Legal Empowerment for a Dignified Life

Download or read book Legal Empowerment for a Dignified Life written by Anna Lise Purkey and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through a critical, interdisciplinary engagement with development and legal theory, this thesis argues in favor of increased emphasis on legal empowerment as a means of protecting the dignity and securing the effective human rights of refugees caught in situations of protracted exile and encampment. Despite the existence of multiple overlapping legal regimes, more often than not refugees are excluded from the law and prevented from actively participating in the determination of their own destinies. In these situations human rights and obligations give way to at best an ethic of charity and at worst an abdication of responsibility. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the first part of this thesis develops a human rights-based capabilities approach which posits that the list of minimal capabilities that a state must ensure in order to legitimize its authority and to provide the basis for a dignified life is embodied in the International Bill of Rights. The duty of the state to provide these minimum capabilities to refugees is then itself translated into a legal obligation by applying the fiduciary theory of state legal authority which reconceives the relationship between refugee communities and host states as one that is fiduciary in nature. Thus the human rights-based capabilities approach can help us to address questions pertaining to law, power, governance, responsibility and accountability. Having established that the host state has a legal obligation to provide refugees with a minimum set of human rights-based capabilities, the second part of this thesis focuses on the role that legal empowerment plays as one of those capabilities. As both a right in and of itself and as a means of securing other rights and capabilities, legal empowerment can have a meaningful impact on the distribution of power in a given situation by facilitating the exercise of individual agency and assisting in the reform of the opportunity structure in which that agency is exercised. By helping to provide refugees with the capability to participate actively in their own lives, it is argued that legal empowerment can assist in ensuring the dignity of refugees within protracted refugee situations but also in finding durable solutions to these situations." --