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Refugee Week 2022 – René Cassin’s statement

15 Jun, 2022 | Asylum and Detention, Latest, Refugee Week 2022

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This year has posed so many new challenges to the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers, who deserve a just and dignified life. From the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act criminalising refugees, the shirking of our responsibility by sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, to the real-life refugee crisis unfolding in Ukraine. 

In this complex and even bleak landscape for our human rights, the theme for this year’s Refugee Week, healing, poses a challenge. What might “healing” during refugee week look like, then? How can we as Jews seek to educate and understand the roll back of our rights when these very laws were written and ratified in the wake of our bitter persecution?

For Jews, it means finding a pathway from our historic experiences and values, to addressing some of the daily challenges of refugees today. Through collective education, listening, and recovering the deep similarities between our experiences, Jews can take a stand against refugee hostility and for all our human rights. 

This year, we will be bringing our Jewish partners and our sector partners opportunities for action, which challenge the UK’s ever hardening hostile environment to migrants and refugees. From trafficking and exploitation to indefinite detention, you will hear from refugees themselves about their lived experience, and range of advocacy and grassroots activists taking the government to task on the hostile environment.

René Cassin is proud to support Refugee Week to raise our voice in solidarity and to strive for an approach to migrants that centres social justice and humanity. We look forward to seeing you at our events!

#HealingTogether 

#RefugeeWeek

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#Refugee Week 2022: Ways to challenge the hostile environment

Our events

Monday 20th 6pm in partnership with the Human Trafficking Foundation: A Twitter Space – war in Ukraine and crisis for modern slavery victims

Tuesday 21st at 7pm, in partnership with Generation2Generation: Then and Now, Learning from Refugee Experiences.

Thursday 23rd at 1pm No To Hassockfield – an Instagram live conversation with the campaign to shut down Hassockfield/Derwentside detention centre

We hope to see you there!

Our briefing

If you would like a more in depth look at the key issues facing refugees and asylum seekers in the UK for 2022, please find our briefing linked here.

Today, 10th December, is International Human Rights Day – the 76th anniversary of the signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. 

 

 

The Declaration was a reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust. So, for Jews, today has a particuar significance. 

Although rooted in response to atrocity, the Declaration was forward-looking and optimistic. It spoke for the majority of people who knew a better world was possible. The fact that it’s co-author , the French-Jewish lawyer Monsieur Rene Cassin, could draft such a hopeful document so soon after 26 members of his family were murdered by the Nazis is a testament to his humanity and the power of human rights in general. 

Today, as the organisation that works in Cassin’s name, we are determined to ensure his Declaration’s vision of human rights for all is fully realised. Central to that work is a focus on so called ‘socio-economic rights’ – rights to everyday essentials like food, housing and health. This vision was best articulated in Article 25 of the Declaration: 

‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control’.

Bolstering these rights would ensure everybody has access to the foundations on which to build a dignified, prosperous and meaningful life. They have been neglected for too long.

 

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