About Us
The War Crimes and Refugee Status Conference is rooted in the War Crimes and Refugee Status Research Project that is funded, in part, by the SSHRC International Opportunities Fund (IOF) and York University, and is housed in its Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS). The War Crimes and Refugee Status Research Project is an international collaborative and five country comparative empirical jurisprudential study that is led by an international team of legal scholars and researchers that includes: James C. Simeon, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, York University (principal applicant), Kate Jastram, Faculty of Law, University of California at Berkeley (co-applicant) and includes four outstanding and highly distinguished collaborators in the field of international law: Professors Guy Goodwin-Gill, All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK, Jane McAdam, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia, and Geoff Gilbert, School of Law, University of Essex, UK., and Joseph Rikhof, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, and Senior Counsel, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Unit, Justice Canada. For further details on this research project please see the War Crimes and Refugee Status Research Workshop, About Us page, at www.yorku.ca/wcrs/about.html.
The War Crimes and Refugee Status Conference follows on the highly successful War Crimes and Refugee Status Research Workshop that was held at York University on May 17th, 2010. However, it builds further on this previous international Research Workshop to consider a broader array of issues and concerns related to the exclusion clauses and their evolution and development in the field international refugee law.
Moreover, the War Crimes and Refugee Status Conference is related directly to a broader research initiative at the Centre for Refugee Studies, the Refugee Research Network (RRN). For more information on the RRN, please see www.refugeeresearch.net/taxonomy/term/1. The War Crimes and Refugee Status Conference is part of a series of ongoing initiatives of the “Refugee Law” Research Cluster of the RRN. The broad objective of the “Refugee Law” Research Cluster is to contribute to the ongoing positive constructive research and development of international refugee law for the further advancement and protection of the rights of refugees and for the protection and respect for the human dignity of all persons.
We are most grateful and appreciative of the financial contributions of all of our sponsors who have made this research possible and to all those who have contributed to this research initiative through their work in the advancement, the dissemination, and the mobilization of knowledge in the fields of international refugee law and refugees and forced migration studies and to the basic recognition of the rights and further protection of the world’s most vulnerable persons, refugees or those persons with a well-founded fear of persecution and/or to a denial of their most fundamental and essential dignity as human beings.