What Happens to Law in a Refugee Camp?

Abstract

How do people living in a refugee camp engage with legal practices, discourses, and institutions? Critics argue that refugee camps leave people in “legal limbo” depriving them of the “right to have rights” despite the presence of international humanitarian actors and the entitlements enshrined in international law. For that reason, refugee camps have become a highly visible symbol of failed human rights campaigns. In contrast, I found in an ethnography of the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa, that although people living as refugees faced chronic insecurity and injustice, they engaged extensively with several different facets of the law. I illuminate three interrelated dimensions of their experiences: (1) their development as international legal subjects; (2) their alienation from domestic legal institutions; and (3) their agency within the legal field. The article contributes to the research agenda on law in humanitarian settings an empirically grounded account of the subjective dimensions of legal alienation and mobilization in a refugee camp. More broadly, it contributes to international human rights debates by theorizing a mixed outcome of international human rights campaigns: the emergence of wards of international law, people deeply embedded in the international legal system, but alienated from local law.

Conflict Zones of the Middle East: New Challenges in Search for Durable Solutions for the Arab Refugees

“…How can these people living an uncertain life really care about legal delicacies? (Holzer, 2013). Holzer has concluded after observing human right violations in refugee camps that the existing legal instruments offer little security or justice for people living in refugee camps.…”

Sobre el sujeto-víctima: configuraciones de una ciudadanía limitada

“…Diversos escritos relacionan la categoría de víctima con la pérdida de la ciudadanía (Agamben, 2004;Holston & Appadurai, 1996;Holzer, 2013). Las personas en situación de víctimas tienen un cambio en cuanto al ejercicio de sus derechos, que se denomina en términos de ciudadanías precarias, incompletas o en el bajo acceso a los derechos.…”

Your rule of law is not mine: rethinking empirical approaches to EU rule of law promotion

“…Although current empirical research (based on the model of the Rule of Law in Action) identifies a gap between the rule of law in books and the rule of law in action in these camps, it offers no explanation for this discrepancy. In order to understand why most refugees feel alienated from the official legal system (Holzer 2013), and why most people in Mae La Oon prefer their own camp justice over Thai law, we need to apply the model of the Living Rule of Law. Our case study suggests that the (individualistic) values of the official rule of law are quite different from the (communitarian) values of the refugees themselves.…”