The law of asylum in the Middle East and Asia: Developing legal engagement at the frontiers of the international refugee regime

如果一个人逃到一个没有签署《难民公约》或在其国内法中承认难民的国家，他或她是难民吗？如果这个人不是难民，他或她有什么权利？新的居住国对他或她有什么保护？从黎巴嫩到马来西亚，数以百万计的难民生活在广阔而连续的国家中，这些国家没有签署有关如何保护难民的核心国际协议。在这些地点，难民往往被视为“法律之外”，受到歧视、虐待和其他严重侵犯人权的行为。对这些人来说，开篇问题的答案往往是否定的，其结果对难民来说可能是灾难性的。这些地区的难民因被视为违法而遭受各种虐待，包括身份不正常、房东和雇主的歧视性待遇、性骚扰和不受惩罚的性侵犯（包括国家官员的性侵犯）、任意逮捕和无限期拘留（往往处于危及其生命的恶劣条件下）以及鞭刑等体罚。本项目旨在系统地探讨在这种情况下向难民提供法律援助的地方提供者最近取得的一些成功，并确定这些成功是否可以成为保护难民的新办法的基础。该项目将与埃及、印度、马来西亚和香港的四家主要难民法律援助提供者合作，评估难民、律师和法律援助组织在利用创新的法律论据和框架保护难民方面的经验。该项目将通过理论法律分析、与法律专家的面谈和讲习班以及与难民社区领导人的讨论，支持绘制有关的地方法律框架。该项目将向当地律师提供资金，利用一系列创新的法律来源，包括其他国际条约、地方宪法、各种地方立法规定、地方判例和普通法原则，为难民的权利进行法律宣传。它将收集120起此类法律遭遇的详细故事；随着时间的推移，这些故事将被记录下来，使用一系列的材料，从多个角度来看。其中40个故事将被转化为多媒体、数字故事，以供进一步的在线讨论和宣传。该项目将与项目伙伴密切合作。三个国际讲习班将确保合作伙伴在项目的研究方法方面得到培训和能力建设，并充分参与对项目产生的数据的分析。该项目的研究结果将通过在研究的四个国家各自主办的分区域讲习班以及通过在一系列国际会议和会议上介绍研究结果，与学术界和专业人士分享。该项目的目标是支持全球南方国家新的难民法律援助方案，特别是在那些由于缺乏《难民公约》和缺乏当地难民立法而忽视这种方案的地方。它的目的是更好地了解诉讼过程和影响其成功的因素。随着联合国总体上和联合国难民署更具体地重新强调法治，该项目将提出与这一新的重点相一致的保护途径，并关注当地法律和难民社区的专业知识和机构。

Is someone a refugee if he or she has fled to a state that hasn't signed the Refugee Convention or recognised refugees in its domestic law? If this person isn't a refugee, what rights does he or she have? What protection is owed to him or her by the new state of residence? From Lebanon through to Malaysia, millions of refugees live in a broad, contiguous swath of states that have not signed up to the core international agreements concerning how refugees should be protected. In such locations, refugees are often treated as "outside of the law" and subject to discrimination, abuse and other serious human rights violations. The answers to the opening questions for these people are too often in the negative and the result can be catastrophic for refugees. Refugees in these locations suffer a range of mistreatment as result of being seen as outside of the law, including irregular status, discriminatory treatment from landlords and employers, sexual harassment and assault with impunity (including at the hands of state officials), arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention (often in conditions so severe as to put their life at risk), and corporal punishments such as canning. This project seeks to systematically explore some recent successes by local providers of legal aid to refugees in such situations and to determine whether these successes can form the basis for a new approach to refugee protection.Working with four leading providers of legal aid to refugees in Egypt, India, Malaysia and Hong Kong, the project will evaluate the experiences of refugees, lawyers and legal aid organisations in using innovative legal arguments and frameworks to protect refugees. The project will support the mapping of the relevant local legal frameworks through doctrinal legal analysis, interviews and workshops with legal experts, and discussion with refugee community leaders. The project will provide funding to local lawyers to pursue legal advocacy for the rights of refugees drawing on a range of innovative sources of law, including other international treaties, local constitutional law, various local legislative provisions, local jurisprudence, and common-law principles. It will collect detailed stories about 120 of these legal encounters; these stories will be documented over time, using a range of material, and from multiple points of view. Forty of the stories will be turned in to multi-media, digital stories for further online discussion and advocacy. The project will work closely with project partners. Three international workshops will ensure that partners receive training and capacity building in the research methods of the project and fully participate in the analysis of the data produced by the project. The findings of the project will be shared with the scholarly and professional communities through sub-regional workshops hosted in each of the four countries under study and through the presentation of the findings at a range of international conferences and meetings.The goal of the project is to support new refugee legal aid programming in the Global South, particularly in places where such programming has been overlooked because either or both the lack of the Refugee Convention and the absence of local refugee legislation. It aims to develop a better understanding of the process of litigation and factors that influence its success. As both the UN more generally and UNHCR more specifically move towards a renewed emphasis on the rule of law, the project will suggest pathways to protection that are consistent with this new emphasis and which pay attention to the expertise and agency of local legal and refugee communities.