Betwixt and Between: Refugees and Stateless Persons in Limbo

The refugee experience is far from over upon arrival in a place of asylum. Indeed, in many ways, the struggle to create a new life has only begun. As refugees can attest to, the process of fully normalizing their lives--reuniting with family members, securing local education for themselves and their children, finding appropriate employment, and participating in the political life of their new countries--is one fraught with legal and procedural difficulties, a process that leaves many in long after their new lives should be well under way. Similar limbo is experienced by the stateless, those denied the basic yet essential right of nationality. Like refugees, stateless people face often insurmountable difficulties in securing the core protections of the state in which they reside. And, as is the case for refugees, the existence of international treaties aimed at assuring their protection far from guarantees their physical or legal security. It was a privilege to be invited to be guest editor of this special of issue of Refuge. Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) has been involved in Canadian policy related to refugees in limbo for a number of years. Our focus has been to effect policy change--to ensure that the Right of Landing fee (dubbed a head tax) would no longer be charged to Convention refugees, to ensure that Convention refugees and other protected persons can access government loan programs for university, and to propose a policy of automatic landing or permanent residency once a person has been deemed a Convention refugee. Seeking policy change to allow refugees to get on with their lives is often slow, frustrating, and sometimes tedious. But the stories which those in limbo tell--of their flight, of their life today, and of their incredible perseverance--demonstrate the requirement for at least as much perseverance to ensure justice is done. What has become increasingly clear, as we do this policy work, is the need to understand, compare and contrast Canadian policy and approaches with what is occurring in other countries. Together, all of the authors in this issue of Refuge give us a picture of different kinds of limbo in different parts of the world. Two of the articles also show how statelessness is its own form of limbo. Waiting, betwixt and between, perhaps recognized--but not yet truly accepted--perhaps not even recognized. This is the nature of limbo experienced by refugees and stateless persons the world over. Included in most of the articles are the voices of persons caught in limbo situations. The expressions of frustration and often painful separations from loved ones make more poignant the reality that policies and practices which cause limbo are not just items for political or academic study; rather, real people are suffering real hardships which need to be alleviated. For some, limbo begins at the first point of asylum, in a refugee camp. Representative of a situation found in many camps, Awa Abdi's article about 130,000 Somali refugees in camps in Kenya provides a compelling picture of this type of limbo. For well over a decade, these Somali refugees have been able neither to return home nor to move on to a new country of asylum. The emergency need for the camp during a crisis has turned into a semi-permanent limbo situation, with all the familiar consequences of limbo. Inability to procure work, epidemic violence (especially against women), and continuing insecurity leave these refugees in constant dependency on aid from international organizations. It is a picture which often continues as people move beyond these camp situations seeking further asylum. Distinctive barriers are also faced by stateless persons, who may find themselves without formal status, rights to seek employment, access to health care, or education for their children. With neither the right to remain nor anywhere to return to, they are truly betwixt and between. The political determination of statelessness, its distinction from refugee status, and the complexities surrounding this type of limbo are described in the next two articles of this issue. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.