About Asylum Access:
Asylum Access began in the apartment of their founder, Emily Arnold-Fernández, as a collective of passionate human rights lawyers who saw an opportunity for change. Their vision is a world where forcibly displaced people can access their rights and rebuild their lives, regardless of where they find themselves. Over time, they have evolved into a global leader in advancing refugee rights, with organizations and initiatives around the world. Despite their growth, their commitment to a rights-based approach remains central to their work today.
What They Do:
Asylum Access is composed of human rights advocates who support forcibly displaced individuals and communities in reclaiming their rights, agency, and power. Their mission is to create a world where refugees everywhere can live safely, move freely, work, attend school, and rebuild their lives. They advocate for a response to forced displacement that honors refugees’ freedom, dignity, and autonomy while also strengthening the communities that welcome them. Their unique approach involves legal empowerment, policy change, and global systems change to turn rights into reality for refugees.
Partnership With EMA Foundation:
EMA Foundation provides Asylum Access with unrestricted funding of $25K and provides coaching and consulting for several members of the leadership team. In addition, the EMA and Asylum Access staffs are collaborating on a range of projects from fine-tuning tools that Asylum Access has designed for use with their network, co-designing social media assets, and writing new courses to explain key concepts to funders and network members.
Impact:
Asylum Access evaluates its success by assessing its impact on individual refugees and families, a country’s progress toward increased human rights for refugees, and actions by powerful global institutions that result in concrete impacts for refugees.
In the past decade, Asylum Access has reached at least 95,000 refugees with legal empowerment services. Their contributions to policy change have impacted over 1 million refugees worldwide.
Notable policy wins to which Asylum Access has contributed include:
- In 2020, the Mexican Congress voted unanimously to end the detention of migrant children.
- In 2019, the Thai government signed a memorandum of understanding stating they would no longer detain refugee children.
- In 2018, the African Court of Human and People’s Rights ordered Tanzanian citizenship restored to their plaintiff after the Tanzanian state stripped it from him, impacting stateless, refugee, and migrant populations in 30 countries in the region.
- In 2017, Ecuador passed the Human Mobility Law, enshrining robust refugee protections and rights in national law.
Join the Movement:
Join Asylum Access and the EMA Foundation in advocating for refugee rights and creating a world where refugees can live safely, move freely, work, attend school, and contribute to their communities. Together, we can make a difference and ensure that forcibly displaced individuals and communities receive the support and protection they deserve.
