We welcome and celebrate the creation of a new Interest Group in International Refugee Law, launched through the American Society of International Law. As IntLawGrrls have often posted, the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons touches on a number of fields of study, including Human Rights Law, Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law, and the Law of International Organizations. We note that refugee law also hosts huge implications for gender and gender studies, as women and children vastly outnumber men as both refugees and displaced persons. The issues that impact refugees and displaced persons, such as lack of shelter and housing, lack of physical security, inability to receive an education, lack of employment options, lack of access to status determination processes, and the attendant psychosocial impacts of those difficulties therefore impact women to a greater degree than men, and arguably exacerbate existing gender inequality.The interest group focuses on the few existing fora that exist for sharing information across issues related to refugee law and aims to fill that gap. It aims to provide a cyber meeting place to cross reference materials available through multiple resources, such as NGOs dealing with refugee and IDP topics, IGO networks for exchanging information on, e.g., the various national guidelines for refugee status determination, as well as academic scholarship and practitioner's observations on refugee law. The creation of this interest group fills a gap within the field of refugee law and should provide several tools for those concerned with refugees and displaced persons to better access and share information.
Post co-authored by Dina Francesca Haynes and Jaya Ramji-Nogales
