CRS Seminar: The history and role of meaningful refugee participation in the global refugee regime

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsd-GoqDsrHNdyQMxh6Y8pI2uvLKcDrnyN

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

********

Guest Speaker: Rez Gardi, R-SEAT

Accountability and participation are now understood as central to collective action in response to most global human-centered issues. The same is true in discussions of responses to the needs of refugees. When the UN General Assembly affirmed the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018, it acknowledged that “responses are most effective when they actively and meaningfully engage those they are intended to protect and assist.” In response, how can meaningful refugee participation enhance global responses to displacement, especially in the governance of the global refugee regime?  This discussion will explore recent developments relating to the meaningful participation of refugees in the governance of the international refugee system. 

Rez Gardi is an international lawyer, Harvard Satter Human Rights Fellow, and human rights advocate. She is Co-Managing Director for Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table (R-SEAT), a refugee-led initiative seeking to solidify commitments from States to enshrine refugee participation in the global refugee regime. Through this, she has worked to have refugees on the state delegations of Canada, USA, and Germany for the first time in history at global refugee meeting. Now she is working to establish mechanisms in other countries, including New Zealand.

Rez is the founder of ‘Empower’ — a refugee-youth-led organization aiming to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education. Through their projects, they empower and enable refugee youth through education, leadership, and capacity-building, so that young refugees can pursue a meaningful future. Through her work, she has reached over 20,000 refugee youth globally.

She is a co-founder and adjunct research fellow for the Centre for the Asia Pacific Refugee Studies, an academic institution based at the University of Auckland, which responds to challenges of forced displacement through evidence-based scholarship and high-impact research to inform positive approaches to support people forcibly displaced by both climate change and conflict induced displacement.