Thank you, Petra and Anushe, and to the organizers.

It's a great honor and it was a very easy invitation to accept because I wanted to hear

all of the speakers whose names were on the draft programme that I was sent, so it's

very humbling to be in this company as well, in this very amazing and historically resonant

setting.

So I wanted to talk about the human rights of refugees and other migrants, so even framing

it as other migrants is to make a choice about how we label individuals in this context.

And I suppose very broadly the theme of my talk is to think about refugee privilege or

human rights minimalism or is that just a sort of a false choice that we're sometimes foisted

with in this context.

And very broadly I just want to address these two questions and open up the sort of terrain

of normative and legal contestation about them.

The first being the refugee migrant binary, whether that's a protective binary or one

that's sort of pernicious and has harmful consequences.

And then secondly look at migration control and human rights violations and think about

questions of accountability and indeed impunity in this context and why they seem to be so

prevalent.

So on the binary, in some ways I think this issue is sort of a very straightforward one,

although we don't have a settled definition of migrant in international law, most working

definitions just say a migrant is anybody who's living outside their country of nationality.

So this is the view for example of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

And on that basis refugees who are defined as people who fled across the border, so they're

always international also are just a subset of migrants and there's not that much at stake

in this discussion.

And from that point of view it's just simply accurate to say refugees are a subset of migrants,

of international migrants.

That's a view that's very much shared by the scholar Jorgen Carling who's dedicated a very

nice website full of infographics to this view which he describes as the inclusivist

view, in contrast to the residualist definition of migrants that would try to separate refugees

from migrants more rigidly and more categorically.

Now that seems straightforwardly accurate and it's also kind of helpful because in many

contexts refugees aren't too keen on the refugee label either and certainly in their own personal

lives we'll often say they don't want to be defined by a refugee label as notably Hannah

Arendt did in her famous essay We Refugees which opens with the contention in the first

place we don't like to be called refugees.

But there are risks and in some ways in the refugee world this is an unorthodox position

which is quite strange to assert that refugees are just a subset of migrants.

And why is that?

So the UNHCR orthodoxy which was articulated very powerfully many years ago by Erica Feller

in several articles saying refugees are not migrants is a fear that we dilute refugee

protection if we treat refugees or even speak of refugees as a subset of migrants.

That we somehow undermine the specificity of refugeehood in doing this or that we live

in a world in which protection must be rationed and if we are to ration international protection

the refugee category is the one where we identify those to whom we have very particular duties.

And I guess I don't think any of those arguments is dispositive and in fact what they really

do is just highlight risks that refugee protection is fragile that it needs to be argued for

and that yes there is a danger if we say refugees are migrants which to me is just an empirically

correct statement that we dilute their protection or their visibility.

So in that context I think what's noteworthy is that when we look at the most recent international

effort to turn the sort of gaze the shared collective vision of the international community