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14 Mar

[Bill Frelick is the director of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee Rights Program.] The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) rightfully characterized the US Supreme Court’s Sale v. Haitian Centers Council judgment in 1993 as a “setback to modern international refugee law,” and for the next two decades nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and UNHCR have been trying to limit the damage, pick up the pieces, and salvage what they could after that setback. Refugee advocates saw immediately that the central idea of the Sale decision, that the principle of nonrefoulement does not apply extra-territorially, would give a giant push to a movement among asylum-destination states that was already well underway at the time of the decision to divert refugee flows, particularly of boat migrants. What made Sale particularly damaging was not only the judgment per se, but the fact that it came from the United States, the erstwhile leader of the modern refugee regime. From Europe to Australia, but no less so among less developed states in Asia and Africa, the US example of interdicting and pushing back Haitian asylum seekers, now blessed by the Supreme Court, looked like a green light for erecting barriers not only to prevent entry, but to operate unbound by the principle of nonrefoulement, cornerstone of international refugee law, on the high seas and in other legally grey areas, such as no-man’s lands between border crossings, where territorial jurisdiction is not always clear. This essay will look at how NGOs and UNHCR, among others, worked to reiterate in international law fora the principle that the principle of nonrefoulement knows no territorial limits, to dissuade other jurisdictions from adopting the Sale interpretation, and to challenge other states that might try to follow the US lead in interdicting and summarily returning boat migrants. A companion essay looks specifically at NGO advocacy post Sale directed at the executive and legislative branches in the United States. IACHR: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) was an early battleground in this effort. A coalition of key Haitian-specific NGOs, including the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami, and the Washington Office on Haiti, joined with the Haitian Centre for Human Rights in Port-au-Prince to petition the IACHR to declare the US interdiction program a serious violation of internationally protected human rights. In 1997 in Haitian Centre for Human Rights et al. v. US, the IACHR found that US interdiction and summary return of Haitians contradicted the US’s nonrefoulement obligations under the Refugee Convention, which know “no geographical limitations” and that the US further breached article 27 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man by preventing interdicted Haitians from exercising their right to seek and receive asylum in a foreign country. UNHCR’s Executive Committee: In the years immediately following the Sale decision, another key battleground for refugee advocates was the UNHCR Executive Committee, where the United States had heretofore played a relatively progressive role with respect to articulating refugee rights principles. But in the post-Sale 1990s, the United States began to play a decidedly obstructive role on the interpretation of the nonrefoulment principle. (See here.) Previously, ExCom conclusions on nonrefoulement going back to 1977 routinely said that the principle of nonrefoulment applies both at the border and within the territory of states. In the ExCom conclusions of 1996 and 1997- ExCom Conclusions 79 and 82--the “at the border” language was dropped.  An early draft of ExCom 79 had reiterated the standard “at the border” language, but the US delegation to the June 1996 standing committee opposed that language, calling it an overstatement of existing international refugee law. UNHCR wrote a letter to the US mission to the UN in Geneva saying that “no other state has adopted as a matter of law the circumscribed view of nonrefoulement advocated by the United States.” US advocates, including this writer, met with and corresponded with US government officials to argue that the position the US was adopting at the ExCom went even further than Sale, which had addressed high seas interdiction, but had not suggested that the principle of refoulement does not apply at the US border. In fact, Justice Stevens had said, “The INA offers these statutory protections [referring to §243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act] only to aliens who reside in or who have arrived at a border of the United States.” A letter signed by 12 executives of NGOs, including the US Committee for Refugees, the International Rescue Committee, the US Catholic Conference, Church World Service, and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society wrote to Anthony Lake, assistant to the President on National Security Affairs, saying: “What standing will the US State Department representatives have next time we plead with West African nations not to push back Liberian boat refugees?... What signal is the US sending to countries like Turkey and Iran who have recently refused entry to Kurdish persons fleeing Saddam Hussein’s secret police?” The US NGOs were able to convince the State Department to include in its speech to the 1996 ExCom a “political statement” that referred to the principle of nonrefoulement as applying “from the border” of a state, but the State Department only consented to refer to this as a “humanitarian principle,” not a legal one. With the turn of the millennium and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, UNHCR convened a series of Global Consultations on International Protection intended to clarify and fill protection gaps in the Convention. UNHCR commissioned scholarly analyses and convened expert roundtables geared toward maritime interdiction and the principle of nonrefoulement, all of which set the stage for ExCom Conclusion 97 of October 2003 on Safeguards in Interception Measures. Although ExCom Conclusion 97 did not explicitly use the term nonrefoulement, it said that:
“interception measures should not result in asylum-seekers and refugees being denied access to international protection, or result in those in need of international protection being returned, directly or indirectly, to the frontiers of territories where their life or freedom would be threatened on account of a Convention ground.”
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14 Mar

University of Memphis law professor Boris Mamlyuk criticizes most U.S. international law commentary on the Crimea/Ukraine crisis for failing to take seriously the Russian point of view. I've noticed several commenters here have also complained about our pro-Western bias.  Part of the problem is that there is a dearth of international law commentators writing in English in favor of the Russian legal...

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13 Mar

Our thanks to all who have contributed to the conversation here on Opinio Juris about the many legal issues related to the situation in Ukraine. Over the past week we have had guest posts on topics such as Russian rule-breaking as power politics, the use of force under international law, the international humanitarian law issues involved in the Crimean crisis,...

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13 Mar

[Meron Estefanos is an Eritrean journalist, author and human rights activist.]  Introduction The last decade have witnessed an upsurge of Eritrean refugees taking to the Mediterranean Sea in search of a safety from repression and unlimited national service they are facing in their home country. However, in their flight from their home countries, these refuges have encountered several plights such as extortion...

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13 Mar

[Bradley Samuels is a Partner at SITU Research. All work described here was undertaken within the scope of Forensic Architecture, a European Research Council funded project based out of Goldsmiths Center for Research Architecture.] Whether captured by citizen videos, orbiting satellites, or international monitoring agencies, violations of human rights are increasingly documented in visual and spatial registers. Consequently, architectural representations –...

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13 Mar

There have been some interesting developments this past week regarding the legal proceedings against the UN following the outbreak of cholera in Haiti in 2010.  For background on this tragic and politically sensitive case see my prior posts here, here, here and here. Readers will recall that efforts to obtain compensation for the victims moved to US courts in October 2013,...

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12 Mar

[Rhodri C. Williams is a US human rights lawyer living in Sweden and working for the International Legal Assistance Consortium. He writes on human rights issues on his own blog, TerraNullius.] In the crisis triggered by Russia’s poorly concealed incursion in Crimea, there are plenty of grounds to believe that Moscow’s international law arguments are largely a smokescreen, albeit one arguably enabled the West’s own blurring of legal lines in the course of two decades of liberal interventionism. Lying behind Russia’s normative protestations, however, are concrete assertions of political interest that will have to be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable resolution. In this sense, an emerging normative challenge relates to the extent to which international law and practice on self-determination would facilitate such a process. Russia’s has a number of arguable political interests in the Crimean peninsula. The most obvious relate to security, and Crimea’s role as a warm water port of longstanding strategic significance to the Russian Navy. However, a far broader claim relates to Russia’s asserted right to protect both its citizens and Russian speaking minorities throughout a “near abroad” corresponding to the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. Like any country, Russia has a legitimate interest in the fate of its citizens and an arguable interest in supporting kin minorities. However, the unilateral and open-ended imposition of Russia’s own “protection” in a neighboring state is taken by many in the region as a thinly veiled excuse for a new round of post-Soviet revanchism. Indeed, comparisons have inevitably been drawn to “Hitler’s substitution of ethnicity for state borders” in the lead-up to World War II. The issues raised by Russia’s “ethnic” claims in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and beyond play on debates about the alignment of states and nations that have been with us since the 19th century, but which gained an explosive new life since the end of the Cold War. Ironically, the original political emergence of these issues arguably came with the Crimean War of the 1850s, in which France and Britain sought to prevent Russia from encroaching on Ottoman Turkish-held territories in the Balkans. However, while both Ukraine and the Balkans have subsequently provided spectacular examples of the failure to peacefully manage diversity, the Åland Islands of Finland – the little known northernmost theatre of the Crimean War – give some grounds for hope. The “Åland example”, as described in a recent book by the Åland Islands Peace Institute, has significant resonance for Crimea. Perhaps most obviously, Åland, like Crimea, occupies a strategic location in a region long troubled by ethno-linguistic cleavages. Åland is an archipelago in Finland that projects toward Sweden across a narrow strait in the Baltic Sea. Like the rest of Finland, Åland was part of Sweden until 1809, when the country was incorporated into Russia. Eager to consolidate an outpost within striking distance of Stockholm, the Russians built a fortress at Bomarsund on Åland. Thus, the issue of strategic location arose early, with the British and French war aims focused on destroying both Bomarsund and Sevastapol in Crimea, and preventing them from being militarized again. Since the Crimean War, Åland – in contrast to Sevastapol – has remained demilitarized, in a local regime rooted in the 1856 peace settlement. The “ethnic issue” on Åland remained dormant for another 60 years until 1917, when Finland became independent. Until then, the tiny Åland population had aligned itself with the minority of mainland Finns (at the time about 10%) that spoke Swedish as their mother tongue, but that would quickly change. In 1918, the first Finnish Constitution granted the Swedish language formal equality with Finnish, paving the way for an enduring cultural autonomy that has guaranteed linguistic and cultural rights for Swedish-speakers without granting them either political veto powers or control over their territories. Meanwhile, the Ålanders had already begun to agitate for secession to Sweden and succeeded in bringing their case to the newly founded League of Nations. The result was a 1921 compromise solution in which sovereignty was retained by Finland, but on the condition that Åland was to be granted an extensive territorial autonomy, or local self-rule. In order to assuage Sweden’s security concerns, Crimean War-era demilitarization was affirmed and expanded. As described in the Peace Institute’s book, all this led to a surprisingly durable regime, sanctified by international law obligations (compiled here), but fundamentally anchored in consent. The authors attribute the longevity of Åland’s arrangements to a number of factors. A key departure point was the astute balance of dissatisfaction set by the original League of Nations decision. Finland was granted sovereignty without control, Åland self-rule without self-determination, and Sweden security guarantees without territorial gains. This may have contributed to a dynamic whereby all parties acted on “the basic premise of accepting a compromise and learning to live with it” (196).
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12 Mar

[Ilya Nuzov is an Assistant Researcher with the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and a PhD student in International Law at the University of Geneva. His main research area concerns transitional justice in Eastern Europe.]   Much has been said in recent discussions on the Ukraine crisis in an attempt to qualify the ongoing Russian intervention as one kind of violation of international law or another and to ascertain possible legal and political repercussions for either state. (See previous posts in this symposium by Robert McCorquodale, Greg Fox, Remy Jorritsma). This post seeks to bring to the foray what it considers a fundamental issue driving the rift between the two brotherly nations and standing in the way of their reconciliation and democratization. Namely, the failure of either Russia or Ukraine to meaningfully work through the Soviet past internally, as well as with respect to each other, through the institution of any of the transitional justice measures previously employed and recommended by the international community. See a description of these by the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights here. The importance of coming to terms with the past in the post-communist space cannot be overstated. Nations that have transitioned most successfully from authoritarian communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including East Germany, are ones that have implemented robust judicial and non-judicial mechanisms designed to methodically work through the past in order to heal societies and rebuild institutions modeled on democratic principles and the rule of law. Upon its reunification, Germany, which has achieved remarkable economic success while ushering in democracy and restoring trust in public institutions, has employed prosecutions, vetting procedures and a commission of inquiry in order to rid its institutions of the authoritarian legacy, restore societal trust and reconcile Germans who collaborated with the communist regime with those who were persecuted by the infamous Stasi. The same cannot be said with respect to either Ukraine or Russia. Leaving aside the monumental work of NGOs like Moscow-based Memorial, both countries rank near the bottom of the spectrum of post-communist states in terms of official government efforts to work through the past after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Russia, the most noteworthy reforms were instituted in the early 1990’s and addressed primarily rehabilitations of victims of Soviet-era repressions. In 1991, Yeltsin approved Federal Law of the Russian Federation On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions, No. 1761-1 rehabilitating all victims of political repressions after 1917 and offering, albeit miniscule, financial reparations. No one has ever been held accountable for human rights abuses in Russia. What has been optimistically called the ‘trial of the CPSU’ was nothing more than a constitutional law challenge by some communists in December 1991 of Yeltsin’s decree that suspended and later banned the Communist Party and its Russian Federation branch. Although the proceedings did manage to unearth thousands of pages of secret archives detailing past atrocities, at the end of the day the trial was condemned as a bureaucratic farce that failed to acknowledge the collective trauma of the past. Today, the archives are under the de facto control of the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service, which restricts access even to documents dating back to the 1920s. To further complicate matters, many of Ukraine’s Soviet-era secret police archives have been moved to Moscow and the remaining files, maintained by the Ukrainian Archives Committee, are effectively closed to the public. Compare this with the experience of Germany, which has allowed individual access to Stasi archives under the Stasi Records Act and over five million applications from individual victims of the totalitarian regime have been received since 1992 to view them.
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11 Mar

[Jocelyn McCalla was the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights from 1998 to 2006.]

For the purposes of this discussion I will restrict my remarks to the impact of Sale on Haitian immigration and advocacy; I will not be so bold as to extend them to the impact overall on all immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers that the United States is dealing with. Secondly, I believe it is important to explore advocacy before Sale as well after Sale. One can't comprehend what happened after 1993 without an examination of the 20 years of advocacy on behalf of Haitians that  preceded the Supreme Court decision, as well as the changing relationship between Haiti and the United States.

Haitian asylum-seekers began fleeing to the United States by sailboats in 1972. From  the very beginning, advocacy on behalf of Haitians in the United States has never been uniquely about rights to due process or access to the asylum system. It always had a dual edge: promoting rights on the domestic front were associated with the promotion of democratic rights in Haiti. Advocates had urged the United States to disassociate itself from the brutal Duvalier dictatorship. They held that it was that regime which caused Haitians to flee: end your support of the regime, side with democracy and refugee flow would dry up… They looked  to the Courts for relief and to the Court of public opinion for support.

The United States tried all sorts of forceful measures to stem Haitian refugee flow but couldn’t. Finally President Ronald Reagan issued the interdiction order authorizing interception at sea and forcible return. Additionally should the asylum-seekers find themselves close to US shores they needed to be within 3 nautical miles of the shore to access legal help. Interdiction worked: of the 23,000 Haitian refugees intercepted at sea, only six were deemed to have prima facie valid asylum claims. All others were returned.

Things came to a head in 1991 following the violent ouster of democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide when a federal court judge in Miami triggered a scramble at the highest level of  the US government when it enjoined the US from returning refugees intercepted at sea. The high seas drama – interdiction, Guantanamo, injunction against interdiction -- that followed Aristide’s ouster generated sizeable support for Haitian refugees and the Aristide administration.

Campaigning in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to overturn the interdiction policy. Clinton changed his mind shortly before being sworn in. He offered a quid pro quo: more energetic support for Aristide’s return and democracy in Haiti in exchange for keeping the status quo on interdiction, asylum screening and quarantining HIV positive Haitian asylum seekers at GTMO.

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11 Mar

[Ira Kurzban was counsel for the government of Haiti between 1991 until 2004 and was counsel of record in HRC v. Baker and over 10 other class action lawsuits involving Haitian refugees in the United States. Mr. Kurzban continues to serve  as personal counsel for Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president.]

On September 30, 1991, the Haitian military, with the help of the Haitian elite, overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. President Aristide had won Haiti’s first free, fair and open election by 67% of the vote in a field of 17 candidates.

The violence of September 30, 1991 and its aftermath are well known. Estimates range from 1,000 to 3,000 military and paramilitary executions within the first 48 hours of the coup, many in front of the National Palace where supporters of Haitian democracy went to protest the overthrow of their President. Beyond the immediate executions were tens of thousands more over the next several years by DIA/CIA sponsored paramilitary organizations such as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). Many of this is documented in trials such as the Raboteau trial where human rights violators were tried in a court of law and brought to justice for the first time in Haitian history.

A second coup, again with the funds and organization of the elite, but also the  support of the United States, French, and Canadian governments, occurred on February 29, 2004 during the second democratically-elected term of Jean Bertrand Aristide.  By the second coup, the Haitian army had been demobilized. One might call this coup, documented in detail in such works as Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment  and Sprague, Paramilitarism and the Assault of Democracy in Haiti, as a slow-motion performance where a military wing went from town to town executing police and supporters of democracy while the elites simultaneously financially supported such executions while proclaimed their rights were being violated. The U.S., French and Canadian government contributed at a minimum to the finance and support of  gross disinformation campaigns, anti-democratic organizations, paramilitary groups and covert operations in the second coup.

The decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, a travesty of international and domestic law, and basic human decency, had a significant effect on how Haitian refugees fleeing these two coups were treated. Pre-Sale the U.S. government’s actions were hesitant, unsure, chaotic and erratic. Post-Sale they were ruthless.

In October, 1991, almost  immediately after the coup, Haitians who supported democracy and supported President Aristide began fleeing Haiti in fear of their lives. By mid-October, Haitians were aboard vessels trying to get out of Haiti. By December there were more than 5,000 Haitians who had fled Haiti. At one point in the crisis there were more than 10,000 Haitians in the Guantanamo camps.

The initial response of the U.S post-September 30, 1991 was to decline to return Haitians to the imminent danger they faced. They were taken aboard Coast Guard cutters. The U.S. held them in the cutters and sought to obtain clearance for their trip to the U.S. or their return home.  The U.S. had signed a 1981 interdiction treaty with Haiti that required our country to at least provide  facial compliance with international law by granting “ asylum interviews” aboard Coast Guard cutters prior to forcibly returning refugees to Haiti. The numbers of Haitians on the cutters began to build up. Given the public executions in front of Haiti’s national palace the foreign policy establishment in the U.S. was too embarrassed pre –Sale to immediately return Haitians fleeing the country. By November hundreds of Haitians were simply sitting on the decks of cutters in the Caribbean.  The numbers became too large and by November 18, 1991 the Bush Administration directed the Coast Guard to take the refugees back to Haiti and ignore our 1981 Accords.

The next day the Haitian Refugee Center filed an action for declaratory and injunctive relief in the United States District Court in the Southern District of Florida. They also filed an application for a  temporary restraining order that would prevent the Coast Guard and the U.S. government from removing Haitians on the high seas from being returned.

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