Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Non-Citizens

Everyone who cares about human rights at home owes a debt of gratitude to the lawyers and law students who worked through the past weekend to provide assistance to the refugees and immigrants affected by the President’s ill-conceived executive order.  The hard work will continue, the front lines are everywhere, and we all have roles to play: showing up to be counted; supporting organizations doing the legal, organizing and factual reporting work; providing places for continued dialogue; comforting and strategizing with those who are vulnerable; and ensuring, through our teaching and writing, that rolling back human rights and civil rights protections never becomes the “new normal.”

This spring, the University of Connecticut will provide an important forum for discussing these issues.  The Senator Joseph Lieberman Spring conference on Human Rights, April 20-21, 2017 , is:  Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Non-Citizens at Home and Abroad.  Panelists will address issues of citizenship, membership and “othering” through an interdisciplinary lens.  For example, the April 21 morning panel titled “Rights Across Borders” is described as follows:

This session will explore the obligations that states have to non-citizens outside their borders, including obligations to receive refugees and to address the underlying factors contributing to flight. Panelists will address questions such as: Do international human rights obligations extend across borders? What obligations, if any, do states have to allow entry? Are state obligations more demanding if the conditions causing flight are linked to the state’s own actions? What have been the adverse human rights impacts of increased border controls and barriers to migration, and is there a human rights argument these should be lessened? Is current international law adequate to respond to new causes of displacement, such as climate change? To the growing crisis of statelessness? What are the gendered and racialized dimensions of international migration and immigration policies? Do states have obligations to address the underlying conditions that cause displacement and migration? Are international norms and institutions adequate to respond to the global crises of flight, migration, and statelessness?

More information on the conference is available here. 

In the ongoing struggle for human rights at home, timely gatherings like this one help provide the intellectual grounding for forward motion, even though it’s hard to see that horizon in the moment as lawyers and activists work round-the-clock to protect their clients and maintain the status quo.