Bella Mosselmans (LGB, 2012), Director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, discusses the essential work she and her team are doing.

The problem

Refugees and migrants around the world are facing daily violations of their rights. In many countries, individuals are denied entry while escaping persecution, pushed back to open seas, disregarded their rights, detained in camps under deplorable conditions, or denied wages and employment with the chance to have a normal life.

This dire situation persists today despite the existence of international legal protections and national legal systems that establish the rights of refugees and migrants. The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees guarantees refugees various rights, encompassing work, education, due process, non-discrimination, and access to the social safety net. Importantly, it ensures the right not to be forcibly returned to a country where persecution awaits. Other human rights conventions extend protection to refugees and those on the move, covering economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights. These conventions also safeguard specific groups, including women, children, and persons with disabilities, and prohibit torture and inhumane treatment.

There are many civil society organizations, individual lawyers, advocates and international entities that advocate for refugees and migrants to uphold the rights enshrined in these protections. While these efforts, including legal actions in domestic and international courts, are crucial and occasionally successful, they are often ad hoc and lack a cohesive strategy for affirming and advancing rights on a regional or global scale.

The Global Strategic Litigation Council (“the Council”) was established in 2021 against this backdrop, alongside growing xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment and a pattern of countries collaborating on policies that diminish refugee and migrant rights. We exist to help close the troubling and immense gap between the promises of rights protection and the practices of denying those rights. We strive to ensure people fleeing dangerous situations are able to rebuild their lives elsewhere, without fear or discrimination.

Our solution

The Council is a global network of almost 400 lawyers, refugee leaders, advocates, organizations, and academics. Our mission is to empower our members to advocate and litigate to uphold the rights of refugees and migrants that are too often denied or violated. We do this by collectively designing, supporting, and connecting members' strategic advocacy work to dismantle barriers in law and practice that keep refugees and other forced migrants from living safely, moving freely, working in equitable conditions and having agency over their lives. We work across all regions of the world with designated regional litigators in South Asia, East and Horn of Africa and Central America and we prioritize those countries where refugee and migrant populations are the largest or most vulnerable.

We support our members in several ways, including litigation strategy, legal advocacy, research, brief writing, drafting pleadings, and intervening as amicus on international law matters. We also convene training workshops and in-person regional consultations that create vital knowledge-sharing and collaboration spaces and identify new casework for the Council to support. For example, we recently convened a coalition of Carribean civil society organizations to intervene alongside the Council in a case at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Last year, Chile and Colombia filed a Request for an Advisory Opinion with the Court, asking for clarification of the nature of States’ human rights obligations in the face of the climate emergency. The Court was asked to provide guidance on the measures States should adopt to ensure their compliance with international human rights law. The intervention focused on what States must do to respond to individuals displaced across international borders by climate change - making groundbreaking legal arguments in a novel area of international law. You can find out more about this case by reading our blog on the issue, available on our website here. Our next convening is due to take place later this summer in Thailand where the Council is collaborating with the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to convene a meeting on strategic litigation and legal advocacy for the rights of migrants and people on the move in the Asia Pacific region.

Given the myriad of rights violations that refugees and migrants may face, the Council has member-directed priorities to focus its work. These include ending detention as a response to migration and bridging the gap between refugees’ rights on paper and rights in practice. Our newest and most pressing priority is climate displacement. With 21.5 million refugees being displaced annually, and this number only predicted to increase, our members are in agreement that global civil society must act to protect people displaced by climate emergencies.

The Council is already progressing several projects to help tackle this challenge. We are particularly excited about our collaboration with Earth Refuge, The Zolberg Institute and Raoul Wallenberg Institute to develop a Climate Displacement Case Database that will host global litigation related to climate displacement. This curated resource will empower Council members and wider civil society to learn from past arguments and experiences, refine their strategies, and work to obtain protection for those who have been or may be displaced by the climate emergency. We are expecting to launch the Database by the summer of 2024.

Our progress

Although we are a relatively new organization established in 2021, we have made significant strides towards establishing our organization and progressing our goal to advance refugee and migrant rights.

As an organization, we have established a Global Secretariat team that collectively coordinates and implements the Council’s mission. We are a multidisciplinary team led by Bella Mosselmans, an alumni of Ecolint and an asylum and human rights lawyer who serves as Director of the Council. We are based across the world and hire expert lawyers within the regions that we operate in. These regional lawyers have the expertise on the relevant legal systems and local networks to effectively identify the pressing issues facing migrants and refugees within their regions; connect with grassroots organizations that are working to uphold their rights; and both drive and increase the impact of their strategic legal work. We have established regional networks in Africa, Central America & Mexico, Europe, South America & the Caribbean and South Asia connecting litigators and advocates within regions to share knowledge and maximize their collaboration and collective impact.

Our future - how you can get involved

Whilst we are proud of what we have achieved so far, we are always looking to the future and how we ensure the Council both sustains and grows its efforts to support the lives of refugees and migrants across the world. This includes plans to: hire regional litigators across every region of the world so that we have our finger on the pulse of the key human rights violations that refugees and migrants are facing in different parts of the world, and how we can support our members to challenge these; expand our expertise to support advocacy campaigns as well as litigation, because we recognise that real change can only come about with a narrative change around how migrants and refugees are perceived globally; and continue growing our Climate Displacement Case Database once it launches later this year and supporting on groundbreaking cases like the one being heard at the Inter-American Court to ensure that the rights of the millions who are displaced by climate disasters are upheld.

These are big ambitions that we are confident we can achieve with the right resources - funding and community. Funding-wise, we are a new organization with limited resources that is entirely dependent on generous donors and foundations that are interested in the groundbreaking and novel work that we are doing. To help us meet our growth goals and move towards realizing our full potential, we are seeking connections to foundations or individuals who support our mission and may wish to help progress it. We would welcome any proposals through direct contact via [email protected]. If you would like to make a direct one-off or recurring donation,  we are grateful for any kind of support and would invite you to contact us at the same email address or donate online here.

Crucially, our mission is focused on building a global community and fostering knowledge sharing across borders to help dismantle the barriers and rights violations that refugees and migrants face every day. This is only possible through building awareness of the Council and growing our global membership. If there is just one thing you take away from this article, we invite you to follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date and help spread the word of the Council, and consider joining us as a member if you feel you could benefit and contribute to our work. Join our global community and help amplify our work - in doing so, you help uphold the rights of the millions of people who have been forced to leave their homes across the world, and provide them with the opportunity to rebuild their lives with dignity and safety.