Rights in Exile submission and style guidelines

Thank you for considering writing for Rights in Exile. Please send your submissions to refugeenewseditor@gmail.com with one line about yourself and your institutional affiliation (for example: Firstname Lastname is a refugee advocate working in City, Country), including a link to your email address. The last day we can accept submissions for the next issue is the 15th of each month.

Please prepare your submission following these Style guidelines. Papers submitted to the newsletter that do not conform to the guidelines may be returned to you for revision.

  • If you reference something that can be found online, use an in-text hyperlink from the title of the source to its web address. For example,  ‘A dangerous impasse: Rwandan refugees in Uganda’  instead of ‘A dangerous impasse: Rwandan refugees in Uganda. Available at http://www.refugee-rights.org/Publications/Papers/2010/10_08_30_Dangerous_Impasse.pdf’;
  • Please do not use footnotes or endnotes, and keep references to a minimum. Instead, use in-text citations – i.e. (UNHCR 2009: 23) – along with a reference list at the end. We make this request because the program we use for laying out the newsletter unfortunately makes footnotes very difficult to deal with. If you must use footnotes, please keep them to an absolute minimum. Articles with footnote citations will not be considered. Footnotes will only be accepted when used to further explain ideas in the text, not as citations. To do this in Microsoft Word, select the text you want to make into a hyperlink, go to the ‘Insert’ menu and click ‘Hyperlink’ to add the web address. Full instructions on how to edit a hyperlink in Microsoft word may be consulted here;
  • Use single ones only for quotations within quotations. Thus: “When I say ‘immediately’, I mean some time before April,” said the spokesman. Full stops and commas can be placed inside the inverted commas, even if they were not included in the original quotation.
  • Please don’t number your headings or sub-headings. Instead, indicate headings in bold, and sub-headings in italics;
  • In title and sub-headings, only capitalise the first letter, except for proper nouns (i.e. ‘Understanding Australia’s asylum system’, not ‘Understanding Australia’s Asylum System’);
  • Please italicise refoulement, pro bono, inter alia, sur place, prima facie, other legal terms, and terms in different languages;
  • Please use “double” (not  ‘single’) quotation marks;
  • When in doubt, use British English, not American spellings;
  • No indents at beginnings of paragraphs;
  • One space, not two, between sentences;
  • Italicise titles of books, journals, or court cases;
  • Use letter abbreviations for currency (USD not $) and place the abbreviation before the amount;
  • Date format: 29 December 2014;
  • Please spell out all abbreviations the first time you use them, followed by acronym (for example: ‘the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).’
  • Don’t capitalise ‘government’ (i.e. the government of Rwanda) although the abbreviation ‘GoR’ is fine.
  • Don’t capitalise the word ‘refugee’
  • ‘UNHCR’ not ‘the UNHCR’
  • When referring to a person, refer to them by their full name the first time (ex. Yara Romariz Maasri) and just by their last name on subsequent times (ex. Romariz Maasri)
  • Please run a spell-check prior to submission.

About the newsletter

Rights in Exile, the IRRI refugee legal aid newsletter, is designed to exchange information and promote dialogue between legal aid providers as well as raise awareness of new issues relating to refugee legal aid. It is intended to complement the website, www.srlanetwork.wordpress.com.

Rights in Exile aims to stand out from other refugee newsletters and publications through its focus on representing those seeking asylum and in other matters in which refugees need legal help, e.g. from marriage, divorce, birth registration, to detention to criminal allegations. Rights in Exile will also include news items that may compliment Country of Origin information.

Rights in Exile seeks to be a source for information that otherwise might be difficult to compile or access.  We try to present this information in these primary ways:

  • Direct links to articles;
  • Case/situation summaries;
  • Summaries of case law with links to the reported case;
  • Articles written specifically for the newsletter;
  • Announcements;
  • Requests for information that you are searching for.

We welcome submissions in any of these categories.

Rights in Exile is designed to be provide a means of publishing information that eventually could be developed to appear in a law journal, but where the information would be immediately useful to other legal representatives, many of whom do not have access to journal articles. Articles can be anywhere from about half a page to five pages or more. All submissions are refereed by at least one academic specialist, so you may list is in your curriculum vitae. And where you have published a relevant article elsewhere, we would appreciate your forwarding it with permission to reproduce it, always remembering colleagues in the South who do not have passwords to a law library.

Rights in Exile reviews all submissions prior to publication to ensure they suit our mission and style guidelines. Rights in Exile may choose, at our discretion, not to publish a submission, but will, if requested, explain this decision to the individual submitting the piece.