For Cornell Law School Assistant Clinical Professor of Law Ian Matthew Kysel and Luwam Dirar, LL.M. ’09, J.S.D. ’16, an assistant professor at Western New England University School of Law, a trip to Arusha, Tanzania, in October represented the culmination of three years of work promoting a progressive, rights-based framework for viewing migration across the continent of Africa.
Kysel and Dirar presented at the 77th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the rights body of the African Union, as it formally launched the African Guiding Principles on the Human Rights of All Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers (Guiding Principles) on October 21. The Guiding Principles draw on regional and international treaties signed by African nations to lay out the responsibilities those countries have to safeguard migrant rights and tap shared values to encourage African countries to cooperate and expand those rights.
“We want to give the commission, as well as states and civil society, a useful tool so that they have an easier time articulating—whether it’s in advocacy, lawmaking, or even litigation with governments— how states’ human rights obligations must apply in the context of migration,” said Kysel, the founder and director of both the Migrant Rights Initiative and of the Transnational Disputes Clinic.
The Guiding Principles project has personal significance for Dirar, an asylee who was forcefully displaced from her country of origin of Eritrea, and who has family members that fled their home to locations elsewhere in Africa and beyond, as well as some still engaged in the process of migration. “I’ve heard stories of their experiences and how they don’t necessarily have rights like everyone does. Those rights kept on being eroded,” Dirar said. “I just felt like this is something I can contribute to, without imposing what I want, just trying to take what African states have on the ground now or in the past and trying to highlight values that advance the situation of migrants.”
