Structure and Content

Accessing Source Material

Adapting The Reader to Specific Course Needs

Technical Advice

Acknowledgments

Reader Feedback

Editors

November 2008

The Refugee Law Reader: Cases, Documents and Materials (5th edn.) is a comprehensive on-line model curriculum for the study of the complex and rapidly evolving field of international refugee law. We are proud to introduce an expanded and universal edition of The Reader, which provides sections on international and regional frameworks of refugee law, covering Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Adapted language versions will soon be available in French, Russian and Spanish.

The Reader is aimed for the use of professors, lawyers, advocates, and students across a wide range of national jurisdictions. It provides a flexible course structure that can be easily adapted to meet a range of training and resource needs. The Reader also offers access to the complete texts of up-to-date core legal materials, instruments, and academic commentary. In its entirety, The Refugee Law Reader is designed to provide a full curriculum for a 48-hour course in International Refugee Law and contains over 700 documents and materials.

The Refugee Law Reader was initiated and is supported by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and funded by the European Refugee Fund and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Structure and Content

The Reader is divided into six sections: Introduction to International Refugee Law, The International Framework for Refugee Protection, The African Framework for Refugee Protection, The Asian Framework for Refugee Protection, The European Framework for Refugee Protection and The Latin American Framework for Refugee Protection. Each section contains the relevant hard and soft law, the most important cases decided by national or international courts and tribunals, and a carefully selected set of academic commentaries.

To facilitate teaching and stimulate critical discussion, the Editors highlight the main legal and policy debates that address each topic, as well as the main points that should be drawn from the assigned reading. In many sections of the syllabus, readers may also access Editor’s Notes, which contain more detailed commentary and suggestions for teaching in a given subject area.

Because of the depth, scope, and flexibility of the Reader, it is now being accessed in several continents by over 20,000 users. In this edition, The Reader has ‘universalized’ by introducing new regional legal sections focusing on Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Alongside the English language publication, adapted language editions will be launched in French, Russian, and Spanish. The Editorial Board hopes that with these new developments, The Reader can move towards an effective regional approach to refugee legal education that will overcome language and geographical barriers and can effectively serve a larger community of asylum experts worldwide.

The Reader first deals with the international refugee law regime and its foundations: the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the expanding mandate of UNHCR and regional developments which have a bearing on the universal perception of the rights and duties of forced migrants. The concepts and the processes are analysed in light of the formative hard and soft law documents and discussed in an up-to-date, high standard and detailed academic commentary. Issues underlying the global dilemmas of refugee law are tackled, taking into account developments in related areas of human rights and humanitarian law, as well as research advances in the field of migration.

In addition to the examination of the classic problematique of international refugee law, The Reader also presents the major regional frameworks for refugee protection. The new African section includes the core legal instruments for refugee protection in Africa and focuses on the central legal and policy challenges in their implementation. East Africa is presented in the first of sub-regional case studies. Additional studies of refugee protection in Northern, Western and Southern African will be forthcoming in the 6th edition of The Reader. The Asian section presents the framework of protection on a continent where most States are not signatories to the 1951 Convention. It offers an overview of selected national refugee laws and policies on the continent and explores some of the broader protection challenges in the region. The European section presents the detailed pan-European asylum system that is under construction and that is creating regional norms and standards in the area of asylum that have been, and will continue to be, looked to by policy makers around the world. This section contains an excellent collection of the central instruments that are shaping regional law and policy. They are current up until October 2008. The final section considers the distinctive framework of refugee protection that has emerged in Latin America, presenting the regional instruments and jurisprudence alongside a thematic examination of internal displacement in Latin America that is explored in the context of a case study of Colombia.

While we have attempted to design The Reader so that users across jurisdictions, and with varying objectives, can select their own focus for the material, it is important that central themes of The Reader should not be discarded in this à la carte approach to refugee law.

Prior to the launch of the adapted language editions of The Reader, translated syllabi of the English edition will be made available on-line. The Reader syllabus has been translated into Spanish (downloadable in a PDF format), and French and Russian translations will be following soon.

Accessing Source Material

Over 80 per cent of the documents and materials contained in The Reader are accessible in their full text format to all users. For practical purposes, we have limited all assigned reading to English language materials.

The  Reader  uses  James  C.  Hathaway,  The  Law  of  Refugee  Status (Toronto: Butterworths, 1991) and G. Goodwin-Gill and J. McAdam, The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) as core texts. The Reader is able to provide open and full access to the assigned pages of The Law of Refugee Status. While it is likely that many university professors and students will have access to the Goodwin-Gill and McAdams 2007 third revised edition of The Refugee in International Law in their libraries or university bookshops, the Editors are aware that many of our users may not. These users, however, will still benefit from full access to the text of the assigned reading from the second edition of  Goodwin-Gill’s  The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).  Hence, the Editors have  included  parallel citations for the 3rd and 2nd editions of The Refugee in International Law throughout The Reader to ensure that all can follow the core readings in the syllabus regardless of resources. The Editorial Board and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee would like to thank the authors and Oxford University Press for their invaluable support for making refugee legal education accessible across the globe.

With the very generous support of the publishers of the secondary literature that is included in The Reader, we are able to provide the professors teaching refugee law and clinics in Central and Eastern Europe and other developing regions with password-protected access to these documents. Other users who are engaged in teaching and training refugee law in a university or clinical context may also be eligible for a password to access protected materials. More information can be obtained by contacting the Hungarian Helsinki Committee at the email listed at the bottom of the page. As there are a large number of core and extended readings that are accessible in The Reader, we recommend that the reading should only be selectively printed out. Professors may wish to assign their students segments of the assigned readings, and many of the documents, and particularly lengthy legal instruments, can be effectively reviewed on-line.

One of the significant advantages of an on-line Reader is that it is able to provide access to instruments, documents and cases in their entirety, offering a rich source of material for academic writing. It should be noted that for purposes of citation, the process of downloading articles in PDF format does not always translate the page numbers of the original publication. Hence, please consult the full citation that appears in the syllabus to ensure accuracy.

Adapting The Reader to Specific Course Needs

Editorial recommendations for how class time should be allocated to cover each of the respective subject areas, and their sub-topics, are provided below for a 48- hour course, as well as 24- and 12-hour modules. A copy of the complete syllabus can be downloaded and adapted for teaching purposes. Each of the sections of the complete syllabus, and their respective sub-topics can be directly accessed on the site. In the chart below, each of the major topics included in the syllabus are presented. The full text of the syllabus and the relevant source material for the assigned readings can be accessed in The Reader. For more detailed directions, see the section Technical Advice below.

Recommended hours for module teaching

* The allocation of hours across the respective regions will vary according to focus of the course.

Technical Advice

To begin, you are advised to download the complete Syllabus of The Refugee Law Reader. The complete Syllabus provides you with both a general and a detailed overview of The Reader’s structure and the documents included therein. The PDF format enables you to easily print out the Syllabus and use it as a general reference document. You can create your own syllabus or list of readings by simply copy-pasting the relevant citations into your own word processing system – the PDF format will ensure that the original form of the Syllabus remains unmodified.

To access a specific section of The Refugee Law Reader, click on the relevant section titles and subtitles in the left hand menu. The accompanying section of the Syllabus will then appear on the screen followed by the list of downloadable documents. Most of the documents are easily available in PDF format by simply clicking on the small PDF icon under the title of the chosen document.

The vast majority of The Reader’s documents are freely downloadable; however, some documents require authorization (a password) and are limited to refugee law clinics. Requests for password by other users are examined on an individual basis. Users should note that some documents and articles in the retrieval section, primarily those assigned as Extended Readings, are not yet accessible, as the publication permissions are pending. When publication permission is received for select articles, the respective links will be activated.

If you wish to identify documents by publisher, author, or title, you can do so easily by using the search engine of The Refugee Law Reader. For further guidelines on how to search The Reader, please consult the relevant text available on the search website.

Acknowledgments

Each edition of The Reader expands upon the contributions of prior editors. This is particularly the case with members of the editorial board who were involved in the creation and development of the first four editions. We would like to thank:

Jean-Claude Forget, Deputy Representative of UNHCR in Tehran; Darina Mackova, Ph.D. student at University of Hull, UK; Eugen Osmochescu, Deputy Chair of Public International Law and Law of Foreign Economic Relations, State University of Moldova; and Steve Peers, Professor of Law at the University of Essex.

The Refugee Law Reader has developed through the dynamic participation of many experts in the field of asylum, both internationally and within the regional network of refugee law clinic. We would like to thank to the following persons for their valued contributions to the creation of The Reader:

Ágnes Ambrus, Oldrich Andrysek, Deborah Anker, Frank Emmert, Lucia Fulmekova, Juris Gromovs, Anamaria Gutiu, Barbara Harrell- Bond, Romanita Iordache, Dajena Kumbaro, Sean Loughna, Gregor Noll, Imre Papp, Judit Tóth, Blagoy Vidin.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee would like to thank to the following persons for their kind cooperation by obtaining the publication permissions:

Jacqueline Cox (Ashgate), Marion Berghahn (Berghahn Books), Gaby van Rietschoten (Brill Academic Publishers/Martinus Nijhoff), Jean Vandeveld (Bruylant), Gabriel M. Gilman (Buffalo Human Rights Law Review), Linda Nicol (Cambridge University Press), Linda Davidson and Pete Pazmino (Georgetown University Law Center), Hans Zell (Hans Zell Publishers), Richard Hart (Hart Publishing), Anna Bennett (Harvard Human Rights Journal), Lydio F. Tomasi (International Migration Review), Duncan James (John Wiley & Sons), Eva Rodrígues (Kluwer Law International), Mathura Yadav (Manak Publications), Chris Payne (Oxford University Press), William Smith (Oxford University Press USA), Tracey Cummins (Pearson Education), Barbara Ayotte (Physicians for Human Rights), Julie Sitney (Population and Development Review), Dana Adams (Russell Sage Foundation), Dick Greener (Sweet & Maxwell), Gary Piper (Taylor & Francis Books), Lisa Toyne and Amy Woods (Thomson), Bo Schack (UNHCR Bureau for Europe), Jean-Francois Durieux (UNHCR Convention Plus), Oldrich Andrysek (UNHCR Protection Information Section), Rene van der Wolf (Wolf Legal Publishers).

The following Hungarian Helsinki Committee staff members, affliates and friends contributed to the completion of The Reader:

Nuria Arenas, Judit Bagdany, Reyes Castillo, Gábor Gyulai, Awet Haile, Andrew James Horton, Raluca Iagher, Nino Kemoklidze, Boyan Konstantinov, Tamás Kovács, Ferenc Kõszeg, Petr Kutílek, Alba Marcellán, Mike Matheson, Priyanca Mathur Velath, Fiona McKinnon, Márta Pardavi, Syed Qadri, Julie Ranger, Erik Reho, Julie Reynolds, Barbara Salmon, Susannah Scott, Courtney Schusheim, Moira Smith, Rakhmadjon Sobirov, Ewoud Swart, Tímea Szabó, Szabolcs Tóth, Ivy Wong.

Appreciation is also extended to the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, whose funding for Rosemary Byrne as a Government of Ireland Research Scholar facilitated the development of The Reader.

Reader Feedback

One of the advantages of producing an on-line resource is the editorial capacity to update and review materials at more frequent intervals than published texts would allow. For this purpose, we would like to encourage you to send the Editors any suggestions that they may have for improving The Reader.

We would also like to include current case law as it develops. If you are aware of important jurisprudence that is available in English, French, Russian or Spanish, we would be very appreciative if this could be brought to our attention.

Please send any correspondence to the editorial board at:

Hungarian Helsinki Committee
H–1054 Budapest, PO Box 317, Hungary

Tel./Fax: (+36 1) 321 4327 , 321 4323

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Editors

Editor in Chief
Rosemary Byrne, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Editorial Board
Ekuru Aukot, Kenya School of Law, Nairobi, Kenya
B.S. Chimni, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
François Crépeau, Université de Montréal, Canada
Maryellen Fullerton, Brooklyn Law School, New York, USA
Madeline Garlick, UNHCR Brussels, Belgium
Elspeth Guild, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Lyra Jakulevièienė, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Boldizsár Nagy, ELTE University, Hungary
Luis Peral, Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies, Spain
Jens Vedsted-Hansen, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Editorial Staff
Tímea Szabó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Syed Qadri, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Erik Rehó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee

Ekuru Aukot, Kenya School of Law, Nairobi, Kenya
Ekuru Aukot is the Executive Director at Kituo Cha Sheria. He earned his Ph.D. in international refugee law and LL.M in Law in Development from the University of Warwick, and his LL.B from the University of Nairobi. He has published in the areas of refugee law, human rights, governance and constitutional law. He is also Law Lecturer at the Kenya School of Law. Prior to joining Kituo Cha Sheria, he was a co-founder and director of the Northern Frontier Districts Centre for Human Rights & Research (NFD-CHR). In his spare time, he also researches international law, humanitarian law and the plight of IDPs.

Bhupinder Chimni, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
B.S. Chimni is Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and is the author of International Refugee Law: A Reader, one of the main international textbooks in the field. His areas of expertise include international law, international trade law and international refugee law. He served for three years as Vice Chancellor of the W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences and has been a Visiting Professor at the International Center for Comparative Law and Politics, Tokyo University, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Public International Law, Heidelberg, and a Visiting Scholar at the Refugee Studies Center, York University, Canada. He served as a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for the period from 1996-2000. He is on the editorial board of several national and international journals including the Indian Journal of International Law, International Studies, International Refugee Studies, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal & Refugee Survey Quarterly. Professor Chimni is part of a group of scholars who self-identify as the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars.

Rosemary Byrne, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Rosemary Byrne is a Senior Lecturer in International Law at Trinity College Dublin and a Human Rights Commissioner at the Irish Human Rights Commission. She has been a Government of Ireland Research Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Programme. Her research is in the areas of comparative refugee law and policy and international criminal law. She earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard College, Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

François Crépeau, Université de Montréal, Canada
François Crépeau is Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal. Holder of a Canada Research Chair in International Migration Law, Crépeau is a recognized expert in international refugee law, international human rights, international migration law and the relationship between international law and globalization. He has given many conferences and published many articles, as well as two books: « Mondialisation des échanges et fonctions de l'État » (1997) and « Droit d'asile: De l'hospitalité aux contrôles migratoires » (1995). He has been Director of the Revue québécoise de droit international (1996-2004), and heads the « Mondialisation et droit international » collection of Éditions Bruylant (Brussels). Parallel to his teaching and research activities, François Crépeau has been Vice-President of the Canadian Human Rights Foundation (1992-2004) and is a member the Science Commission of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, as well as a Counsel with the law firm Lette & Ass. He has been a guest lecturer at: York University (Toronto), Université Catholique de Louvain, Oxford University, Université d'Auvergne-Clermont 1, Fondazione Internazionale Lelio Basso (Napoli), United Nations High-Commission for Refugees and International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg), and Université de Paris II. From 1990 to 2001, he was Professor of Public Law at UQAM where he was Founding Director of the Centre d'études sur le droit international et la mondialisation. He holds diplomas from Bordeaux University, McGill University, Paris II and Paris I (PhD).

Maryellen Fullerton, Brooklyn Law School, New York, USA
Maryellen Fullerton earned her bachelor's degree at Duke University, pursued graduate studies in Psychology at the University of Chicago, and then studied Law at Antioch School of Law, from which she received her J.D. degree. After her law studies she worked as a judicial clerk for Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Chief Judge, United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, and then served as a judicial clerk for Judge Francis L. Van Dusen, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She joined the faculty of Brooklyn Law School in New York in 1980, where she has been a professor of law since 1985. She has co-authored leading academic texts, Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2007) and Immigration and Citizenship Law: Process and Policy (6th edn. 2008), as well as numerous articles on comparative refugee law. She has been a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Louvain in Belgium and a Fulbright Scholar researching asylum policies in Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. She has also been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, researching refugee law and asylum policy in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences of the Juan March Institute in Madrid. In addition to her academic research, she has served as a rapporteur for Human Rights Watch/Helsinki on several human rights fact-finding missions to Germany. She has been active in the International Law Association on the Committee on Internally Displaced Persons and on the Committee on Refugee Law (American Branch). For her work with law students representing asylum seekers, she was awarded the Migration and Refugee Services' Volunteer Service Award for Assistance to Refugees.

Madeline Garlick, UNHCR Brussels, Belgium
Madeline Garlick studied at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, where she obtained an LL.B.(Honours) in general law and B.A.(Honours) in politics and German language and literature. She later read law at Queens' College, Cambridge, UK, from which she graduated with an LL.M., after writing a thesis on the compatibility of the national asylum legislation of different countries and international refugee and human rights law. She is qualified as a barrister and solicitor in Victoria, Australia, where she has practiced in various legal fields, including advice and representation for asylum seekers and refugees in Australia. In her work for Justice, UK, she lead research and prepared the1997 report entitled ‘Providing Protection', on the UK asylum procedure. She worked for three years in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees and for the Office of the High Representative. Subsequently, she worked for the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), including as a member of the Secretary-General's negotiating team, which sought to facilitate a resolution to Cyprus' political conflict, from 1999-2004. She is currently Senior EU Affairs Officer with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Brussels, in charge of liaison with the EU institutions. Madeline Garlick serves as an Editor in her personal capacity, and the views expressed or implied in The Reader do not necessarily represent the position of the United Nations or UNHCR.

Elspeth Guild, University of Nijmegen,The Netherlands
Elspeth Guild studied classics in Canada and Greece and law in London. She defended her thesis on European Community immigration law at the University of Nijmegen, where she now is the Professor of European Immigration Law. She is also a partner in the immigration department at the London law firm, Kingsley Napley. She teaches at Sciences Po in Paris and is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. She has published widely in the field of immigration and asylum law and policy in Europe. Her monograph, Immigration Law in the European Community, remains a basis text in the field. Professor Guild is the UK member of the Odysseus Network of academic experts in European Immigration and Asylum Law. She is frequently invited to advise both the European Commission and the Council of Europe on immigration and asylum issues.

Lyra Jakulevièienė, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Lyra Jakulevièienė is an Associate Professor at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania and has almost ten years of teaching experience in international law (human rights, refugee and treaty law in particular). She served in the capacities of Legal Adviser and later as Liaison Officer of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lithuania in 1997-2003 and lately as the Head of United Nations Development Programme in Lithuania. Her international experience includes participation in the Söderköping process where she was responsible for the establishment and management of a Cross Border Cooperation Secretariat in Kiev, Ukraine in 2003. In this capacity Ms. Jakulevièienė has been working on facilitation and promotion of co-operation among ten countries in the Western CIS and the Central European/Baltic region on migration, asylum and other cross-border related issues, as well as on bridging the implementation of the UN priorities and strategies with the changing environment due to the EU enlargement process in the countries on both sides of the future EU external borders. She is a Doctor of Social Sciences (law) and an author of a dozen of articles on refugee protection, as well as the first book in Lithuania on the rights of refugees, and is a member of the Odysseus Academic Network in Europe.

Boldizsár Nagy, ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary
Boldizsár Nagy read law and philosophy at the Eötvös Loránd University and pursued international studies at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center. Besides the uninterrupted academic activity both at the Eötvös Loránd University International Law Department (since 1977) and theCentral European University (since 1990) he is counsel for Hungary in the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Project case pending before the International Court of Justice, and has acted several times as an expert for the Hungarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Council of Europe. The Directorate of Refugee Affairs of the Hungarian Office for Nationality and Immigration Affairs and UNHCR Branch Office in Budapest maintain close contacts with him. He is also involved in the work of three leading Hungarian NGOs (Menedék, Helsinki Committee and NEKI) representing the interests of forced migrants and other victims of discrimination. In 2001 he was awarded the Menedék Prize of UNHCR for his contribution to refugee protection. He has published widely in the area of refugee and international law and is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Refugee Law and of the European Journal of Migration and Law.

Luis Peral, European Union Institute for Security Studies, Paris, France
Luis Peral holds a Ph.D. in Law, M.A. in Law of the European Union, M.A. in Political Sciences & International Relations (Universities Complutense and Carlos III of Madrid), and Diploma in English Law (University of Kent, Canterbury, UK). From 1992 to 2004, he taught Public International Law at University Carlos III of Madrid, where he organised a Masters Course on Cooperation to Development, Migration and Humanitarian Action. From 2004 until he joint the EUISS as Research Fellow in 2008, he worked at the Center for Constitutional Studies of the Ministry of the Presidency under the Ramón y Cajal Research Program of the Spanish Government, whilst he was Senior Research Fellow at FRIDE and Director of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Programme of the International Center of Toledo for Peace (CITpax). He has been visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, and a lecturer at several universities and institutions, such as the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (Sanremo) and the European Inter-University Center (Venice). He founded the Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law in 2006. His research and publications, particularly, "Éxodos masivos, supervivencia y mantenimiento de la paz", are focused on International Refugee Law, Humanitarian Law, European Human Rights Law, Peacekeeping and Peace building. At the EUISS, he deals with the EU contribution to multilateralism and in particular to the international security system, EU-Asia relations with a focus on India, and international responses to conflict situations such as that of Afghanistan.

Jens Vedsted-Hansen, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Jens Vedsted-Hansen earned his LL.M and LL.D. from the University of Aarhus, where he is a Professor of Law. Having worked as a research scholar at the University of Aalborg, Faculty of Social Sciences, and as assistant and associate professor at the University of Aarhus Law School, he became a research fellow at the Danish Centre for Human Rights in 1993. In 1997 he joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen as an associate professor. Since 1999 he has been a professor of human rights law at the University of Aarhus Law School. He has participated in various international research projects as a contributor, commentator or panel member. He is a member of the Odysseus Academic Network of Legal Studies on Immigration and Asylum in Europe, and of the editorial board of European Journal of Migration and Law. He served as a member of the Danish Refugee Appeals Board from 1987 to 1994. His research interests include administrative law, immigration and refugee law, and human rights law.

Editorial Staff

Programme Coordinator

Tímea Szabó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Tímea Szabó graduated from Hungary's József Attila University of Sciences and studied comparative refugee law at Harvard Law School. Before joining the Hungarian Helsinki Committee to coordinate the organization's Refugee Program, she worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for various international organizations, including CARE International and the International Rescue Committee. Her focus was on human rights, human security and refugee protection. Prior to that, she worked as research coordinator at a human security program of Harvard University, researching conflict prevention strategies and the protection of civilians in conflict areas. Before joining Harvard, she was a Budapest-based journalist, writing for a number of U.S. and British newspapers, magazines and newswires.

Programme Assistants

Syed Qadri, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Syed Qadri earned his political science degree at York University, specializing in policy and human rights development. He joined the Hungarian Helsinki Committee through Human Rights Internet, sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency. Before he joined the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, he volunteered with Rooftops Canada focusing on various deve-lopment projects and resource building. He also worked at York University, at the Office of the Ombudsperson & Centre for Human Rights as a researcher and case analyst. His work also involves grassroots iniatives for the community, such as local food drives for the homeless and blood drives.

Erik Rehó, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
Erik Rehó has earned his M.Sc. in Political Science from Uppsala University in Sweden and has also studied law and political science at Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest with a concentration in international humanitarian law and Eastern European politics. During his studies he held the position of programme secretary at the Uppsala Association of International Affairs, organising seminars mainly on poverty, human rights and refugee issues. Before joining the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, he worked at the Swedish Embassy in Budapest primarily with trade issues. He has also worked at the Ministry of Defence in Stockholm in the Department of Arms Control, focusing on the Swedish arms control undertakings within the OSCE and UN.