From Identification to Durable Solution: Analysis of the Resettlement of Unaccompanied Refugee Minors to the United States and Recommendations for Best Interest Determinations

Internationally, not much is known about unaccompanied refugee children who are identified for third country resettlement and who they are as a group. As the largest resettlement country, the United States resettles more unaccompanied children than any other nation and much can be learned from this group of children's cases. Sharing this information with the international community could inform policies and programs related to the identification of displaced children in need of durable solutions.This USCCB/MRS staff report is intended to assist with educating the international audience about the population of unaccompanied refugee minors identified for refugee resettlement to the United States. It builds upon and compares results from a previous USCCB report. Drawing upon our professional experience with best interest assessments and determinations for unaccompanied/separated children, we also include in this report concrete suggestions regarding best interest determinations in refugee settings. Our hope is that sharing this information will be a helpful tool for those in the international community who are charged with or have the capacity to provide a voice of protection for vulnerable refugee children.For refugee minors unable to resettle with family members or other appropriate caregivers, the United States Refugee Program provides specialized foster care services through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor (URM) program network. The URM programs are designed to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate foster care and supportive services to refugee children and youth. They originated in the 1980s in response to the needs of unaccompanied refugee children arriving from Southeast Asia; since then, the programs have received almost 13,000 children from countries all over the world. Placement into the URM programs is offered by two national voluntary agencies: Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration and Refugee Services (USCCB/MRS), both of which receive approximately equal numbers of URMs each year.The majority of unaccompanied refugee minors who enter the URM programs are identified overseas by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staff, nongovernmental organizations and others. Currently most children who are referred for resettlement into a URM program have had their needs evaluated through a process called a Best Interest Determination (BID). The UNHCR Guidelines on Determining the Best Interests of the Child (2008) states that, "Resettlement to a country other than that of the parents can be in the best interest of the child, if family reunification is neither possible in the place of residence of the parents (for instance, due to safety considerations) nor in the country of asylum, and the child faces serious protection risks which cannot be addressed in the environment of the country of asylum." Often a BID is conducted in an effort to identify a durable solution -- including voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement -- for the child.When a child is referred to USCCB or LIRS for resettlement, a BID is included in the referral documentation. These BIDS are invaluable in understanding the child's history and in making decisions about the best placement option in the U.S. for the child.In 2010, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) conducted an evaluation of Best Interest Determinations for most of the unaccompanied refugee minors who were resettled by USCCB between October 1, 2007 and March 31, 2009. Among the recommendations in that report was the need for greater efforts to identify children in urban settings, the need to conduct BIDs promptly and to be alert to the possibility of trafficking in refugee settings. This report looks at the BIDs and other pre-arrival case information for all of the URMs resettled by USCCB from January 2010 through March 2011. We found some changes from the last report and some areas where we believe there is room for improvement

The Jury Vetting Cases: New Insights on Jury Trials in Criminal Cases?

In this paper the author discusses the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in the jury vetting cases of R. v. Yumnu, R. v. Emms and R. v. Davey. The author suggests that while the Supreme Court’s ruling goes a long way toward eliminating the concerns associated with jury vetting, there is a disconnect between the Court’s description of the jury selection process and how counsel tend to think about jury selection in criminal trials. While counsel are limited in their ability to influence the jury selection process, the Court might nevertheless have considered whether a full ban on jury vetting was needed to combat the risk — both real and perceived — that the Crown might act unethically during the jury selection process. The paper also examines whether the Court’s comments about the essential and inalienable features of the jury contribute to our understanding of the right to trial by jury enshrined in section 11(f) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Collaborative Approaches to Conservation: A Critical Look

7 pages

Assessing the Impact of the Ancillary Powers Doctrine on Three Decades of Charter Jurisprudence

This paper seeks to better understand the factors that may have led the Supreme Court of Canada to assume a role in articulating new police powers since the advent of the Charter in 1982. It also attempts to situate the Court’s ancillary powers cases within the context of a larger jurisprudential trend of balancing individual rights against “societal interests” outside of section 1 that has emerged in the Charter case law. The paper suggests that courts may be disposed to create new common law police powers because in some cases, the police have infringed the Charter rights of suspects in a manner that the court finds reasonable or justifiable, but the constitutional machinery upon which it normally relies to give effect to such arguments — that is, section 1 — is functionally unavailable, since the police conduct is not prescribed by law. The court is the refore unable to consider arguments that go to justification unless it identifies a common law source of authority for the police’s actions and/or considers such arguments at some other stage of the analysis. The articulation of new common law police powers has thus emerged as one option for solving the “problem” created by the functional unavailability of section 1. This explanation for the amplification of police powers since the entrenchment of the Charter is tested by examining some of the Supreme Court’s leading police powers decisions

Collaborative Approaches to Conservation: A Critical Look

7 pages

The Jury Vetting Cases: New Insights on Jury Trials in Criminal Cases?

In this paper the author discusses the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in the jury vetting cases of R. v. Yumnu, R. v. Emms and R. v. Davey. The author suggests that while the Supreme Court’s ruling goes a long way toward eliminating the concerns associated with jury vetting, there is a disconnect between the Court’s description of the jury selection process and how counsel tend to think about jury selection in criminal trials. While counsel are limited in their ability to influence the jury selection process, the Court might nevertheless have considered whether a full ban on jury vetting was needed to combat the risk — both real and perceived — that the Crown might act unethically during the jury selection process. The paper also examines whether the Court’s comments about the essential and inalienable features of the jury contribute to our understanding of the right to trial by jury enshrined in section 11(f) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Book Review: Juries in the 21st Century, by Jacqueline Horan

In Juries in the 21st Century, Jacqueline Horan immerses the reader in a discussion of how jury trials operate, how they could be more effective, and how they should adapt to emerging technologies. The book makes three contributions to the existing legal literature. First, it challenges basic assumptions about how juries operate. Horan demonstrates that not all features of modern jury trials are essential or even useful. She argues convincingly that the existing features of the jury system should only be retained if they contribute positively to the process by which the jury arrives at a verdict. This leads Horan to some interesting conclusions about which features of the modern jury system should be discarded and which could easily be improved upon