Review of Jason Pobjoy, The Child in International Refugee Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today more than half the world’s refugees are children and their numbers appear to rise continually. Child refugees tend to be at the greatest risk not only of lethal danger but also of being neglected by immigration systems. Jason Pobjoy studied the cases of 82 unaccompanied children who were applying to be refugees in Uganda to escape from extreme violence in their homelands. Although not the subject of this book, these children and the atrocities they experienced have inspired it. Dr Pobjoy is a practising barrister in London and he also works at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Questioning why children are so invisible within immigration systems, he was led to examine how the problem arises from gaps and contradictions in international law. Specifically, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (UNCR, 1951) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) are both necessary to support child refugees adequately. Yet they are rarely combined in administrative and legal cases. Pobjoy’s aim is to demonstrate in practical detail how it is essential and possible to assist child refugees through legal analyses of their cases that combine the two Conventions. He has conducted ‘a comprehensive comparative review of the procedural and substantive obstacles that a child –whether unaccompanied, separated or accompanied – may encounter’ as well as ways to resolve these challenges (p. 3). The research is based on over 2,500 cases, mainly in the major common law countries, UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Although most refugees, nearly 90 per cent, are in the Global South, they tend to be allowed into those countries, where their living conditions are the major concern. Pobjoy concentrates on law about access, and how permission or refusal are determined at the point of entry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".