Making the hidden visible: providing data to support the legal rights of refugees

Jo Wilding (University of Sussex) and Steven Martin (Channel Monitoring Project)

Refugees, as well as the groups that support them, are often disadvantaged because they don’t have access to either legal services or robust evidence that may support their case for asylum. 

Most of the Eastern Arc region is a ‘legal aid desert’, and this is particularly acute on its south and east coasts. As a result refugees and others have little access to social welfare and immigration legal advice and representation. Even where legal support is available, they may not be made aware of their right to access it. For those who do get legal support, their representatives may not have access to data that will validate their claims and strengthen their cases. 

This session will hear from two people who are working to make hidden data and knowledge visible, accessible and usable, mapping legal aid provision across the UK, and bringing together a wealth of data to help evidence cross-Channel migration and interaction. 

Having set out the context for their work, they will explore some key questions leading on from it: what data are necessary and appropriate to support refugees in making their cases? How should they be presented? And what tools would be most beneficial for people to access them? 

Participants in the session will be invited to explore these questions, as well as sharing their own knowledge and experience, and thereby allowing a diverse range of stakeholders to learn from each other through a shared solidarity: refugees and community groups, academics and researchers, policymakers, politicians, charities and authorities. 

• Jo Wilding (University of Sussex) is an Associate Professor in Law. A former barrister, she holds an ESRC New Investigator Grant looking at the indicators of social welfare legal advice need, the availability of advice provision and barriers to provision across the whole UK.
• Steven Martin (Channel Monitoring Project) is a Senior Research Fellow and has undertaken a wide range of refugee solidarity work in Greece, Belgium and the West Bank, and co-founded CMP to provide evidence to the UN and UK Government in order to hold border authorities to account.