Through his advocacy, teaching and scholarship, Arthur Helton enabled some of the most vulnerable people on earth, as well as those who work to advance their rights, to ensure that governments strive to live up to their legal and moral obligations to protect and assist the displaced

Schoenholtz, Andrew I.

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Arthur C. Helton 1949-2003

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Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2004 Arthur C. Helton 1949-2003 Andrew I. Schoenholtz Georgetown University Law Center, schoenha@law.georgetown.edu   This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1897  17 J. Refugee Stud. 370 (2004) This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub  Part of the Immigration Law Commons Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reservedArthur C. Helton 1949-2003ANDREW I. SCHOENHOLTZInstitute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown UniversityThrough his advocacy, teaching and scholarship, Arthur Helton enabled some ofthe most vulnerable people on earth, as well as those who work to advance theirrights, to ensure that governments strive to live up to their legal and moralobligations to protect and assist the displaced.I was fortunate to meet Arthur at the very beginning of my career. When Iasked for a pro bono project one summer at a New York law firm, I receivedvintage Arthur: an attempt to stop the federal government from building theOakdale Detention Facility. Here was the realist and the dreamer in this action.Congress had appropriated funds for an INS detention facility in Oakdale,Louisiana. The closest city with an active bar, Baton Rouge, was hours awayfrom this rural Louisiana location. As a practitioner, Arthur knew that theasylum process could not be meaningful for those detained at a serious distancefrom counsel, so he contested what became a model for the detention of asylumseekers in the US and Australia. Of course, there was no way that anyone couldprevent the government from building this prison.Arthur was a Renaissance man in our field, both in terms of roles and sub-stance. He did it all: practitioner, advocate, educator, and scholar. Substantivelyhe took on all of forced migration. Initially focusing on the protection of asylumseekers in the United States, he gradually built on that foundation to address thecomplexities of forced migration in all parts of the world.Arthur always thought of the big picture. That's how he approached therepresentation issue. Right after law school, Arthur practised criminal law atLegal Aid and then immigration and labour law at Mailman & Ruthizer. So whenhe joined the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in 1982, he understood frompractice the major role that representation plays in a system where it is, unfor-tunately, not mandated. That year the Lawyers Committee argued before a USDistrict Court Judge for the release of some 2,000 detained asylum seekers fromHaiti. Thejudge made it clear to Executive Director Mike Posner and Arthur thatthe asylum seekers would only be released from detention if counsel were secured.Arthur convinced Mike to promise the judge that the Lawyers Committee wouldfind volunteer lawyers for every Haitian. At this date the Refugee Act thatestablished an asylum law based on the international obligations of theUS was brand new. Training materials did not exist, and case law based onthe international refugee definition was minimal. Working with the AmericanArthur C Helton 1949-2003 371Bar Association, Arthur recruited local lawyers in 20 states, trained them andconnected them to these asylum seekers.For Arthur, this wasn't just a case or a particular population. This was asystemic problem that needed to be addressed. As Director of the LawyersCommittee's Refugee Project, Arthur and his small staff built a programmeof pro bono counsel from major law firms to help meet the needs of the increasingnumber of asylum seekers coming to the US. Today, that programme ensures therepresentation of more than 1,000 asylum seekers each year, winning more than90 per cent of those cases. Equally as important, this Pro Bono RepresentationProject has served as a model to other organizations as they try to meet the needsof asylum seekers in various parts of the US.Arthur advocated for refugees in the US in every available forum: before theExecutive branch, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Borders did not confinehim. While at the Lawyers Committee from 1982 to 1994, he headed missions ofinquiry to Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, Africa andAsia. At the Open Society Institute from 1994-1999, he established a projectto monitor, respond to and prevent forced migration in the 15 countries of theformer Soviet Union. He played a key role in connection with the internationalconference on migration-related issues in that region. He advocated before seniorgovernment and international organization officials around the world, so ofcourse, when he and our colleague, Gil Loescher, began a mission to Iraq inAugust 2003, their first stop in Baghdad would be with Sergio Vieira de Mello, theUN Special Representative in Iraq.Arthur educated in many ways. Training that first group of volunteer attorneysback in the early 1980s helped develop training on asylum law in many organiza-tions. But he was also a formal educator at numerous institutions. He taughtimmigration and refugee law and policy on an adjunct basis at New YorkUniversity Law School for many years and more recently at Columbia LawSchool. He was a Visiting Professor at the Central European University inBudapest for several years, teaching courses on the legal dimensions ofpreventing forced migration in transitional societies. He taught courses onrefugee law in Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia.Arthur's scholarship covered everything from US refugee law to the interna-tional humanitarian regime and its institutions. Always thinking ahead of mostof us, he wrote about persecution on account of membership in a social group in1983. The ink on the 1980 Refugee Act was barely dry, Immigration Court wasabout to come into existence, and very little US law existed at the time on this andmost other aspects of refugee law. But Arthur understood the importance of thisground in the development of contemporary asylum law. In 1986, he addressedthe legality of detaining refugees in the US. Indochinese refugees attractedArthur's scholarship in an article about the Comprehensive Plan of Action.He wrote as well on the role of refugee, humanitarian and human rights lawin planning for the repatriation of Kampuchean asylum seekers in Thailand.Forced migration in the former Soviet Union, displacement and human rights,establishing a comprehensive scheme for refugee and migration emergencies in372 Andrew I. Schoenholtzthe Caribbean region, humanitarian intervention, Palestinian refugee propertyand the Arab-Israeli conflict, humanitarianism in crisis: these were some amongthe subjects of his scholarship.And then The Price of Indifference, where Arthur laid out the case for inter-national policies, mandates and institutions to prevent displacement and providemeaningful protection and needed assistance to forced migrants. Big ideas, ofcourse, that he developed because of his experience with displaced people. Forexample, this is how he relates an exemplary failure of our humanitarian regimeto prevent or mitigate forced migration:It was a late Sunday evening in November 2000 when our plane landed in Nairobi,Kenya. As I walked on the runway through the sultry air to the airport arrival hall, Ibecame an unintended witness to the conclusion of the infamous journey of the 'lostboys of Sudan', some of whom I had visited in 1993 at the Kakuma refugee camp innorthwestern Kenya. There, a remnant of some 17,000 children had come to restafter fleeing in 1988 from fighting in Sudan to Ethiopia, where they were attackedagain after the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam fell in 1991. This prompted aharrowing 600-mile trek by foot to Kenya, with many dying from attacks by wildanimals and exposure.Dissatisfied with the administration of misery, with poorly thought out, unsys-tematic, and ad hoc solutions to forced migration crises, Arthur offered far-reaching proposals for institutional change at the national and internationallevels. His goal was to create a humanitarian regime capable of preventingmass displacement and of being proactive in mitigating such displacementwhen prevention is impossible or inappropriate. To accomplish this, he envi-sioned the creation of a consolidated UN humanitarian agency with a fullyintegrated programme and budget capable of deploying well crafted policiesto the range of complex emergencies. Within the US government, he calledfor a new Agency for Humanitarian Action, reporting to the Secretary ofState, to do the same. Arthur focused on major problems and recommendedsolutions capable of addressing the basic human needs and rights of forcedmigrants.Finally, in his capacity as Director of Peace and Conflict Studies and SeniorFellow for Refugee Studies and Preventive Action at the Council on ForeignRelations, Arthur, together with Gil, travelled to Baghdad to assess humanitar-ian conditions in Iraq. It was a crisis that had to be attended to. Arthur andGil had just greeted the head of the UN in Iraq at the beginning of their firstin-country meeting when the bomb exploded.And so this great realist and dreamer has been taken from us. I am sure that hiswork that touched so many will carry on. But our community-the displaced, theexiled, practitioners, advocates, government officials, international organizationrepresentatives, educators and researchers-has lost someone who cannot bereplaced. Let us try our best, then, to achieve the goals that he strove for andhonour him with our action.

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Arthur C. Helton 1949-2003

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