27 June 2014

The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and Irish Refugee Council (IRC) are hosting two events focusing on legal assistance for asylum seekers and unaccompanied children on 7 July 2014 in Brussels.

ECRE will host the final conference of the Right to Justice project on Quality Legal Assistance for Unaccompanied Children. The conference will entail a comparative review of the project’s findings from research on access to and quality of legal assistance for unaccompanied children in immigration and asylum procedures in seven Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy, Spain and the UK). Additionally, the conference aspires to provide a fruitful and engaging forum for participants to discuss and reflect upon the upcoming tool – “Guiding Principles for Quality Legal Assistance for Unaccompanied Children” – which seeks to contribute to the definition of what quality legal assistance for children encompasses and will be the outcome of the Right to Justice project. The project was made possible with financial support from the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union

IRC will present the report Access to Early Legal Advice for Asylum Seekers, a consolidation of research conducted in Ireland, the UK and Estonia on the practice of providing asylum seekers with legal advice and assistance as soon as they have made an application for refugee status. IRC’s report is based on interviews with refugee status adjudicators, those with financial oversight of public funding of legal advice and asylum seekers and refugees themselves. The project was funded by the European Programme for Integration and Migration (EPIM).            

Both events will take place on 7 July 2014 in Brussels, at Residence Palace, in Brussels. The Right to Justice conference will begin at 9.00am and the Access to Early Legal Advice event will begin at 1.30pm.

Registration for the Right to Justice conference is open here. For more information, contact Elona Bokshi (ebokshi@ecre.org) or Hélène Soupios-David (hdavid@ecre.org).

To register for Access to Early Legal Advice for Asylum Seekers, contact Caroline Reid (Caroline@irishrefugeecouncil.ie).


This article originally appeared in the ECRE Weekly Bulletin of 27 June 2014.
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