Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop Series
presents
James Hathaway
University of Michigan Law School
Dictating Asylum:
What Does International Law Allow?
4:10 – 6:00 PM
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Refugees were traditionally able to decide for themselves where to seek protection. States now seek to deny that prerogative -- sometimes by unilaterally declared 'direct flight' and 'safe third country' rules, increasingly by bilateral or multilateral arrangements that purport to designate the refugee's 'first country of arrival' as solely responsible to assess protection needs. Is this evolution a sensible form of responsibility-sharing, or a denial of refugee rights?
James C. Hathaway, the James E. and Sarah A. Degan Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan since 1998, is a leading authority on international refugee law whose work is regularly cited by the most senior courts of the common law world. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam, Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme, and President of the Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law. From 2008 until 2010 Hathaway was on leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the Dean of Law and William Hearn Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, where he established Australia’s first all-graduate legal education program. He previously held positions as Professor of Law and Associate Dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada (1984-1998), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983-1984), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980-1983). He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, Tokyo, and Toronto. Hathaway’s publications include more than seventy journal articles, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991, republished in both Japanese and Russian), an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997) and, most recently, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005) – the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention. He serves as Counsel on International Protection to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and is Founding Patron and Honorary Director of Asylum Access, a non-profit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the global South. Hathaway also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Immigration and Nationality Law Reports and directs the Refugee Caselaw Site (www.refugeecaselaw.org), a website that collects, indexes, and publishes leading judgments on refugee law. Professor Hathaway regularly advises and provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
