Tag: Iraq

This is a critical history of the legal and public policy response by the United States to the Iraqi refugee crisis. Its thesis is that a sharp contrast has developed between U.S. immigration courts on one hand, and the U.S. State Department, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) such as Human Rights Watch on the other, on the question of whether Iraqis driven from the country since the 2003 war are fleeing “random” violence or targeted persecution. U.S. courts have tended toward findings of “random” violence in order to deny Iraqi asylum-seekers the right to remain in the United States under the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and its 1967 Protocol, and the U.N. Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984 (Torture Convention). Thus, U.S. immigration judges, and some federal appellate judges, have concluded that because multi-national forces (MNF) led by the United States and United Kingdom deposed the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein and are now guaranteeing security, even Iraqis who can prove past persecution and torture by the Iraqi government are not refugees and are not entitled to relief under the Convention Against Torture, which protects persons from being deported to face a risk of torture. As a result of these findings and other laws, by 2008 the United States offered protection to only 14,000 out of the 2.5 million refugees that have fled Iraq. Read More …