Providing International HELP (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals)

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by Jane Herlihy

At CSEL we emphasise the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to decision making, in order to bring together the best knowledge from the relevant fields. Through our work with authorities internationally, we’ve been glad to see that the value of the interdisciplinary approach is being increasingly widely understood by decision makers, too. Early in June I travelled to Strasbourg to contribute to a Council of Europe (CoE) event bringing legal and non-legal professionals together to extend practical skills for lawyers working on human rights cases.

by zack lee @ flickr.com

HELP, the European Programme for Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) is a project of the CoE that aims to support EU member states’ implementation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by ensuring adequate training in Convention standards for legal professionals. HELP also promotes the dissemination across member states of relevant case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). HELP aims to ensure that is embedded in the training for all legal professionals, to ensure that national human rights legislation is appropriately implemented, and the programme targets the key legal actors in European asylum processes: judges, prosecutors and lawyers.

I was invited to bring CSEL’s expert knowledge of the psychological issues relevant to credibility assessment into the HELP knowledge exchange process. Working with human rights lawyer Flip Schuller, I gave a presentation on the breadth of scientific psychological evidence available to lawyers and decision makers considering claims for protection from human rights abuses to 200 legal trainers from across the 47 EU member states. The audience included judicial trainers, all attending in order to consider how to incorporate other disciplines in their legal training.

With so many high-level legal trainers in one room, the conference provided an excellent dissemination opportunity - and a chance to address lawyers and decision makers who are considering not just the refugee convention, but the wider world of protecting people from abuses of their human rights. I’m looking forward to further work with the HELP network, and more opportunities to take CSEL’s research findings to human rights defenders across European jurisdictions.

Considering children's credibility at IGC

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In June, Zoe Given-Wilson was invited to speak at a meeting of the IGC, an international, intergovernmental group of immigration policy makers who meet regularly to develop strategic thinking and share knowledge and best practice about migration around the world.

At their latest meeting, the group were particularly concerned to address the increasing numbers of children arriving in North America and Europe, fleeing conflict and other dangers such as gang violence or persecution. Many are trafficked, and some travel ahead of parents. All are vulnerable because of their age. Most protection mechanisms developed by governments to assess asylum applications and provide sanctuary are designed primarily to deal with adults, and have to be adapted to meet the needs of children.

by monique kittan @ flickr.com

Zoe was invited to speak after her review of the literature on child and adolescent psychology and child development was published as a chapter in the CREDO report Heart of the Matter. The report examines the key issues to take into account when assessing the credibility of children and young people making applications for asylum. Zoe’s research is being recognised at high levels as an important reminder of the need to take an interdisciplinary approach to protecting unaccompanied children seeking asylum. In her presentation, Zoe talked about the key factors that need to be taken into consideration when making credibility assessment in children – both those relating to the child, including both normal child development and autobiographical memory; and those relating to decision making, the assumptions that underlie the judgements of decision makers, and the need to ensure that these are in line with scientific evidence for what we know about child development, and memory.

Zoe will be speaking at the London launch of Heart of the Matter on 25 June, with fellow contributors S Chelvan of No 5 Chambers, and Debora Singer of Asylum Aid.

Meaningful and Credible: Researching *With* Refugee Women

At CSEL we're not only interested in conducting and disseminating research, to improve the fairness of decision making, but also in exploring ways to ensure the quality of research findings, and the integrity of research processes. As part of this enquiry, the Evidence into Practice project is exploring the issue of participation of refugee women in research projects.

How can researchers involve refugee women more in the development, design and delivery of research into refugee women’s experience? Why should they? What challenges do participatory approaches pose to the need to balance meaningful involvement by marginalised stakeholders, with the production of reliable, credible research findings? What can be learned from the community sector to help find answers to these questions? These are some of the questions that have emerged through the preparation for our roundtable on Researching With Refugee Women, to be held later this year.

Photo from Participate2015

To explore these questions I’ve been reading some of the literature evaluating the vast experience of participation in the community sector, the user involvement movement, and the international development field. Grassroots community activists have been using participatory methodologies for many decades to support marginalised people to be meaningfully involved in decision making and research that affects their lives. What can more conventional academic researchers learn from this literature?

In May I presented these questions and some of this learning from the community sector at a conference in Paris on Producing Knowledge on Migration. It was an exciting chance to raise these issues with migration researchers, and hear their concerns about ‘participation’ and participatory approaches. These included worries about the integrity of the 'participation'; differences in objectives of researchers and stakeholders; and a loss of objectivity and quality of findings. Many of these concerns have been explored in depth in the community sector - it seems to me there’s a real need to share the knowledge gained outside academia with those working within.

The questions we are exploring in this strand of work raise exciting challenges for conventional researchers. They also open up space to suggest possibilities for new ways of working, and opportunities to support the empowerment of refugee women. This is an important objective for those working on refugee women’s issues, whether as practitioners or researchers, and I’m looking forward to convening the roundtable in October to discuss it further. To find out where we get to, watch this space! c.cochrane@csel.org.uk