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Feature – Climate Change, Conflict, and Children’s Rights Abuses: Syrian Refugees in Turkey

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by Chiara Scissa

In limbo in Lesbos: Doctors without Borders labelled the Mória Refugee Camp as the ‘worst refugee camp on earth’ (Image credit: Getty Images/AFP/F. Perrier)

Introduction

The world is becoming increasingly aware of the interconnections between climate change, human rights, and its implications on affected populations and countries. It is now widely recognised that climate change adversely impacts the right to life, property, and an adequate standard of living by hampering access to hygiene, water, and food but also adequate healthcare, among many basic necessities. This fact has been most visible during the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011.

According to the data of the Syrian Ministry of State for Environment Affairs and the World Bank, the annual temperature in Syria has increased at a rate of 0.8°C per century since the 1950s. This change is reflected in an increased frequency, length, and intensity of droughts and heatwaves. Decades of unsustainable agricultural policies, the consequent overexploitation of water and soil resources, coupled with the effects of climate change resulted in desertification, higher temperatures, and reduced precipitations. These developments dramatically impacted the agricultural industry, at that time representing twenty-five per cent of Syrian GDP.

Although in-depth research studies have so far not confirmed a causal link between climate change and conflicts, other scholars, such as Ingrid Boas, nevertheless stress that drought and water scarcity may be included among the complex and interlinked pressures that characterise the unrest in Syria. To make matters worse, water infrastructure there was consistently under attack. In a country already hit by drought, attacks on water networks cut services for weeks during the armed conflict, with millions of people suffering from long and deliberate interruptions to a water supply.

According to UNICEF, disruptions in Aleppo encompassed a deliberate forty-eight-day shutdown of a water treatment plant that served two million people. Indeed, the organisation  straightforwardly claimed ‘attacks on water and sanitation are attacks on children.’ Without safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), children’s health, nutrition, safety, and education are at risk. They are exposed to preventable diseases including diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera and polio which may potentially disrupt their early development if not treated on time. Children are also at risk of undernutrition and malnutrition, vulnerable to sexual violence and injury as they collect water.

The report continues by noting that children under fifteen are, on average, nearly three times more likely to die than adults from vector-borne diseases, such as diarrhoeal disease, related to unsafe water and sanitation than violence directly linked to conflict. As a matter of fact, seventy per cent of annual children’s death are attributable to diarrhoea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, and the lack of oxygen at birth. For children under five, this probability increases more than twenty times.

With millions of refugees streaming into Europe since the onset of the war, Turkey, as Syria’s closest and ‘safest’ neighbour has been the focal point of this population movement. However, Turkey’s response to the refugees has been a human rights abomination, particularly when it comes to children and minors. This article will describe the steps Turkey has taken to undermine the human rights of Syrian children and why it should not be considered a safe third country.

Children’s rights abuses in Turkey

It has been estimated that due to the Syrian civil war, as of March 2019, one million Syrian children became orphans, 4.7 million children are in need of humanitarian assistance, and another 490,000 of said children are in hard-to-reach areas. Overall, six million Syrians are internally displaced, while another 5.6 million people have left their home country. Most of them fled to Turkey. In response, Turkey passed two foundational pieces of legislation in 2013. First, the Law on Foreigners and International Protection no. 6458, which entered into force in April 2014, and second, the Temporary Protection Regulation – TPR, in 2014. Given that Turkey is one among very few countries which still has the geographical limitation to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, Syrians and non-European asylum seekers may only be entitled to the weaker standards provided under the TPR.

As pointed out by several authors, temporary protection has a more limited scope than the refugee protection and, in non-compliance with its provisions, health and education services as well as access to social assistance and employment to Syrians are often not delivered. For instance, UNICEF stressed that the situation for refugee children in Turkey remains particularly challenging, given that around 400,000 Syrian children are still out of school and are therefore at likely risk of isolation, discrimination and exploitation. Of 4 million registered Syrians in Turkey, 3.6 million were awarded the TPR, including around 1.5 million children under 18, of which 532,000 are under 5 years of age.

To date, Ankara is yet established a comprehensive human rights framework. Nor does it provide for a specific law addressing (un)accompanied minors. However, under Article 3 of the TPR, (un)accompanied minors are persons with special needs, thus entitled to additional safeguards and priority access to rights and services, such as healthcare, psychosocial support, and rehabilitation. Pursuant to the Turkish Civil Code, unaccompanied minors shall be appointed with a legal guardian, a provision that the Asylum Information Database (AIDA) claims is not respected most of the time.

In this respect, it has been noted that lawyers in Ankara have witnessed difficulties, while in some cases appointed guardians had no qualification for that role. AIDA also noted the persistent coexistence of different procedures applying to the reception and guardianship of unaccompanied minors in Turkey, which gives rise to different standards of treatment. AIDA considers, for instance, that in 2019 the legal assessments of new guardians in Antakya have not been conducted carefully.

Additionally, although Turkey has ratified both the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2001 Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Exploitation and Abuses, Amnesty International claims that, between 2014 and 2018, Turkey has unlawfully deported Syrians to their home country, violating the principle of non-refoulement. According to such peremptory norm, States are not allowed to remove, deport or expel a person to a country where their life and liberty would be threatened, or where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm.

This allegation has been also confirmed by Human Rights Watch and questions have been raised by Ambassador Tomáš Boček, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on migration and refugees of the Council of Europe, on the observance of its international obligations. Amnesty showed that episodes of deportation persisted respectively in July 2019 and May 2020. The victims are mostly men, but there is evidence of children and families deported. Moreover, Syrians at risk of deportation are often left without legal recourse or remedy to prevent their illegal removal, and the UNHCR does not have access to immigration removal centres, as also noted by the European Parliament.

Furthermore, Amnesty International, Save the Children, the European Council for Refugees and Exiles, and the Council of Europe accuse Turkey of unlawfully detaining Syrian asylum seekers. In 2017, there were 21 temporary accommodation centres for temporary protection beneficiaries. Some of these have turned into de facto detention centres for Syrians with insufficient food and dire conditions, especially for children. In practice, unaccompanied minors are kept in removal centres in border cities and a number of children begging or selling small objects in the street are detained in police stations, where they often receive documents cancelling their right to stay.

Children with their families are generally detained in removal centres where they are not granted education. For all these reasons, recently, the European Court of Human Rights found Turkey violating Article 3 ECHR (prohibition of torture), Article 5.4 ECHR (right to remedy), Article 5.1 ECHR (freedom of movement), and Article 13 ECHR (fair trial) in the case of detention pending expulsion of a mother and her 3 children, all Russian nationals, arrested for attempting to cross the Syrian border after entering Turkey.

Finally, another severe breach of children’s rights in Turkey concerns the employment of children under the age of 15, which remains a considerable problem in Turkey. The influx of refugees has led to a quickly growing number of Syrian children working especially in textile factories and agriculture. A 2020 Save the Children report finds that often families only pay smugglers for their children’s trip to Turkey. From there the children need to find jobs to continue their journey to Western Europe.

This particular pattern of emigration exposes them to exploitation, abuses, kidnapping, and detention by smugglers as well as by Turkish authorities. According to Save the Children, ‘out of 254 children interviewed in March 2019, almost thirty per cent worked in one of the transit countries before reaching Belgrade. Almost all of these children (97%) worked in Turkey. Based on the testimonies of those willing to provide this information, the prices of transferring migrants from the country of origin to the desired destination ranged from EUR 6,000 to over EUR 10,000’.

Conclusion

In light of the persistent violation of fundamental freedoms and human rights of Syrians and other non-European persons in need of international protection in general and of (un)accompanied minors in particular, the unfilled lack of a comprehensive human rights framework, and the increasing limitation to basic civil and political rights by the central Turkish government, it comes clear that Turkey cannot be considered anymore, if ever, as a safe third country, where international protection applicants may find guarantees of adequate protection standards.

Similarly, the heads of government and state of the EU Member States that in 2016 signed together with Turkey the so-called EU-Turkey Statement cannot shy away anymore from their international obligations and responsibilities. Neither Turkish President Erdoğan’s autocratic regime, nor the absence of a national human rights framework persuaded the EU to consider Turkey as an unsafe country for refugees and asylum seekers. On this behalf, President Erdoğan repeatedly threatened the EU to open the border with Greece as a way to convince the Union to financially support Turkey’s intervention in Syria. In March 2020, the EU refused to increase its financial aid to Ankara, claiming that EU Member States would not bow to President Erdoğan’s threats. A few days later, the Turkish President opened the gate and thousands of migrants stuck at the Turkish-Greek border to exit the country.

Ankara used migration to put pressure on a weak EU, unwilling to take on its responsibilities towards migratory challenges. The externalisation of actions to curb migration through informal agreements with unsafe non-EU countries, which unlawfully impedes people to leave their soil in exchange for financial and economic benefits, leads to human rights abuses, to breaches of international and EU law, and to extremely serious damages against the victims involved. Many scholars have also pointed out the high risk for the parties involved to violate the principle of non-refoulement, since the removal of asylum seekers from Greece to Turkey as the first country of asylum seems not to fulfil the requirement of sufficient and effective protection.

Such a human rights-breaching deal – that trapped over twelve thousand asylum seekers in the Moria refugee camp, which has a capacity to house two thousand – should end immediately. As long as EU Member States will continue to limit the access to international protection in their national territories and to add external barriers to stem migration flows, the Common European Asylum System cannot be more than empty words on the EU Official Journal.

Chiara Scissa is a PhD student in Law at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) and Human Rights and Migrant Protection Focal Point at the United Nations Major Group for Children and Youth (UNMGCY). Her main research interests in migration and refugee studies include the impact of climate change on human rights and environmental migration. Email: chiara.scissa@santannapisa.it

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part IV) – Water Conflicts: Climate Change as Threat Multiplier in Sub-Saharan Africa

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by Musab Alnour Ibrahim

The Greater Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the giant hydropower project on the Nile, and the control of the waters flow that comes with it, remains a point of contention in the region (Image credit: Reuters)

On 11 April 2019, a popular revolution removed Omar Hassan al-Bashir from power. Since the ruler’s departure after more than thirty years, the Transitional Government of Sudan, led by Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, has been tasked with alleviating the economic hardship resulting from decades of mismanagement and corruption, addressing the lack of civil and human rights, as well as preparing the country for its first democratic elections in 2022. A major persisting issue facing the country is the devastating conflicts occurring in multiple regions. It is a crisis further exacerbated by the fact that Sudan is one of the countries most affected by climate change. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense classified climate change in its report as a ‘threat multiplier,’ highlighting the seriousness of the issue and asserting the role of climate change in creating the conditions for violent extremism and terrorism.

While there is scientific consensus on the causal links between human activities and rising temperatures, disagreement persists over the impact climate change has on the likeliness of a conflict to occur. However, it is widely agreed among academic circles that higher temperatures lead to severe droughts, desertification, flash floods in the rainy season, and other climate-linked disasters. These are all factors that increase the likelihood of conflicts. A recent study has concluded that more conflicts will occur as the environmental effects of climate change become more severe.

Threat multiplier: Climate change in Darfur

An often-cited example in the climate-conflict literature is the conflict in Darfur, which is considered by scholars like Jeffrey Mazo, as the world’s first modern-day climate change conflict. Since 2003, the western-most region of Sudan was at the centre stage of violent conflict between the al-Bashir government and allied militias, against the Sudanese Revolutionary Front, which accused the government of ethnic cleansing of black Africans in favour of Arabised indigenous Africans. According to International observers and scholars, the seeds of the Darfur conflict, which killed more than 300,000 people and displaced about 3 million, began with a famine in the mid-1980s.

As temperatures rose, water scarcity led to severe droughts and a shortage of grazing lands, impacting the adaptive capacity of Darfur. Consequently, as the Sahara Desert expanded southward overtaking once green areas, water points, and fertile pasture lands became focal points of the conflict between the semi-nomadic livestock herders and sedentary farmers, undermining the social fabric and peaceful coexistence in the region. The adverse environmental conditions caused by rising temperatures also negatively impacted economic prosperity in this volatile region, as freshwater sources become increasingly scarce, food production declined, and subsequently, people began to migrate in search of better opportunities.

The competition was complicated by the former regime’s policies that have led to the socioeconomic marginalisation of many Darfuris. For hundreds of years, tribal groups settled their differences through mechanisms built on past traditions. The main traditional mediation method in Darfur, called Judiya, allows for disputes to be resolved by setting up a reconciliation committee, which consists of a group of tribal elders as impartial facilitators, guiding the parties of the conflict towards a peacefully negotiated settlement. Under the government of al-Bashir, these mechanisms have been either weakened or abolished, further exacerbating the conflict.

The Darfur Conflict continues, despite the presence of one of the world’s largest peacekeeping missions. While the transitional government was able to agree with rebel groups in Darfur on the cessation of hostilities, the climate factors that exacerbated the conflict still remain. To maintain a lasting peace in the region, initiatives like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission should be championed to rectify the wrongs of the past and mitigate disputes in the future.

Geopolitical implications of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

The case of the Darfur conflict illustrated the consequences of severe climate conditions within a country. However, in recent years Sudan found itself in another water conflict, one which also involved its East African neighbours of Egypt and Ethiopia. At the heart of the dispute is the construction and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile River, the latest development in one of the world’s oldest geopolitical rivalry. All three countries share the Blue Nile River, which provides 85% of the Nile River water and originates in the Ethiopian highlands. The $4.6bn hydroelectric dam is seen by Ethiopia as a legacy project that could lift millions out of poverty, as half of the population has no access to electricity. Once operational, the GERD will be Africa’s biggest hydroelectric power plant to date and the seventh-largest in the world, producing 6,500 megawatts of electricity for the country’s poorest regions. With power generation starting from 2021, the massive hydropower project is also intended to spur Ethiopia’s economic growth and turn the country into Africa’s biggest power exporter.

Ethiopia began working on the mega-dam project in 2011, while Egypt was mired in a political turmoil in the wake of the Arab Spring, not able to confront Ethiopia over the project at the time. Since then, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan held multiple talks to reach an agreement on the operation and filling of the dam, the most contentious elements of any future agreement. While Ethiopia’s intention is to fill the dam’s reservoir over four to seven years, Egypt proposed an extension to over 15 years. With a fast-growing population of about 100 million people, Egypt heavily depends on the river for over 90% of its freshwater needs. For thousands of years, Egypt relied on the river to flood and help grow its crops in inland farms, providing sustenance for the poor and agricultural products to export. However, years of water mismanagement and pollution led to severe water scarcity, estimated in 2019 at around 570 cubic meters of water per person annually, well below the 1,000 cubic meters of water considered by hydrologists to be the threshold. Moreover, the dam’s location near the Ethiopian-Sudanese border suggests that once the dam is operational, Ethiopia could threaten downstream nations by controlling the flow of the river, without any serious consequences to its own territories.

Hence, despite the reassurances of Addis Ababa, Cairo fears the short-term drop in freshwater supply could pose an existential threat to Egypt, a threat they are prepared to answer militarily. While Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has asserted, that negotiations are the way to resolve the dispute, he has warned that his country will go forward with its plans to fill the dam in the rainy season of July, even if that would lead to war. The challenge to reach a deal is complicated by nationalism and domestic considerations in both nations. For instance, much of the GERD’s cost was financed through public contributions from ordinary Ethiopians. The dispute is further complicated by colonial-era arrangements that are in favour of Egypt. For decades, affairs pertaining to the Nile River’s use were managed within the framework of the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement, signed between Egypt and Great Britain, which governed and negotiated at the time on behalf of Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania), and Sudan.

The agreement gave Egypt a veto right over future water projects that could potentially affect its water supply. Subsequently, the 1959 Treaty further strengthened Egypt’s position, by allocating 55.5 billion cubic meters (66%) a year of the Nile water to the country, 18.5 BCM (22%) to Sudan, and the remaining 12% was left for evaporation. Neither of the treaties made any reference towards the rights of Ethiopia or the other Nile River basin nations. Fearing the loss of its current share of water supply, Egypt insists that any resolution respects the decades-long colonial treaties, while Ethiopia does not recognise the treaties. Downstream nations argue that under the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA), a permanent resolution can be achieved. Meanwhile, Khartoum had to strike a balance between the interests of Cairo and Addis Ababa, while protecting its own interests. Despite the fact that Sudan initially opposed the GERD, due to safety concerns regarding the dam and its impact on its own dams, Khartoum was persuaded to support the project, as it will provide cheap electricity, decrease flooding downstream and increase crop rotations.

Negotiations between the three Nile River basin nations have yet to produce a conclusive agreement. Although a Declaration of Principles on the GERD, signed in 2015, was a significant step towards a resolution and affirmed the “equitable and reasonable” use of the Nile, the tripartite talks have failed to reach an agreement over the technical details of the dam’s filling and operations. The Crisis Group has studied the issues at hand and in its report, which suggested a two-step resolution to overcome the impasse. Firstly, the parties have to agree to a timetable for filling the reservoir, as well as a study of GERD’s impact on water flow. Secondly, once an agreement has been reached, Egypt has to work through the Nile Basin Initiative, which is an intergovernmental partnership of ten countries through which the Nile flows, to establish a working framework that would set the rights and obligations of each nation. Another suggestion came from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, which proposed a mixture of technical and financial assistance from the European Union. Under this proposal, the EU would help create a compensation mechanism to ascertain the estimated cost for not filling the reservoir in the proposed time, and aid Cairo in compensating for the concessions made by Ethiopia.

As temperatures rise, wind and rainfall patterns will become more unpredictable. This is a particular vulnerability to the agricultural sector that still dominates many economies around the world. While this conflict is still ongoing, it is evident from the case study that as the effects of climate change become more severe, we are likely to see more water conflicts emerge in the future. Without a global treaty on the use and sharing of rivers suggested by experts, I argue that we will be bound to see more unilateral actions, that could destabilise volatile regions that already experience extreme political instability and economic hardship.

Musab Alnour Ibrahim holds an MA in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London.

Resistance to Extinction Rebellion’s Press Protests Reveals Double Standards in the UK

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by Holly Barrow

Protestors block the entrance at Merseyside printing press (Image credit: Liverpool Echo)

On 5 September 2020, the global environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion, dominated headlines after blockading key printing sites in Merseyside and Hertfordshire, causing a significant disruption to the distribution of some of the UK’s leading national newspapers – including the Sun and The Times. Activists blocked exits to the print works, describing the protest as an attempt to hold these publications to account for their failure to report truthfully on the scale of the climate crisis and for ‘polluting national debate’ on a number of social issues, including migration.

Each of the newspapers affected by the blockade is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has been openly criticised on numerous occasions for his climate change denialism – not least due to his personal interests in the fossil fuel industry. By no coincidence, Murdoch’s newspapers have become renowned for being littered with rife climate skepticism, both across Australia and the UK.

Yet, despite the well-known murky ethics and questionable practices surrounding Murdoch’s publications, Extinction Rebellion’s protests were met with an onslaught of accusations by the likes of the Sun which claimed the organisation’s protests were ‘trying to destroy our greatest democratic principle: freedom of speech’. The Prime Minister himself echoed such sentiments via social media, suggesting that it is ‘completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way’ and that a free press is ‘vital’ in ‘holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.’

Only, this assertion neglects to acknowledge the inherent biases within the UK’s mainstream media and how it notably fails in its apparent duty to hold the powerful to account. The responses to Extinction Rebellion’s protests have revealed a deeply ingrained double standard regarding what is and is not considered ‘democratic’. In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that Extinction Rebellion’s protests served to expose and fight against the ‘shallowness of our theatrical democracy’, and the ‘blatant capture of ours by the power of money’. It’s almost laughable, then, to witness those arguing that the movement’s protests threaten our way of life – that they attack the ‘freedom of the press’ that is considered so crucial to a functioning democracy – with zero irony. This glorified notion of the UK’s so-called ‘free press’ is a far cry from reality. As a matter of fact, it has long been in decline.

The increasing corporatisation of the media is what ought to be recognised as the real threat to press freedom. The UK’s leading newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires and giant corporations. This drastically hinders the workings of an actual ‘free press’. From Murdoch to the Barclay brothers – 85-year-old British billionaire twins whose business empire spans from luxury hotels to budget retail – their deceitful dedication to protecting vested interests and setting political agendas through the UK’s leading publications has become well-established.

Former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, Peter Oborne, resigned from the paper after coming to recognise the unethical collusion between their editorial and commercial arms. The publication – owned by the aforementioned Barclay brothers – allegedly sought to bury criticisms against HSBC in 2013. In response, Oborne wrote in an article for OpenDemocracy: “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.’” The media’s reliance on corporate advertising sees editors pandering to their whims.

What’s more, these billionaire-owners of the UK’s media and their publications are, unsurprisingly, right-leaning. The majority supported right-wing political parties in the 2019 general election, with a recent study by Loughborough University finding that the Labour Party was overwhelmingly targeted with negative coverage by national newspapers, while particular publications reserved positive stories almost exclusively for Johnson’s Conservative party. strong editorial support provided by the newspapers with the largest circulation (the Daily Mail and the Sun)

The political influence of the mainstream media is no new phenomenon. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair notoriously cosied-up to Murdoch in order to gain the backing of the Sun in the lead up to the 1997 general election – a move which many believe contributed to his landslide majority. In a recent BBC documentary on Murdoch’s media dynasty, former Sun deputy editor Neil Wallis told of how Murdoch played a crucial role in the paper’s drastic shift in support away from John Major’s Conservative party to Blair’s New Labour: “Rupert comes up and says ‘you’re getting this wrong. You’ve got this totally wrong. We are not just backing Tony Blair but we are going to back the Labour party and everything he does in this campaign 200%. You’ve got to get that right’.”

The relationship between Blair and Murdoch went on to be described as ‘incestuous’, with Murdoch’s decision to back him in 1997 allegedly arising as the two made a deal; Blair promised Murdoch he would not take the UK into the European currency without first having a referendum.

This relationship between media tycoons and leading politicians has been tirelessly scrutinised, with the 2012 Leveson inquiry revealing the extent of its impact, as editors admitted that Murdoch regularly interfered with content. Critics of Murdoch’s News Corp UK – which owns the Sun and The Times – have previously argued that ministers, chief constables, and regulators alike were unable to stand up to him due to the power of his company.

This enmeshing of media and commerce hardly screams the ‘pinnacle of democracy’ and press freedom. The insularity of the UK’s senior journalists only speaks further to a monolithic media – one which upholds the values, beliefs, and interests of a small section of society. A 2018 article by Jane Martinson described the UK media as ‘pale, male and posh’. Martinson – a British journalist and Professor of Financial Journalism at City University – broke down some extremely telling statistics regarding the background of some of the UK’s leading journalists: 51% are privately educated, as are 80% of editors. The journalism industry is 94% white with just 0.4% being Muslim. This inevitably plays a role in the way stories are reported, which stories are covered, and the interests of those reporting them.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Johnson’s denouncement of Extinction Rebellion’s protests as a threat to Britain’s apparent free press is one riddled with hypocrisy. In December 2019, in the lead up to the general election, Johnson threatened to revoke Channel 4’s licence after they held a leaders’ debate on climate change – to which Johnson did not show. In his absence, Channel 4 placed a melting ice sculpture where Johnson would have stood; a symbol to mark the urgency of the crisis, with Johnson’s non-attendance speaking volumes. The Conservative party went on to launch a formal complaint with Ofcom, threatening to have Channel 4’s public broadcasting licence revoked.

Fast forward a few months and the Conservative government faced backlash again, this time for attempting to ban specific journalists – those most critical of the party – from attending a Downing Street briefing. Suffice to say, Johnson and the elite seem only to value the UK’s ‘free press’ when activists fight back against a heavily skewed media.

XR’s protests come at a time when the increased accessibility of social media helps to provide a necessary balance to the partisan traditional media. Twitter in particular has become key in challenging powerful political and social figures, succeeding where traditional media outlets often now fail. In July, Twitter fact-checked tweets made by Trump, after he incorrectly claimed that mail-in ballots would result in “a rigged election.” The platform then went on to flag any posts he had shared which included manipulated media.

The social media platform also caused a stir when it permanently banned the account of Katie Hopkins – notorious for espousing dangerous islamophobia and xenophobic rhetoric. Hopkins had previously been given a free pass to spout such views in the likes of the Sun. In refusing to provide a platform for such deeply hateful, divisive language, some – such as Trump – have denounced this as a form of censorship; a ‘policing of conservative voices’. However, this seems more like a balancing of power; no longer allowing for the dominant narrative to prevail unabated.

Holly Barrow is a features writer for the Immigration Advice Service – an organisation of OISC-accredited immigration lawyers providing assistance with Spouse Visas, British citizenship, and more

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part III) – Slow Violence: Climate Refugees and the Legal Lacuna of Protection

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by Eloise Judd

Climate change and natural disasters are rapidly putting people around the world on the run, often rendering them stateless climate refugees (Image credit: Campaigncc)

Cities and states are gradually being submerged by rising sea levels, food and water security are threatened by temperature and rainfall variability, and diseases are spreading with increasing frequency and severity – to name but a few effects of climate change. Refugees coming from such regions find themselves in a legal lacuna of protection in international law. This ‘slow violence’ that is ‘not just attritional but exponential’ is exacerbated with each passing day of political inaction. The inertia of legal developments mirrors the very threat faced by these refugees, with climate change and its correlative forced migration as the epitome of ‘delayed destruction’.

Climate-induced migration will also be, for the most part, gradual, with the exception of sporadic, mostly internal, migration shifts in response to significant climatic events such as cyclones or king tides. However, by focusing on transnational migration, specifically from low-lying, ‘disappearing’ island states, pertinent and unanswered questions around statelessness, international law, and human rights obligations are highlighted.

The slow violence of climate change is consistently an issue of representation, accruing in the shadows of the ‘immediate’, ‘explosive’ and ‘spectacular’ violence that dominates rapid news cycles and political agendas. This article seeks to bring the legal lacuna in which climate refugees are positioned to the fore. By challenging the ‘slow violence’ of political inaction, it advocates for an amendment to treaty law on the basis of international human rights obligations.

Despite its poignant resonance, the term ‘climate refugee’ does not exist in international law. For this reason, many authors avoid this label as it is considered an ‘international misnomer’ which ‘does not accurately reflect in legal terms the status of those who move’. Instead, alternative appellations such as ‘environmentally displaced person’ or ‘climate change migrant’ are adopted. Yet, in doing so, authors present an implied acceptance of a differential standard of legal protection according to the source of harm from which one is fleeing.

Climate refugees fall within a ‘protection gap’ – a legal lacuna – unprotected by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Convention) (UNHCR, 1951) and the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless People (1954 Convention). The former is ‘the centrepiece of international refugee protection’ however the criterion of Article 1A(2) is limited to those with a ‘fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion’.

Extensive literature has debated whether ‘climate change counts as persecution.’ This focus, however, is misguided. The centralisation of ‘persecution’ overshadows the elaboration in Article 1A(2) of one ‘being unable… to avail himself of the protection of [his] country’. By encouraging the notion of ‘protection’ to take precedence in debate, a case can be made in favour of extending the 1951 Convention to obligate international protection for human rights when state assurance is inhibited.

Under international law, human rights are the positive obligation of a citizen’s nation-state. Climate change may undermine the state’s capacity to protect and ensure numerous human rights: including the right to life, the right to health, the right to a nationality, and the right to political freedoms. In Tuvalu and Kiribati, for example, this cessation will ensue on a slow and violent continuum: the state will become increasingly uninhabitable, with resources such as freshwater supply threatened until the point that it is lost below sea level. Consequently, climate refugees are de facto stateless; a status that should not be limited to the de jure loss of nationality but to the loss of ‘protection resulting from nationality’.

This is a novel form of statelessness, unprotected by the 1954 Convention which, when drafted, was formulated around state absorption, merger, and dissolution (with successor states). The loss of low-lying island states, however, is not met by a territorial replacement. Contributing further to the lacuna of protection, the right to nationality outlined in article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not present in customary international law. This lacuna of protection is highly significant for de facto stateless climate refugees who are unable to rely upon the legal obligation of the international community to grant a new nationality.

Solutions posited to the legal lacuna centre around the principles of non-refoulement and ‘complementary protection’. The former is exemplified in the Teitiota ruling in January 2020, heralded as a ‘landmark’ and ‘historic’ case. Although valuable in its unprecedented recognition of climate refugees, the legal protection afforded in insufficient. The case made by Teitiota, a Kiribatian man seeking asylum in New Zealand, formed the basis of the UNHCR ruling against the deportation of persons who’s right to life may be threatened by climate change upon return.

However, the protection offered by non-refoulement is conditional and temporally latent, premised upon an individual reaching the host state before any form of security is granted. It is also a highly individualised form of protection, wholly inadequate to meet the demands of entire populations as states disappear below sea level. Similar ad hoc protection is reflected in ‘complementary protection’ regimes – nation-state responses to persons outside of the 1951 Convention seeking asylum. These are premised upon national discretion rather than a universalized obligation. Without a binding treaty, disparate nation-state displays of altruism are ineffectual.

Nevertheless, ‘complementary protection’ regimes do exemplify political will to meet the post-1951 Convention demands of refugeehood on the basis of human rights. This notwithstanding, political will must be transformed into action to explicitly incorporate climate refugees in the mandated protection afforded by the 1951 Convention. Some authors, such as McAdam and Saul and Williams critique that the Convention cannot, or should not, be amended; arguing that the incorporation of specialised sub-groups would devalue current refugee protection by fragmenting the legal regime.

This contention is flawed, however, as the 1951 Convention itself is additional to the refugee criterion established in the Arrangements of 12 May 1926 and 30 June 1928, the Conventions of 18 October 1933 and 10 February 1938, the Protocol of 14 September 1939, and the Constitution of the Refugee Organisation. The Convention encompasses former refugee definitions, thus broadening rather than devaluing protection.

Expansion to meet novel contexts, such as climate change and its correlative forced migration, was anticipated when drafting the Convention in 1950: the French delegate critiqued the narrow criterion, affirming that ‘new and undreamed-of categories of refugees might be created’ and ‘in view of the turbulent state of the world, no such list could ever be complete’. Thus, it was acknowledged in Recommendation E of the Conference’s Final Act that the Convention could be extended in response to changing demands. Ad hoc extensions of the contractual scope have been exemplified at the national level by ‘complementary protection’ regimes. However, until climate refugees are explicitly protected by the 1951 Convention, they will continue to exist precariously in a lacuna of international legal protection.

Eloise Judd is currently completing an MA in Conflict, Security & Development within the War Studies Department at King’s College London. Formerly specialising in Political Geography at Durham University, she is currently researching protracted refugee situations and the interaction between camp architecture and human rights. Eloise hopes to pursue a career in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. You can connect with her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter: @eloise_judd

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part II) – Drought and its Effect on Internal Conflict

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by Anatol Lieven

While difficult to measure, the connection between climate change and conflict is important to study how it fuels internal tensions. In this picture, taken on August 3, 2018, drought-displaced Afghan children carry water containers filled from a tanker at a camp for internally displaced people in Injil district of Herat province. (Image credit: Hoshang Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images)

The idea that ‘climate change causes conflict’ is not so much a red herring as a red whale when it comes to understanding its impacts. Being by its nature unprovable, it also provides a very convenient target for climate change deniers. Equally pointless are attempts to attach mathematical weightings to the likelihood of climate change increasing conflicts. Given the number of variables involved, the results are inevitably so approximate as to be of very limited value in analytical terms. More sensible is to examine existing tensions and vulnerabilities and then assess (or perhaps “imagine” is a better word) how climate change could make them worse. Thus much of the literature on climate change and conflict has focused on the possibility of interstate wars over rivers, including between India, Pakistan and China, as increased water shortages and the melting of glaciers lead to worsening disputes over the sharing of the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers.

Though by no means absent, this threat may have been somewhat exaggerated. Precisely because these rivers are so vital, serious interference with them would be regarded as an existential threat. Pakistan has stated that serious Indian reductions in the flow of the Indus would be regarded as the equivalent of war; and presumably China, as Pakistan’s ally, would respond in kind by reducing the flow of the Brahmaputra river to eastern India. If however, water shortages become so severe that the choice for upstream states is water diversion or state collapse, then all bets would be off. Critically, if this was the case, a combination of internal stress and mass migration would already have brought the states concerned down in ruins.

More significant than interstate war in this regard is therefore internal conflict within states. Precisely because so many states and societies are already facing a growing set of challenges, they cannot afford to face the effects of climate change as well. This is the crucial thing about climate change in the medium term. It will feed into and exacerbate most other existing social, economic, health, and political problems – just as it will also feed into all other ecological problems, from mass extinction through deforestation to the acidification of the oceans. Western democracies also are coming under increasing internal strain, from unemployment, inequality, and growing chauvinism stemming partly from immigration and the reaction against it. With the exception of immigration, these problems are not related to climate change; but with increasing migration and crippling economic growth, climate change may in the future gravely worsen the political condition of Western societies.

I have been struck in this regard by the latest book by Ian Bremmer, Us Vs. Them, which paints a deeply worrying picture of the effects on Western societies of globalisation, automation, immigration, and growing inequality. Factor in the effects of climate change as well, and Bremmer’s grim scenarios become even grimmer, and his hopeful ones a great deal less hopeful. Yet, Bremmer’s book mentions climate change only once. The same is true of Paul Collier’s impressive work on the future of capitalism, which, too, fails to consider the impacts of climate change on Western economies. In the next three generations, by far the greatest threats of climate change to existing states and societies will come in South Asia and parts of Africa, for the simple reason that these societies are already under pressure from a combination of high temperatures and water shortages, leading to a growing threat of famine. Their steeply growing populations increase this danger still further.

The World Bank predicts that if we continue emissions at the rate of recent years, by 2050, in South Asia alone some 800 million people (around 35 per cent of the probable population at that date) will see their living standards decline sharply as a result of climate change. In 2050, Indian teenagers alive today will only be middle-aged. It is not a distant prospect affecting generations yet to be born. If in addition the resulting suffering is very unequally distributed among Indian states and leads to mass migration within South Asia, it is hard to see how Indian democracy and the Indian Union itself will be able to survive. In both India and Pakistan, water shortages are also causing friction between upriver and downriver provinces. Should the water crisis become truly disastrous, these tensions have the capacity to spur separatist movements.

Many parts of South Asia are already experiencing severe water stress, and since 2000, drought in north India and Pakistan has largely wiped out the expected further gains from agricultural development. Drought, coupled with the commercialisation of agriculture, is causing despair among India’s smaller farmers and is fuelling support for the Naxalite communist rebellion in central India. An official Indian report of 2018 stated that six hundred million people (almost half the population) already suffer both physically and economically due to water stress; while a 2017 study by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) drew attention to the severe danger posed by a rise in temperatures to agriculture, both because intensified heatwaves will make it impossible to work outside for months on end, and because beyond a certain level they produce steep falls in rice production.

Moreover, even if economic development allows India to deal adequately with the direct effects of climate change, the country is likely to be overwhelmed by the collapse of the even more endangered neighbouring states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, it has been estimated that a rise in sea levels of only one metre will render 17.5 per cent of the country uninhabitable, while a rise of ten metres would essentially destroy the country. By the end of the century, Bangladesh is predicted to have a population of 250 million at the absolute minimum (from 160 million at present).

Western studies of international migration have focused overwhelmingly on migration to the West. The most ferociously enforced border fence of all, however, is that constructed by India to prevent illegal migration from Bangladesh. This hostility to Bangladeshi Muslim immigration has increased still further under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. In 2019, Modi also introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act, giving rights to Hindu and Christian migrants to India but denying them to Muslims.

In 2010, the US Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, reported to Congress that: ‘For India, our research indicates that the practical effects of climate change will be manageable by New Delhi through 2030. Beyond 2030, India’s ability to cope will be reduced by declining agricultural productivity, decreasing water supplies, and increasing pressure from cross-border migration into the country.’

2030 is now only ten years away.

This article is based on Anatol Lieven’s new book Climate Change and the Nation-State: The Realist Case, published by Penguin in March 2020.

 Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC and a member of the academic board of the Valdai discussion club in Russia. He also serves on the advisory committee of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He holds a BA and PhD from Cambridge University in England. From 1985 to 1998, Anatol Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and is author of several books on Russia and its neighbours including Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power? and Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry. From 2000 to 2007 he worked at think tanks in Washington DC. A new edition of his book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism was published in 2012. His latest book, Climate Change and the Nation-State, was published in March 2019 by Penguin in the UK and Oxford University Press in the USA. His previous book, Pakistan: A Hard Country was published by Penguin and OUP in 2012. Anatol Lieven is currently working on the relationship between nationalism and progress in modern history.