe’s refugee emergency, she moved to UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti as its senior migration and displacement research specialist to build its Migration and Displacement program (2016-2018). She is the author of seven books including Children and the Politics of Violence in South Asia (CUP). Bina has also served as the Asia Rapporteur for the Asia-Europe 55 member states ASEM global meeting on Children and Human Rights in 2017.

Resettlement of Refugee Immigrants in Australia: Agency and Affordances

Across the world, including in Australia, the population of refugee immigrants is growing. Yet, understandings about how best their resettlement needs can be addressed remain under-informed. Despite being in relatively safe environments, adult refugee immigrants in Australia continue to experience poor
educational, occupational, and social inclusion challenges. This may be due to compounded effects of possible difficult past refugee life experiences and the often distressing and challenging resettlement experiences. In this seminar, Dr Gerald Onsando (University of Melbourne) and John
Riek (Afri-Aus Care) will explore the life experiences of refugee immigrants and the social structural affordances that often constrain their capacity to exercise the personal agency required to fully contribute to and participate in Australian society.

Gerald was joined by John Riek in delivering this seminar.

Dr Gerald Onsando is a Research Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne. Dr Onsando is currently working on a project that is focusing on life after prison support for African Australians through the practice of Ubuntu.

John Riek has a Bachelor of Social Work (Hons) from the RMIT University and is currently working as an Employment Pathway and Facilitator at the Afri-Aus Care organisation supporting culturally diverse young people in and around the City of Greater Dandenong. Mr Riek is a member of the South Sudanese community in Melbourne who came to Australia as a refugee from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

Minority Statelessness and Racialized Citizenship: Romani minorities and the Uneven Access to Citizenship

Recent UNHCR data has shown that more than 75 % of stateless people belong to a minority group. Although this data indicated that minorities are more vulnerable to statelessness, it is not every minority group that faces same degree of vulnerability. This paper poses a question, what circumstances make
certain minority groups more vulnerable to statelessness than the majority population and also other minorities. It takes an example of Romani minorities in Europe, who have in different contexts found themselves with a hindered access to citizenship and hence at the risk of statelessness. It then explores
how does the position of Roma in Europe compare to other examples of minority statelessness in Europe and around the globe, such as:  Russian speaking minorities in the Baltic States, children of the ‘Windrush’ generation in the United Kingdom, the Dominicans of Haitian descent, and Rohingya
minority in Myanmar. With the theoretical reconsideration of racialized citizenship, I argue that in these selected cases the states introduced legislation, discourses and practices, which retroactively transformed minorities in question from citizens to irregular or illegitimate migrants.

Dr Julija Sardelić is a socio-legal scholar and currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at LINES (Leuven European and International Studies), University of Leuven, Belgium. Her Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project is entitled “Invisible Edges of Citizenship: Readdressing the Position of Romani Minorities in Europe”.  Her research encompasses broader themes of citizenship and migration, but she particularly focuses on the legal statuses of marginalized minorities and migrants in Europe such as: Romani minorities, undocumented forced migrants, legally invisible persons and stateless persons. Before her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Law and Social Justice (University of Liverpool), Max Weber Fellow (European University Institute) and School of Law (University of Edinburgh). Prior to her academic career, she has a decade long experience of working as a civil society activist in Romani communities. She is an individual member of the European Network on Statelessness.

Applicants will need to demonstrate their integration into the Australian community'': Proposed Citizenship Changes and Refugees/Stateless Persons

According to the Federal Government’s proposed 2017 citizenship package, which will be re-introduced in 2018, applicants for citizenship by conferral would be required to show that they have ‘integrated into the Australian community’. This lecture examines the idea of integration requirements, using evidence from other jurisdictions to sketch out the meaning and scope of the concept. It analyses the background for the proposed changes and examines their possible consequences, especially for refugees/stateless persons.

Dr Heli Askola is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Monash University. Her research interests include comparative immigration and citizenship policy; labour and sexual exploitation of migrants, including trafficking in human beings; and freedom of movement and migration in the EU. She has published widely in these areas. Her publications include Citizenship and Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Legal Responses to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation in the European Union (Hart Publishing, 2007).

Is Mr Pham a Vietnamese National? Citizenship Deprivation and Foreign Nationality Law in Municipal Courts

In Pham (2015), the United Kingdom Supreme Court decided that Mr Pham was, as a matter of Vietnamese law, a Vietnamese national. This conclusion was in conflict with the position of the Vietnamese authorities, who did not accept that he was. This divergence as to the content of municipal Vietnamese nationality law – between the institutions of the state of nationality and those of a foreign state – raises in dramatic form questions concerning the treatment of foreign nationality law in municipal courts.

Different conclusions were reached not only by the British and Vietnamese authorities, but by the relevant adjudicative bodies in the United Kingdom. The British litigation saw decisions that Mr Pham was not a Vietnamese national, and decisions that he was. These different conclusions arose from differences of interpretive approach between the relevant courts and tribunals. The interpretive differences were in turn informed by different readings of relevant international law materials, centrally guidance on statelessness provided by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

This seminar will analyse the different interpretive approaches employed in the Pham litigation, grounded in British public law and applied to both Vietnamese and international law. The context for this analysis is twofold: the common law tradition with regard to the treatment of foreign nationality law and the relevant international law debates on statelessness.

Dr Rayner Thwaites is a Senior Lecturer in Public and Administrative Law at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher. His ARC grant project is titled “Conditional Citizenship: Revocation’s Implications for Australians” and is comparative study of citizenship deprivation, focusing on Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He is the author of the GLOBALCIT Report on Citizenship Law: Australia and of The Liberty of Noncitizens: Indefinite Detention in Commonwealth Countries (Hart Publishing, 2014), among other publications. His most recent paper accepted for publication, coauthored with Assoc Prof Andrew Edgar, is “Implementing Treaties in Domestic Law: Translation, Enforcement and Administrative law” in the Melbourne Journal of International Law (forthcoming). He has an SJD from the University of Toronto.enship and Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Legal Responses to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation in the European Union (Hart Publishing, 2007).

The Lived Experiences of Children of Transnational Migrants in Lombok, Indonesia

In contemporary Indonesia economic forces have led to a significant rise in transnational labour, with an accompanying surge in family fragmentation. Policies on transnational labour migration, however, do not adequately consider the rights of children of migrant workers, including their right to an official identity and to protection in a family environment. This seminar discusses how the lack of accessibility to birth registration for children of migrant parents on the island of Lombok, Eastern Indonesia, has resulted in considerable risks for children left behind by their migrant parents. These risks include being unable to access entitlements associated with citizenship, being regarded as de facto stateless, and being exposed to numerous child protection issues while their parents are overseas. Drawing on the results of child-focussed research with children and young people in rural Lombok the paper reveals children’s lived experiences while their parents are away, and the deep feelings they articulate about their parents’ sustained absence. A prominent issue that emerged from the research was how children of migrants are entangled in a multigenerational pattern of undocumented and unsafe migration, leading to inter-generational statelessness. Some children described how they felt they were in some sort of limbo, waiting for something to happen, which included waiting until they were old enough to migrate themselves. By concentrating on children’s own views and experiences, the paper contributes to current debates about the implications of migration and statelessness in the Southeast Asia region.

Dr Harriot Beazley is a human geographer and community development practitioner with a passion for rightsbased research with children and young people. She is Program Coordinator (International Development) and Senior Lecturer (Human Geography) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Harriot’s research interests are directed towards childfocussed participatory research in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Her PhD (ANU) research was ethnographic research on the geographies and identities of street children in Indonesia. Since then she has consulted as a technical advisor to AusAID, UNICEF, DEFRA (UK), Save the Children and DFAT on a variety of child protection, social inclusion and gender issues. Harriot has conducted research and published widely on street children in Indonesia and Cambodia, the physical and emotional punishment of children in Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Indonesia, children’s experiences in orphanages after the tsunami in Aceh, children in prison in Indonesia, and the impact of transnational migration on children in Lombok, Indonesia. Harriot is a member of the Research Forum of the International Consortium for Street Children, and is Commissioning Editor for the Journal Children's Geographies.

Children of ‘Cross Border Marriages’ and Nationality in Can Tho, Mekong Delta, Vietnam

The second in the Statelessness Seminar Series 2018 took place on 9 August 2018 with a presentation by Professor Susan Kneebone and PhD students, Brandais York and Sayomi Ariyawansa.

This seminar presents the preliminary findings on data collection on the situation of bi-racial children born from international marriages between Vietnamese women and fathers in South Korea and Taiwan, who are returned to Vietnam following a failed marriage. This work is part of the larger ARC project ’Development of a Legal Framework for Regulation of International Marriage Migration’.  A key concern of this data collection is to evaluate the rights of the children in light of the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, especially Articles 7 and 8, which contain provisions which confer independent rights of nationality and identity upon a child. The seminar will explain the laws and regulation of nationality in Vietnam, and the different legal and contextual situations of the children, many of whom are de facto statelessness in in Vietnam. We will examine the effectiveness of central and local regulation of the rights of the children.

Susan Kneebone researches in the area of international migration, nationality and citizenship law, including refugees, statelessness, human trafficking, marriage migration and migrant workers, with particular reference to South East Asia.  She has published widely in international journals including the Journal of Refugee Studies, the International Journal of Refugee Law [‘The Pacific Plan: the Provision of ‘Effective Protection’?’ (2006) 18 (3, 4)], the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law [‘Outing off-shore processing: the High Court of Australia defines the role of the Refugee Convention’ (2012).Susan is a Professorial Fellow and Associate at the Asian Law Centre at Melbourne Law School.

A noncitizenist look at statelessness and the global compact for migration

Our world is commonly understood as a world of citizens. Citizenship is often ideologically assumed to be desirable, enfranchising and rights-providing. This paper argues that this is a mischaracterisation and defends a more complex noncitizenist approach. It explores what this means for understandings of statelessness and for how statelessness is addressed in the global compact for migration in particular.

Tendayi Bloom is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University in the UK. She is author of Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Routledge, 2018) and editor most recently of Understanding Statelessness (Routledge, 2017, with K Tonkiss and P Cole).