Rock Ethics Institute

It is widely accepted that the international community has strong moral duties to protect refugees’ human rights. Our initiative subjects conventional models of refugee protection to three levels of critical scrutiny. Firstly, we propose a fundamental human interest not yet recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We argue for a broader human right to communicate that entitles refugees to the provision of minimally decent communication technologies. Secondly, the “conventional model” is state-centric. It presumes that the actors responsible for human rights provision are sovereign states, and that refugees must either return to a state of origin or join new ones. Against this, we theorize alternatives like the creation of new global institutions or reorganization of the international order. Thirdly, we explicate a number of problematic assumptions often made about refugees, e.g. the belief that they are always sedentarized within a fixed territory. The existence of traditionally nomadic refugee groups like the Sahrawi must be recognized and accommodated. For the 2021-2022 year, we focused on analyses of literature relevant to the evolution in human rights norms away from “freedom of expression” to the “right to communicate,” an evolution, which, however, still does not provide remedy for refugees.