St. Andrew's Refugee Services Holiday Fundraising Catalog

Resettlement Legal Aid ProjectBuilding pathways of justice to new beginnings

RLAP has worked with over 700 refugees in Cairo this year on a variety of legal matters. Staff and interns interview clients to determine legal eligibility for refugee status or resettlement to another country,communicate with governmental agencies on behalf of clients, and prepare testimonies and appeals.

An Iraqi doctor working in an Iraqi hospital, he had seen more unnecessary death during his residency than many doctors see in their entire careers. Dead bodies peppered his commute to work; sectarian expenditures tossed to the roadside like spent bottles. The body of a coworker was among them; a doctor shot dead on his morning commute. If there was one thing Shakir learned during his last few years in Iraq and after his flight to Egypt, it was that “there is nothing that will be with you forever.” A sad was that “there is nothing that will be with you forever.” A sad truth from a man who seemed only to want happiness.

Shakir, a refugee and RLAP client, arrived at StARS afterfleeing to Egypt in an effort to escape the long arm of sectarianviolence in Iraq. Upon arriving in Egypt, he learned that his medi-cal residency in Iraq would not be recognized to practice medi-cine in Egypt. A qualified medical doctor from the top medical school in Iraq—with the unparalleled depth of experience that war brings to the surgical theatre—was met with the sad reality that his expensive application for a medical license in Egypt was rejected without appeal (and without an official letter explaining the reason).

In Egypt, his medical residency was not only officially unrecog-nized, but its equivalent was a twelve-month at-cost internship running into the thousands of U.S. dollars. He paid for this, but was still denied a license to practice medicine in Egypt. It seemed every attempt to change his life for the better was met with an-other disappointment.

But then he discovered StARS and with it a community ofrefugees who understood his sense of desperation. He has once refugees who understood his sense of desperation. He has once again taken another leap and chartered a path towards fulfillment through counseling other refugees, while pressing forward with his own petition for resettlement to another country. However, the petition is time-consuming and requires specialized knowl-edge of the procedures of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as well as international human rights law.law.

Expecting refugees to simultaneously fend off the ever-encroach-ing penury and listlessness that accompanies such great up-heaval, all while acquainting themselves with the intricacies of UNHCR policy and international refugee law, is as unrealistic as it is cruel. Shakir’s story demonstrates the overwhelming string of loss that typifies the struggle of refugees; a seemingly endless ava-lanche of tragedies. While their status continues to deprive them of basic human dignities—the right of a doctor to work as a