School of Law Annual James Muiruri International Law Lecture

Refugees in our Time: The Challenges of Protection and Security

Professor Guy S Goodwin-Gill
Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford

This event is free of charge, but places are limited so please register if you wish to attend.

Over the past two years or so, Europe has been challenged, like many countries in the ‘south’, by what to do when faced with large numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, many in desperate need of protection and assistance. True to form, some alarmists have raised the security spectre, as if enough ‘terrorists’ were not home-grown, or able anyway to use regular means of transport, and forgetful of the extent to which States have already ‘securitised’ the movement of people, certainly since the mid-1990s, if not much earlier. Europe’s failure, however, has not been on the security front; rather, it has so far failed to live up to its principles, to make the best use of existing mechanisms, institutions and laws, and to think pro-actively, outside the box, so as to develop a regime of protection, asylum and migration management fit for the twenty-first century, in which both the rights of individuals and communities and the interests of States can be effectively, lawfully and equitably accommodated. This lecture will look over at the past, and make some suggestions for a future.