UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award Committee: Consider Barbara Harrell-Bond for the Nansen Refugee Award

The Nansen Refugee Award highlights the work of individuals or organisations that have gone beyond the call to assist people in need of protection. The award has not been given posthumously, and the selection committee is hesitant to award it under these circumstances. However, many of us believe that Barbara is deserving of this recognition as a pioneer in the advancement of refugee rights, a woman in a field dominated by men, and a selfless and untiring advocate for refugees around the world. We hope this petition will further advance her nomination.

It would be difficult to overstate Barbara's contribution to refugee rights and to legal anthropology, and impossible to quantify her impact on the lives or refugees, students, colleagues, and institutions around the globe.Barbara is perhaps most notably affiliated with the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, which she founded in 1982 as the Refugee Studies Program and directed until 1996. The annual Harrell-Bond Lecture salutes her legacy in the centre, and other early initiatives, such as the Refugee Participation Network (now called Forced Migration Review) continue the push for greater understanding of refugee rights frameworks and challenges to refugee protection from the ground up.It was the global south, however, where Barbara dedicated the majority of her efforts. These countries, the countries that host the vast majority of the world’s refugees and shoulder the greatest responsibility for protecting people, were where support was needed, she determined. She had seen it first hand, working as a researcher across Africa and the world since the mid-1960s.She established the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University in Uganda, the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University in Cairo, and Africa Middle East Refugee Assistance (now AMERA International) to provide legal aid to refugees and ensure young people were able to study refugee law. She was a founding member of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network, The Euromed Rights Network, the International Detention Coalition, and the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network. She helped draft the Nairobi Code of Ethics and trained student after student in appropriate refugee interviewing technique, testimonial drafting, argumentation, and research.