Law Commons^™

Forced Migration, The Human Face Of A Health Crisis, Lawrence O. Gostin, Anna E. Roberts

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Nearly 60 million refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons (IDPs) fled their homes in 2014, predominately from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. The global response to assisting this vulnerable group has been wholly incommensurate with the need given the profound health hazards faced by forced migrants at each stage of their journey. The majority of forced migrants are housed in lower-income countries that do not have the infrastructure to assist the significant numbers of individuals who are crossing their borders and the humanitarian organizations who seek to assist in the response are grossly underfunded and under-resourced.

Countries have varying responsibilities …

Deconstructing And Reconstructing Rights For Immigrant Children, Erin B. Corcoran

Law Faculty Scholarship

Children rights advocates and scholars alike continue to call for the development of innovative and alternative rights models, which specifically provide for an expansive conceptualization of children’s rights. Central to their calls for reform is a simultaneous recognition that children’s rights must embody agency – a child’s voice (a proxy for autonomy) – free from governmental interference, as well as the establishment of certain fundamental “needs” that place an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure the child has, and affirmatively provide, when necessary. Reimagining children’s rights also requires reforming our laws in such a way that reflects children as …

Life After Limbo: Stateless Persons In The United States And The Role Of International Protection In Achieving A Legal Solution, David C. Baluarte

Scholarly Articles

Stateless persons are not recognized as citizens by any country, and as such, their enjoyment of fundamental human rights depends on the good faith of host countries, and their basic human security and dignity are often subject to the whims of immigration authorities. Despite this intense level of vulnerability, U.S. immigration law does not explicitly recognize statelessness, nor does it provide for humanitarian protection to relieve stateless persons of their suffering. Rather, stateless persons are treated like any other unauthorized migrants in the United States; when they are ordered removed, they are mandatorily detained while immigration officials undertake efforts to …