Lunch seminar with Nurbanu Hayir
The Influence of Law on the Scope of Procedural Justice for Asylum-Seekers
This presentation explores an answer to why harsh asylum policies do not damage the legitimacy of political governments in functioning democracies by focusing on the dynamics shaping public opinion in Europe in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war and the Russo-Ukrainian war. An overview of international refugee law shows that most asylum policies are likely to violate international law, which receives criticism from the international community and civil society. Despite this, asylum policies are one of the policy areas in which domestic and international reactions are seemingly in clear conflict, showing that harsh asylum policies do not come with a high political cost, whereas lack thereof does.
The presentation investigates the reason behind this by drawing on the theories of procedural justice and the scope of justice in social psychology. Procedural justice theory studies demonstrate that individuals tend to consider the fair treatment of other groups when they form judgments about the legitimacy of authorities. The scope of justice studies find that nationality, race, and religion are important factors in determining whether justice is relevant for other groups. Most harsh asylum policies strip or constrain, by law, the procedural guarantees under international refugee law. The argument at the crux of this paper is that law plays a role in evaluating the deservingness of refugees. Law is an under-investigated factor in the scope of justice theory, but it often provides legitimizing rhetoric that enables other personal and immutable characteristics such as race, nationality, and religion to operate as a moral exclusion tool. As a result, a domestic society does not extend its procedural justice considerations to others.
The presentation tests this argument in mini-case studies by analyzing the political statements and media discourse in the 2015 refugee influx to Europe following the Syrian civil war and the Ukrainian and Russian refugee influx ensuing from the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukrainian refugees, fortunately, encountered a welcoming reception when they fled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unlike Syrian and Russian refugees. Findings show that in cases of countries that admitted a very low number of refugees or received attention for denying refugee rights by closing borders or pushing back refugee boats, political discourse relies heavily on exclusionary dynamics that draw on legal arguments. The paper’s foregrounding of legality aims to investigate the potential of this dynamic concept as a tool to widen or narrow the scope of justice and fuel the legitimizing rhetoric on harsh asylum policies. It also aims to provide the basis for further empirical research to test the hypothesis that individuals care about the procedurally just treatment of people outside their national boundaries to the extent that they do not consider those refugees as having been involved in illicit conduct of some sort.
Speaker bio
Nurbanu Hayır recently got her LL.M. degree from Yale Law School and holds a first law degree from Galatasaray University. She is visiting iCourts as a Yale University Fox Fellow for her research on how public opinion factors into international law compliance, in particular, enforcement of international court judgments and the impact of sanctions on state acts.
She has a broad interest in examining how international law regulates the treatment of foreigners and how nation-state boundaries influence the principles and dynamics of international law.
Her previous academic works have explored diverse issues, such as understanding the enforcement histories of international courts through the application of compliance theories, how social psychology phenomena shed light on the varying actions taken by states in similar issues arising from refugee law, the intersection of sanctions and EU migration law, and a critical analysis of the deployment of emergency doctrines in migration contexts.
Meeting ID: 669 6510 8602
Passcode: 961937