Guest Blogger: Julie Veroff

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome as a guest blogger Julie Veroff (right), who recently finished her MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford, which she pursued on a Rhodes Scholarship.
Julie is now the Executive Director of FACE AIDS, a non-profit organization dedicated to mobilizing and inspiring young people to fight AIDS and global health inequities. She earned her B.A. with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University in 2007. In the future, Julie plans to go to law school and pursue a career in public service.

Julie first worked in a refugee camp in 2006, when she established a women’s center and leadership training program in Mwange Refugee Camp in Zambia as a Project Facilitator with the nongovernmental organization FORGE. She has since interned with Human Rights First’s refugee protection and lifeline for Iraqi refugees program and at the U.S. Department of State.

Julie became interested in refugees’ access to justice while working in Mwange. Teenage girls often spoke of teachers demanding sex in exchange for good grades. When Julie asked whether they had anyone to report the problem to, they laughed. Her recent research in Meheba Refugee Settlement, Zambia, which formed the basis of the dissertation for which Oxford awarded her distinction, is discussed in her guest post below. Rather than look just at the rules and procedures of justice systems in refugee camps, Julie explored how refugees viewed and interacted with these systems in order to capture the socio-legal aspects of justice administration in a protracted encampment environment.
Heartfelt welcome!

Justice Administration in Meheba Refugee Settlement: Refugee Perceptions, Preferences, and Strategic Decisions

(Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post!)

Though access to justice is enshrined in international refugee and human rights law instruments, including Article 16 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, many refugees do not have access to, or do not choose to utilize, the host state justice system. Camps and settlements are often characterized by a plurality of legal institutions, operated by the host state, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), nongovernmental organizations, and refugee actors. Many of these institutions do not comply with international or host state laws, thus leaving refugees without adequate legal protection.
The UNHCR has long recognized that the lack of functioning law and order systems in refugee camps and settlements has serious consequences for violence and human rights. Yet as a senior official recently told me in an interview, UNHCR is still “a little bit at a loss about what is really needed in the field.” This is in part because the existing body of academic and practitioner literature on justice administration in refugee camps and settlements is very small and focused on procedural and legalistic questions. (As one example, see this report.) Almost no attention has been paid to the perceptions, preferences, and strategic decisions and behavior of refugees themselves with regard to justice administration.
The aim of my research was to go beyond rules-based analysis, toward a socio-legal study that engaged with justice systems as dynamic social institutions heavily influenced by popular perceptions and actions. To this end, from July to September of 2008 I conducted fieldwork among three communities in Meheba Refugee Settlement in Zambia, which hosts 14,181 refugees primarily from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda. Through focus groups, individual interviews, and participant observation, I sought to understand the types of crimes and conflicts that refugees thought to be most common and of greatest concern in their communities; their opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of the various justice institutions available; how they decide whether to take a case to a justice institution and, if so, how they decide which one to go to first; and what they believe the objective(s) of pursuing justice are. Working in three different administrative areas of the settlement, I found significant variation in the way groups of refugees perceived and used various justice institutions.
I argue that four factors help to explain these variations:

• Population composition and heterogeneity, in terms of gender, age, and country of origin
• Physical location in the settlement and proximity to authorities (e.g. UNHCR, Zambian Ministries, police) and social services (e.g. schools, clinics, Mobile Court)
• Socio-cultural characteristics, namely witchcraft beliefs, employment backgrounds, and attitudes towards the rule of law
• Long-term durable solution (i.e. resettlement, repatriation, or local integration) preferences.

More generally, what emerged is that, to the refugees in Meheba, justice is often about more than simply seeking a resolution to a single crime or conflict. Personal reputation, community image, monetary costs, pride, fear, shame, manipulation, and the pursuit of a particular durable solution or long-term goal all affect refugees’ strategic decision-making processes about whether and where to pursue justice. With such variation in the perceptions of and preferences for different justice institutions among refugees in the same settlement, it is clear that one-size-fits-all policies and programs to improve access to justice will be ineffective.

(This post is based on my dissertation for the Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. It is available in full here.)

On December 31

On this day in ...

... 1963 (45 years ago today), a 10-year-old entity (left) formed by British initiative, the Central African Federation, officially dissolved into 3 units. What had been Northern Rhodesia become independent Malawi; Nyasaland, Zambia. The remaining territory, "Southern Rhodesia[,] refused to hand political control over to its African majority"; it would not become independent Zimbabwe until 1980.

... 1930, Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Alabama. At age 10, not long after she and her family had moved to Los Angeles, the girl's talent for singing was discovered. At age 19 she performed in the chorus of Finian's Rainbow, and while supporting herself through housecleaning, she pursued a career as an entertainer. Eventually Odetta would be known as the mother of folk music and a queen of the blues. She also was active in the U.S. civil rights movement, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma, Alabama, and singing at the 1963 March on Washington (above right) where King gave his renowned "I Have a Dream" speech (prior posts here and here). Odetta passed away at the beginning of this month, a few weeks shy of her 78th birthday. In the video clip below, Odetta delivers a powerful rendition of an old prison work song, Water Boy.

On September 18

On this day in ...
... 1988 (20 years ago today), about 6 weeks after hundreds of thousands had demonstrated in cities across the country, and just over 3 weeks after then-43-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, "daughter of Burma's independence leader stood outside Shwedagon Pagoda" (left) in Rangoon, "and addressed a huge crowd on the need for democracy," military leaders crushed the Burmese democracy movement. Troops fired into crowds, killing many and arresting others. To this day, "[t]he military remains firmly in control" in the country it calls Myanmar.
... 1961, the bodies of 12 persons were found in the wreckage of a plane outside Ndola, a town in Northern Rhodesia (today, Zambia). Among those killed in the crash was U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who'd been on his way to take part in "peace talks following clashes between United Nations peacekeeping troops and forces striving for independence in the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga." The 1961 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded posthumously to Hammarskjöld (right), born 56 years earlier in Sweden; in the words of the BBC, "he did much to raise the profile of the UN and the post of secretary general."