Designing a New Global Refugee Protection System: Problem Solving Initiative (PSI), University of Michigan Law School

Abstract

Most states have ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, yet the rights of refugees are routinely ignored. Borders are often closed, and even refugees allowed to enter usually find themselves living in camps or urban slums with few opportunities to remake their lives. Indeed, most refugees today live in ‘protracted’ refugee situations — meaning they have been waiting decades for a solution to their displacement. The dissonance between formal rights and lived realities arguably stems from the lack of any incentive for states to live up to their obligations. In particular, the absence of any duty to share burdens or responsibilities among states may perversely push countries to do what they can to deter refugees from arriving or staying.

This Problem Solving Initiative invited student researchers from the University of Michigan to leverage insights from problem solving tools they learned and from fields including the social sciences, market design, law and ethics to develop innovative solutions for the fair and legally sustainable treatment of refugees in the states that receive them. In addition, student researchers interviewed a group of practitioners and academics, including Ahmed Hussen (Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion of Canada), Dina Nayeri (Author), Marta Lucía Ramírez (Vice-President of Colombia), Sarnata Reynolds (Immigration Hub), Gillian Triggs (United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees), Alexander Betts (University of Oxford), Martin Hagen (Universidad CUNEF), Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga (Universidad Carlos III), David FitzGerald (University of California at San Diego), James Milner (Carleton University), Serena Parekh (Northeastern University) and Ayelet Shachar (University of Toronto).