The Haiti Earthquake and International Refugee Law

nother writer on here really messed up my assignment, and now I need a rewrite. This is for an LLM in Refugee Rights course. Attached is the original paper and the three articles the professor recommends. Your draft contains a very detailed discussion of the relief effort for Haiti, including a lot of information about the effects of the disaster, the response of the US government, the government of Haiti, MINUSTAH, and others. The discussions of refugee law are comparatively brief, when the origins of the UN Refugee Convention are explained in the introduction and from p. 14 onwards when you discuss whether people fleeing this disaster qualified for refugee status. This assignment is testing your ability to analyse and argue about refugee law, so there needs to be a sufficient focus on this.[unique_solution] While there is nothing wrong with explaining what happened in Haiti, this needs to be connected to a detailed discussion of refugee law. For example, when you say that refugee law doesn′t include post disaster migration, you could go into more detail about the elements of the definition of refugee and identify the specific difficulties. As part of doing this, you could do more to consider whether post-disaster conditions such as these could be considered a breach of economic, social and cultural rights (such as rights in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). You could consider the argument that breaches of economic, social and cultural rights could, or should, be seen as persecution. If you conclude that people escaping post-disaster conditions can′t be be accepted as refugees under the UN Refugee Convention, you could do more to present the reasons for your preferred view on whether the UN definition of refugee should remain the same or be expanded to recognise natural disasters. While it′s understandable that you would need some explanation of the situation in Haiti, at the moment this discussion takes up most of the main body of your essay, from p. 5 to p. 14. Many details included in the discussion of the relief effort, such as the numbers of navy and Coast Guard ships deployed, could be taken out to make more space for discussion of Haiti in relation to refugee law. While the detailed discussion of the relief effort is interesting and well-written, I recommend focusing more on the issues of refugee law (in particular, about whether refugee law can recognise people escaping a disaster such as the one in Haiti as refugees, and whether and how it should be amended to do so). You could do this using legal sources such as the attached articles (which I found on Lexis Library and HeinOnline).