Helping Refugees, Worldwide, Is a Young Lawyer's Calling

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 10 No. 2011 Pg. 04
• Publication year: 2011
• Pages: 04
• Year: 2011
• topic: Charity and Non-Profit Law,Civil Rights

California Bar Journal 2011.

CBJ - October 2011 #04. Helping refugees, worldwide, is a young lawyer's calling

The California Lawyer
October 2011

Helping refugees, worldwide, is a young lawyer's calling

By Diane Curtis
Staff Writer

These statistics are front and center on the Asylum Access website:

The average time spent in a refugee camp is 17 years.

Most refugees are denied the right to work and provide for their families.

Half of all refugees are children.

126 countries have signed the Refugee Convention but refuse to honor it.

Developing countries are host to four-fifths of the world's refugees.

Emily Arnold-Fernandez once assumed that some organization or agency was watching over the world's refugees to make sure they were getting the rights to which they are entitled under international law. But an experience working on refugee rights in Egypt after her first year of law school demonstrated otherwise. Many deserving refugees were not even getting refugee status. Even those with refugee status were getting little beyond emergency food and shelter in camps. When the urgency of a refugee movement dissipated and the TV cameras went home, refugees were left to languish in tent camps. The prospect of getting a job, sending children to school, opening a bank account * rights written into international law and enjoyed by...