Facilitating New Paths for Durable Solutions for Refugees in Spain

Clinical Professor Susan M. Akram has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar award to conduct research on refugee solutions and teach at the University of Murcia in Spain. Prof. Akram is honored to receive this award, a second Fulbright Senior Scholar award for her. (Her first award in 1999–00 allowed her to conduct research on Palestinian refugee issues and teach at the Al-Quds University School of Law in the West Bank).

This award is for a research project that builds on her years of work on refugees and forced migrants, and will allow her to collaborate with partners at the University of Murcia (UM) and the non-governmental organization Fundacion Cepaim to resettle refugees in abandoned Spanish villages.

Her focus in Spain is a project aimed at facilitating refugees who might otherwise be without prospects of durable solutions or are stateless, to resettle and integrate successfully in Spain. All across Spain there are hundreds of towns and villages with dwindling and disappearing populations. In 2020, the BU International Human Rights Clinic, the University of Murcia’s International Human Rights Clinic, and the Spanish NGO Fundacion Cepaim, developed an initiative to match depopulated villages in Spain with refugees and asylum-seekers who wish to live there, and provide for successful integration. Based at UM over the Academic Year of 2021–22, she will work closely with Spanish colleagues to conduct research on the work that Cepaim and other NGO’s in Spain have done to successfully integrate migrants into abandoned areas. The project intends to scale up this model to develop a set of ‘best practices’ for other communities in Spain and across Europe to sponsor and integrate asylum-seekers and refugees. The project seeks to overcome barriers to refugee and asylum-seeker reception while towns and villages in Spain and elsewhere are emptied of their populations. Professor Akram will also be teaching international human rights as a visiting professor at the University of Murcia during the year.