A Legal Day

Dear Family and friends,

This the beginning of my second week. After spending a the weekend sight seeing and reading it was time now to discuss and debate about all that we read. The topic of this week is Refugee Law. We had a Porf Guy Goodwin and international authority on the subject who set the perspective for us to understand the Refugee law. He spoke of the history of the Refugee management regime starting from the First world war to the current day.
Since i used to teach this course in Loyola a while ago i was able to go back to my mental notes. One comment i had made in the year 2000 said that the whole System that deals with the refugees is so Euro centric and does not talk about the refugees around the world. IN fact there were thousands of refugees from India to Pakistan and vice-versa. No one spoke about it. I shared it with my African friends who told me that they felt the same way since the situation in Africa was not any different.

We continued to discuss these issues the whole day. We came to a very interesting session where we had to read some legal materials related to the Inclusion and Exclusion criterion for refugees according to the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR). We had to pick a case study in which one person had to be the asylum seeker and the other person had to play the Immigration officer. In my team we were four people. Two asylum seekers and two officers. The case was set in Bangladesh, Asam, a homosexual was beaten by his family and sent out because he was caught having sex with his male servant. Zahir had recieved 300 lashes for raping many young men in the work place. Both of them had been living together in an apartment, it was vandalized and broken down. They were seeking asylum in Australia.

We had to build the case strongly. Debbie was Asam and I was Zahir. We made up a case looking up the legal readings and presented it. after the case was argued there was a voting for the grant of asylum. Mr asam was granted asylum and Zahir was not based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. In fact they could not decide on the judgement but the vote did not give asylum to Zahir. It was a pity.

Similarly we had others in my class playing 3 other stories with intensity. the votes were divided based the law. Finally we had time to argue the case and find out what really happened in the actual case. It was relieving to find that MR Zahir has also got asylum. The analysis of all the cases revealed that he questions and arguments we were building were immaterial to the actual country of asylum. it helped me to understand the working of the asylum mindset and deal with it accordingly.

After class i had a great meeting with Prof Richard, a Pedro Aruppe fellow who spent his time talking on his experiences of bridging academic research with Field practice.

Soon it was time for the evening seminar on South Africa which focused on Xenophobia. four of my class mates from there presented their case and gave a clear picture of the happenings there. Listening to it made me think that Hatred has no reason but hate itself.


Last word: the pictures that you see are:- the world's most expensive violin, Dr Sathya and Francesca (from Italy) in front of Radcliff, and the boat ride that you can take around Oxford (thanks to Janaki who told me that it was called Punting. Young learners here take fruits and snacks and go in that boat for a few hours).

well since i have to go and read and sleep let me take my hands of the key board