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).