Rights in Exile exclusive: The case for refugee legal aid in Tunisia
Published: 1 Jul 2016
While Tunisia has little in the way of domestic law on refugees or asylum, the country was one of the first to ratify the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and other international instruments. Article 26 in the country’s new Constitution prohibits refoulement. However, the distance between these principles and the reality of refugees’ and asylum-seekers’ lives in Tunisia is gigantic.
Legal aid for asylum-seekers to go through the process of refugee status determination (RSD) has been shown in other countries to be of benefit to both the seekers and the determiners. Providing such aid would also bring UNHCR into harmony with its own guidelines. The report first published here by Oliver Tringham is the result of an exploratory mission recently undertaken to assess the potential benefits and likely challenges of establishing such a programme of refugee legal aid in Tunisia.
This report indicates that establishing legal aid for refugees – the very weakest members of Tunisian society – would start to bring them into the ambit of the law. Tringham concludes that the benefits of such a programme would far outweigh the costs. The full report is available here.