Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Fleeing with an Olympic Dream – The Human Right to a Life Project of Forcibly Displaced People Following The Swimmers

[Ramón Barreto Pirela (LLM Public International Law) is a Venezuelan lawyer, political scientist and PhD candidate in social sciences at Oslo Metropolitan University]

2024 is an Olympic year. This centenary sporting event is constantly adapting, as it is not exempt from international matters such as apartheid or aggression. In our 21^st Century world, where mobility is a defining feature, sports find themselves progressively conditioned by migration. There is a wide range of recent examples filled with migrant stories, including this year’s UEFA Euro and, of course, the Olympic Games. In fact, in his inaugural speech, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees emphasized how the refugee team, which premiered in the 2016 Olympics, is a delegation representing more than 120 million forcibly displaced people. 

“The Olympics?

Swimming for who?

There is no country left anymore! Syria is gone.”

Yusra Mardini to her coach, Sven

Certainly, the creation of a Refugee Olympic Team (ROT) allowed an opportunity to compete for all those that do not ‘have’ a country left anymore, or left it based on a well-founded fear. The popular film The Swimmers depicted that opportunity by exhibiting the true story of Yusra and Sara Mardini, two Syrian swimmer sisters escaping war. The youngest sister, Yusra, benefited from the ROT’s debut at the age of 18. She was granted the chance to swim for her passion, for her dream, for everything that constitutes her “life project”. Indeed, this article is set to intertwine, just as the Olympic rings, legal postulates of the human right to a life project with refugee law, all in the light of the compelling quotes of The Swimmers.

“Once we arrive, we will be safe.

That is if you arrive…”

Sara Mardini in a conversation with another refugee

To start, we shall not overlook that the perils of a refugee begin with their journey. So much so that Yusra’s training to join the Olympic games began by swimming for her life in the Aegean Sea. As shown in the film, she and her sister dragged their broken boat to shore with all passengers onboard. After the threatening endeavor that followed, they became asylum seekers in Germany, where they demonstrated their swimming skills to a local trainer who supported their Olympic goal. However, if Yusra and Sara had arrived today to Europe, things could have turned out to be completely different owing to the current legal landscape: pursuant the imminent “Legal Fiction of No-Entry”, included in the New European Pact of Migration and Asylum approved before the Olympics, forcibly displaced people reaching the continent irregularly will be treated as they were not physically present, raising warnings regarding their fundamental rights, e.g. to non-refoulement –let alone regarding their Olympic dreams. Putting it another way, there is an ever-higher threshold for requesting protection. 

Despite the rough scene in dangerous waters just portrayed, forced displacement implies a journey that is not only physical. On the intangible dimension, victims of displacement also transit across their dreams, their self-purpose and, again, all that integrates their “life project”; a project that has reached the sphere of human rights. Apropos, the legal notion of a life project was coined by Fernández Sessarego at the end of the 20th century. Building on philosophical ideas describing humans as ‘free’ and ‘temporal’ beings, he argued that such features make us “project ourselves into the future” based on our individual aims.  

In 1998, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was the forerunner in its inclusion within international human rights law in the case of Loayza Tamayo v Peru. The Court acknowledged that a life project is akin to personal fulfillment and takes into account a person’s calling in life, particular circumstances and potential, allowing the person to set reasonable goals and to attain them. Strictly speaking, those goals are “the manifestation and guarantee of freedom” with “an existential value for human dignity”. 

“I decided to give you what I don’t have: 

Freedom to choose whatever you want in life”.

Mervat Mardini, the sisters’ mother

Freedom appears to be the guiding principle to understand the legal dimension of the life project. Not as a coincidence, freedom is the convergence location for the ideas of Fernández Sessarego and the Court’s criteria, as well as what the sisters’ mother wanted to ‘give’ them. Amid warfare, as it happens with systematic human rights violations or natural disasters, freedom is in short supply. Without freedom, humans find themselves restricted to project themselves in line with their life purpose as their ‘choices’ in life are limited. When balancing the risks of a refugee journey vis-à-vis the promise of a better life, freedom tilts the scale in favor of the latter: In favor of a better life where one is free to choose what to do with that life, a life where one can swim… 

Ultimately, freedom is what distinguishes us humans from other species. And it is not freedom in a ‘simple’ sense, but one denominated ‘phenomenological’ freedom inherent exclusively to humans. With it we carry out, or even fail to carry out, purposes outlined in future projects. Therefore, the life project gives meaning to human dignity. Yusra was not merely fleeing for her life, but for living her dignity crystalized in her life project. Only by understanding the depth of the life project, by recognizing it as the epitome of our freedom, it becomes possible to comprehend why the Inter-American Court pondered that the life project had “existential value for human dignity” and acted upon its protection in dozens of rulings, several of them concerning situations of forced displacement. Moreover, in the words of Fernández Sessarego, the damage to this project entails a “psychosomatic collapse” of a magnitude that the subject experiences an “existential void”. 

“Swimming is home for me.

I feel like it’s where I belong.”

Yusra Mardini

The feeling of ‘belonging’ expressed in Yusra’s testimony is also not coincidental. Instead, it is rooted in the existential value of the life project reiterated by the doctrine and the jurisprudence. The late Judge Antônio Cançado Trindade, a devoted defender of the right to a life project, argued that, when forcibly displaced, one faces a state of uprootedness and, when uprooted, one loses “the spontaneous means of expression and communication with the outside world” –as well as the possibility of developing a life project. Even better, the complementing thoughts of Suárez Rivero fully mirror the existential void’s verge that Yusra could have faced if prevented from swimming: When uprooted, one loses part of one’s cosmovision and identity. They must be reconstructed from an “abstract context that neither of its members know”, one that they do not belong to and to which they have no roots. It was by swimming, by clinging to her life project, that Yusra managed to re-dignify her displaced life.

It is now evident how uprootedness, as a consequence of forced displacement, matches the existential void symbolizing the consequences of losing one’s life project. Furthermore, we face semantic, etymological, and substantial contradictions when contrasting forced displacement and the life project. If the life project is phenomenological freedom, if freedom is one of its essential conditions, then whatever that is ‘forced’ collides with it from all directions. It is not displacement per se what is antagonistic to freedom, but the involuntary movement as it does not result from a choice in the universe of existential possibilities that people can make for their life. On the contrary, coercion shrinks that pool of possibilities, and, in many cases, what is left out is what is existential for the person, i.e. their life project. 

Subsequently, it is vital that every forcibly displaced person, like Yusra, gets the chance to continue with their life project and, in doing so, obtain positive expectations for their future. In the context of forced displacement, the life project evolves to embody a well-founded hope for the victim. Accordingly, albeit unaware, Yusra’s coach, Sven, was exercising what has been described by Betts and Collier as an increasing role of non-traditional agents in the reception, integration and, why not, in assisting the life projects of refugees. But we should be aware of the importance of assisting the life project. 

It is thus regrettable there are no dedicated studies in the existing literature contextualizing the life project in the plot of forced displacement. Nonetheless, scholars like Kate Ogg, in her cleverly named work “Protection from Refuge”, have recently seen refugee law’s functions from the same prism that I have when researching the crises of Venezuela and Ukraine. Ogg has outspokenly claimed that a contemporary model of ‘refuge’ should comprise supplementary purposes past protection, including “restoration of a meaningful life” and “dreaming of and creating a future”. In that same vein, she reasons that building a meaningful life involves “providing conditions in which a refugee can grow and develop”; including to restore not only security and safety, but also “freedom” and “having choices about their lives’ directions”. It is frustrating to witness that the scholar strives to ground her postulates on refugee rights in apparent unawareness that there is one human right which exactly subsumes her (our) vision: the life project. Cheers to Netflix for granting a film for discussion!  

“We’re not people anymore.

We’re just numbers.”

Sara Mardini after talking to an immigration officer

Complementarity of refugee law with international human rights law is compulsory in the case of the life project, at least under the present legal system. Let us recall that one of James Hathaway’s strongest arguments is that the 1951 Refugee Convention, a child of its days and still the primary source of refugee-specific rights in international law, has an underlying structure for the entitlement of those rights that is hierarchical and discriminatory due to a distinction between citizens and non-citizens, physically present and lawfully present asylum seekers (maybe not anymore?), and refugees that are lawfully staying. 

Those categories also pose a graded structure for the guarantee of the right to a life project in the context of forced displacement, as the level at which victims of displacement can enjoy the right to a life project is equally subjected to their level of attachment to a certain State other than the one the person is fleeing from. Being physically present, so far, only entitles the person (under refugee and/or international human rights law) for a coverage of basic necessities of life, as seen on the scenes from the shelter where the sisters first stayed in Germany. Only by laddering up the ranks people receive rights interrelated to more complex needs that are equally or, most likely, more relevant for the fulfillment of the right to a life project. 

While, theoretically, it is feasible that someone’s life project dwells within basic necessities of life, it is often the case that the life project lies within the realm of more complex needs and only those satisfy someone’s personal fulfillment. A life project often looks like raising a family, like practicing a profession, or like swimming in the Olympic games. Once more, despite his unawareness, Yusra’s coach bypassed the hierarchical structure of rights and safeguarded her life project. Yet that is just an exception, being the rule that the referred 1951 Convention is virtually incompatible with the right to a life project as it only ‘guarantees’ a limited number of basic rights, whereas the life project is usually better served by a larger number of options, including those rights of greater complexity. Consequently, as refugee lawyers and advocates, we are, too, dragging a broken boat.

“Find your lane,

Swim your race.”

Ezzat Mardini, the sister’s father and first coach

Towards the end of the film, we see Yusra achieving her Olympic dream in Rio and her sister, Sara, cheering from the stands. Despite her initial resistance competing under the ROT banner, and the prejudice she faced because of it, she understood that her life project had surpassed herself as she was swimming for all those people who were swimming for their lives. Sure, we would have wanted that ‘movie ending’ where she took the gold medal, but she did not win. In fact, the first ROT medal did not come until Paris this year. Paradoxically, losing offers the perfect closure for this article, as it is worth highlighting that the right to a life project has little to do with success. It rather focuses on the existential possibility of being free to choose and pursue such a project. It focuses on the dignity intrinsic to all humans: To Yusra, to Sara, and to over 120 million forcibly displaced people alike. In short, we should all have the right to find our lane, to swim our race.