Response from another perspective

Before this summer, I had a similar view of the advocacy reports published by the likes of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. I wasn’t sure what purpose these well-researched reports served beyond a moral tug at the sleeve of an unresponsive government.

This summer I have seen these reports put to a different use: to corroborate the claims of refugees. Refugee determinations are made by the UNHCR or the evaluating government on the basis of country of origin information. The work of NGOs (like AI, HRW, International Crisis Group, or domestic organizations) can make or break an application.

If a Sudanese refugee can point to an Amnesty appeal publicizing the arrest of protestors on a certain date, and match his arrest to that date, his application will almost certainly be granted. In more tenuous cases, if a Kurdish Iranian woman can cite a Human Rights Watch report about honor killings in the north west of Iran and the lack of state protection against these killings, her application is more likely to be granted. For the asylum claims I have seen, there is often very little in the way of evidence besides the applicant’s testimony and whatever relevant NGO or government reports exist. The credibility of the applicant often determines the claim. If I can find a report from an NGO that supports a claim, it is not overdramatic to say it could change a life. For this, my view of these reports has dramatically changed. If your report to the Nepalese government is published or made available online in a source like RefWorld? (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain), your report may be cited by someone preparing a refugee claim. A Nepali who says he has been tortured can cite a report like yours to demonstrate that the Nepalese government has failed to conform to the UN treaty it signed and the UNHCR will be more sympathetic to his claim.

Of course, even this defense of NGO-advocacy eventually hits a wall. I think about something Prof. Moglen said during class that pissed me off at the time. I will paraphrase because I forget the details. We were talking about how many people we could help if we tried, or how many people we should help if possible. One hundred? One thousand? One hundred thousand? What number would be sufficient? No number seemed high enough to balance the moral inequality.

Naively, I thought the answer was simple: one. If I could help one person, that has meaning and is sufficient. But after working on half a dozen claims this summer, I have a different answer. The number is not the point: it is the system. The six people I might have helped are irrelevant. The legal aid office I am working at is fighting an avalanche with a handful of broken shovels. There is no way they could adequately assist all the refugees who need legal help, let alone all the illegal migrants who face a miserable life in Turkey and in their countries of origin and yet have no valid claims as refugees. At a certain point, the work becomes more than helping individual refugee applicants, but creating pressure within and outside the system for change.

How can change be created? Well, advocacy reports again are a start. UNICEF was not aware of the treatment of minor refugees in Turkey until an NGO’s report brought it to their attention. On the other hand, like you say, money has the last word, especially in places like Turkey where bribery and corruption are more prevalent. A human rights professor at LSE told us to quit his class and study arbitration instead. If we really cared about changing the world, he said, we were better off making a lot of money and then using it to create the change we wished.

He said it ironically (I hope), but I still disagree with the premise and hate that view of human nature. Like buying off a politician, creating the ends you wish by disregarding the means only perpetuates the inequality of that system. So the question becomes changing the system… and I do not YET know how that can be done as a citizen, a human, or a lawyer. For now, I want to learn how these systems work and help in whatever limited way I can with an eye towards the future.