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

如果某人逃到了一个没有签署《难民公约》或在其国内法律中没有承认难民的国家，那么他或她就是难民吗？如果这个人不是难民，他或她有什么权利？新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的、毗连的国家中，这些国家还没有签署关于如何保护难民的核心国际协议。在这些地方，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。对于这些人的开场白，答案往往是否定的，结果对难民来说可能是灾难性的。这些地方的难民由于被视为法律之外而遭受一系列虐待，包括身份不正常、房东和雇主的歧视性待遇、性骚扰和性侵而不受惩罚(包括在国家官员手中)、任意逮捕和无限期拘留(往往条件恶劣，危及他们的生命)，以及罐头等体罚。这个项目旨在系统地探索在这种情况下为难民提供法律援助的本地机构最近取得的一些成功，并确定这些成功是否可以成为新的难民保护方法的基础。该项目将与埃及、印度、马来西亚和香港四个主要的难民法律援助机构合作，评估难民、律师和法律援助机构在使用创新的法律论点和框架保护难民方面的经验。该项目将通过理论上的法律分析、与法律专家的访谈和讲习班以及与难民社区领导人的讨论，支持绘制相关的当地法律框架。该项目将向当地律师提供资金，利用一系列创新的法律渊源为难民的权利进行法律辩护，这些法律渊源包括其他国际条约、当地宪法、各种当地立法规定、当地判例和普通法原则。它将收集120个这样的法律遭遇的详细故事；这些故事将随着时间的推移而被记录下来，使用一系列材料，并从多个角度。其中40个故事将被转化为多媒体数字故事，供进一步的在线讨论和宣传。该项目将与项目合作伙伴密切合作。三个国际讲习班将确保合作伙伴接受项目研究方法方面的培训和能力建设，并充分参与项目产生的数据的分析。该项目的成果将通过在所研究的四个国家中每一个国家举办的分区域讲习班和在一系列国际会议上介绍成果，与学术界和专业界分享。该项目的目标是支持全球南部新的难民法律援助方案拟订工作，特别是在因缺乏《难民公约》和当地难民立法而忽视这类方案拟订工作的地方。它的目的是更好地了解诉讼过程和影响诉讼成功的因素。随着联合国和难民署更加具体地重新强调法治，该项目将提出与这一新重点相一致的保护途径，并注意当地法律和难民界的专门知识和机构。

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.