With more people displaced from their homes than ever before due to persecution, conflict and environmental changes, there has never been a more critical moment for the legal community to join forces and work with refugees and other displaced people. The Global Refugee Forum Legal Community Pledge seeks to harness the expertise, passion, and influence of legal professionals worldwide to drive meaningful change for displaced people globally and to ensure that refugee rights are upheld and strengthened.
Building on the achievements of the 2019 Pledge, PILnet and the Pledge Core Group are excited to announce that the 2023 GRF Legal Community Pledge is now open for signature.
The 2023 GRF Legal Community Pledge is a multi-stakeholder pledging initiative that aims to unite the legal community around a shared goal of working with refugees and other forcibly displaced people to advance their access to rights, justice and lasting solutions to their displacement. You can learn more about the 2023 Pledge on PILnet and UNHCR’s dedicated webpages and by reading the Pledge Framework and Guidance. You can download the draft template of the pledge sign on here.
2023 Global Refugee Forum
PILnet and its delegation were in Geneva for the 2nd UNHCR Global Refugee Forum and presented the 2023 Legal Community Pledge. Over 100 signatories pledged close to a million hours of free legal assistance to displaced people and refugee rights organizations.
What is the Pledge
With support from PILnet and the Core Group, this multi-stakeholder pledging initiative will:
- Mobilize organizational pledges by civil society and private sector stakeholders to provide services, resources, expertise, and policy solutions that facilitate access to rights, justice, and solutions for refugees and other displaced people.
- Build an integrated legal community that works locally to globally to maximize resources and impact, supports the building of effective partnerships to address local needs, and centers the meaningful participation and leadership of refugees and other displaced people.
- Resource and support the localization of legal practice and advocacy, including direct resourcing of host community and refugee-led legal initiatives and support for the development of local and regionally-led coordination efforts to increase collaboration, mutual-learning, and joint legal advocacy and strategy building.
Sign the Pledge
If you are interested in joining us and challenging yourself to do more to advance access to rights, justice and solutions for refugees, then please sign on to the 2023 GRF Legal Community Pledge and developing your own organizational pledge:
- Review the Pledging Guidance for further information and examples of potential organizational pledges.
- Download the draft template of the pledging form as a pdf or a Word document to help you draft your pledge.
- Sign up to the 2023 Pledge and share your organizational pledge with us using this form.
We will launch the Pledge at the GRF in Geneva on December 13 – 15. While we will keep the pledge open for signature after the GRF, only those that sign up by December 4 will be listed as a signatory at its launch. We encourage you to start developing your pledge now!
Despite the challenges presented by Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021 and in response to the urgent refugee crises in 2022, the actors that signed the GRF Community Legal Pledge effectively mobilized themselves in an unprecedented way to deliver essential legal services to refugees and others forcibly displaced and to work collectively to increase access to justice for refugees. This includes responses to the crisis in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
