Production of vulnerability: African refugees in Jordan
Published: 1 Jul 2016
This article explores how Jordanian laws and international donors’ nationality criteria negatively interact to produce vulnerability of African refugees in Jordan. The specific focus is on the substantive right to work, which has recently been extended to Syrian refugees, to the exclusion of all others. To reduce the vulnerability of other refugee groups in Jordan, it is necessary for funding of refugee programmes to be based on rights, not nationality. It was submitted to the Rights in Exile Newsletter by Taina Renkoven and Domenique Sherab. Domenique Sherab is a refugee rights activist from Australia. She currently works as a researcher in Amman, Jordan, and holds a first class honours degree in Political Economy from the University of Sydney. Taina Renkoven is a political geographer with particular interests in borders, refugees and migration. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Helsinki.
Introduction
While constituting only a fraction of Jordan’s over 700,000 registered refugees, African refugees are consistently identified as being among the most vulnerable. Although all refugees face numerous obstacles, tackling them is often even more challenging for the Africans, who are further disadvantaged by their lack of language skills and local integration as well as the racist discrimination they encounter in all areas of life. Most of them have come to Jordan with the hope of being resettled in a third country. However, the chances of this are low as the estimated resettlement rate currently stands at 2.9 percent. This means that most African refugees are trapped in limbo for an indefinite time, in a country that grants them very few rights.
The legal framework for refugee protection in Jordan
Jordan has a long history of welcoming refugees in its territory and, as a result, the second greatest ratio of refugees to citizens in the world. Nevertheless, Jordan’s legal commitments to their protection remain modest. Jordan is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its additional 1967 Protocol. Neither has it adopted national refugee legislation or domestic asylum procedures.
However, Jordan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with UNHCR in 1998. This agreement assigned the responsibility of Refugee Status Determination (RSD) to UNHCR and provided parameters for cooperation between the Jordanian government and UNHCR. The document contains many of the main principles of international refugee protection, including the legal definitions of refugee and asylum seeker. However, many of the refugees’ key legal rights stated in the UN Refugee Convention are missing from the MOU. These include the rights to public assistance, housing and employment. While having few legal obligations has afforded Jordan flexibility to adjust its policies from situation to situation, this has simultaneously ensured that refugees in the Kingdom remain in a precarious and vulnerable situation.
The aid context
There is no shortage of people in need of humanitarian assistance in Jordan. African refugees are somewhat more disadvantaged, as many organizations have focused their operations around the more sizable Syrian and Iraqi populations. Many aid organizations also face the problem that donor money is earmarked exclusively for Syrian refugees, which prevents them from distributing resources equally according to need and across nationality lines. UNHCR provides aid and services for all refugees, but they too have limited resources and are able to provide cash assistance only to the most vulnerable few.
This amounts to feelings of neglect and inequality among African refugees. They perceive themselves as “invisible refugees,” forgotten by the humanitarian community. In fact, the average monthly assistance that African refugees receive is slightly higher than the amount that Syrians receive. And although they constitute just 0.5 percent of Jordan’s refugee population, over 30 percent of the emergency cash assistance is allocated to Sudanese. On the other hand, African refugees are excluded from some other forms of assistance. For example, they do not receive food vouchers from the World Food Programme and receive substantially less support from NGOs. Moreover, in comparison to Syrian refugees, their access to public services is more limited. For instance, in health care they rely almost entirely on charitable organizations.
The perceived inequality in relation to other refugee groups has generated distrust and reluctance to seek aid at all, which in turn puts them at risk of even further marginalization. Therefore it is vital that humanitarian organization strive to regain their trust and tackle possible disparities between nationality groups in their programmes.
Legal challenges in employment
Due to scarce humanitarian assistance, most refugees have to find other ways to survive. According to the Article 8 of the MOU, “it was agreed to accord a refugee who is legally residing in Jordan to work for his own account whenever the laws and regulations permit [sic].” Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, as the Jordanian labour market is strictly regulated by the law. While expanding refugees’ rights to access legal work opportunities would solve many problems they encounter on a daily basis, any concessions in legislation seem highly unlikely in the light of the current circumstances. With the support of international funding and with pressure, the conversation is currently focused on the creation of legal work opportunities for Syrians, through an amnesty on the fees associated with work permits. The conversation has not expanded to include other refugee groups.
The Jordanian labour law does not mention refugees or asylum-seekers per se, but requires all non-Jordanians to obtain a work permit from the Ministry of Labour (Jordanian Labour Code, Article 12). However, there is a list of “closed professions” that defines fields available exclusively for Jordanians. Even in the professions outside this list, permits are only issued in cases where there are not enough qualified Jordanians to do the work in question. The law also stipulates that Arab workers must be prioritized over others. This puts African refugees in an even weaker position. The application process entails significant bureaucracy for both the employee and employer and a substantial permit fee. Permits must also be renewed annually and are only permitted with an annual contract. As such there must be significant commitment on the part of the employer.
Because of difficulties associated with obtaining such permits, African refugees, like most refugees, tend to work without permits in the informal sector. Typically they are only able to find work for a few days each month, which means that they earn very little. Further, Jordanian authorities are especially strict with irregular workers of African origin. Unlike Iraqis or Syrians, Africans are immediately recognizable and targeted. This means that African refugees work under a constant threat of police raids that can lead to administrative detention, or even deportation, if in violation of the labour law.
Administrative detention may lead to further problems. Release is sometimes dependent upon providing a guarantor, a Jordanian male with a clean security record who is willing to hand over his ID card to police for a given time period. While this is a standard practice also for Jordanian nationals, African refugees with few connections to the host community face great difficulty in finding such an individual. Most have to resort to a black market of guarantors, who offer their help but charge substantial amounts for their services. While this practice is illegal, refugees have little choice but to expose themselves to exploitation. As finding and paying for guarantors is one of the most typical legal challenges African refugees encounter in Jordan, they often request free guarantor service from various actors in the field. Providing such a service is not possible under Jordanian law.
Due to their precarious position in the labour market, many African refugees are exposed to abuse and exploitation. However, Jordanian law deems legality of work and labour rights two separate issues. This implies that certain labour rights hold even when employment itself is illegal. Awareness of this is not very widespread among refugees, although NGOs have reported that refugees are often surprised to learn that they, as undocumented workers, are still entitled to file a case and, for example, claim unpaid wages. These cases are often fairly complex and demand legal expertise and dedicated representation. Unfortunately, there are only a few actors who can provide such assistance.
Psychological toll on the people left behind
While legal issues related to work are among refugees’ core concerns, it is important to note that they are connected to a myriad of other challenges. The current situation of the Sudanese community is a good example of this. At the end of 2015, their frustration with the prevailing circumstances culminated in a month-long protest outside UNHCR headquarters in Amman. The protest came to a dramatic end as the government forcibly deported hundreds of protesters back to Sudan.
As of May 2016, there are still 3,055 Sudanese still in Jordan. The impact of the deportations has instilled deep fear in the remaining community. As most of the deported were registered refugees or asylum-seekers, the community members have come to realize that not even this status is enough to protect them. Many are so anxious about getting arrested and deported that they have stopped looking for work opportunities, and some avoid even leaving the house. This has further exacerbated their already dire economic situation.
The combination of these stress factors has taken a great psychological toll. It has become evident that these high stress levels are aggravating factors in family relationships. Some community members have reported that there is an increasing tendency for parents to resort to violent methods to discipline their children. This is a worrying development as the detrimental effects of corporeal punishment on children’s development, behavior and educational performance are widely known.
The importance of a non-discriminatory approach
Donors must understand the dynamics and consequences of their funding decisions. Excluding African refugees, or any other refugee community, from forms of assistance or legal livelihood opportunities produces severe levels of vulnerability. Vulnerability cannot be spoken about in isolation from these decisions. In the case of African refugees, funding decisions interact negatively with Jordanian law to perpetuate and intensify the vulnerability of these people. Non-discrimination should be the basis of all work with refugees and asylum seekers. Nationality should never be a determining factor for assistance, and actors within the field must continue to advocate for this.