Setting fire to the rain

    Yes, I am listening to Adele, as the title of this entry clearly suggests. I have been seriously slacking on this blog, but the good news is that is because I have been a fully engaged participant in my life here...so much going on! In my social life, things are splendid. On Friday, I hung out with Miguel, who is from Northern Spain and doing a law related internship here until August. Apparently, my coworker(who is finishing his year with JRS as a media assistant) saw me out in the main square that night, which is kind of funny because I keep having these things happen to me, where I run into someone I know in the middle of the city or am at least at the same place as someone else at the same time without knowing it. And it's not like I know that many people! Which gives you a sense of Brussels-a city and yet still with a small town feel at times. I went to Ghent on Saturday with my friend Diana, who lives next door to me. There was a lights festival going on, in which all the old buildings and churches were lit up, with some animated light shows in the works as well. We had some drinks, including a delicious hot chocolate and really yummy chicken soup with bread for dinner. My roommate, Helen has gone back to Germany, so sadly she wasn't there to join us. I will be getting a new roommate tomorrow, from Italy. Sunday was pretty low-key, but Diana, Nina (another girl who lives in the residence center, also from Germany), and I walked to the cinema to see A Dangerous Method. Most things are closed here on Sundays, though. In other social life type news, I have booked flights to Berlin, Madrid, and now London (I still need to get my train ticket there, but I have my flight back). I am excited because Berlin will be to see my college roommate, Grace, who I haven't seen in four years, Madrid will be to see the Spanish family I au paired for a couple summers ago (and hopefully, fellow BC globie Swathi), and London when my friend Malinda and I meet up again after a very eventful summer meet up in Madrid this summer. I am also working on a trip to Paris and getting some day weekend trips to Dinant, Bruges, Antwerp, Lilles, and hopefully Luxembourg together. So, life is good..I am really enjoying meeting new people here.

     In terms of work, I am working to help draft a chapter for the DIASP (Dublin's Impact on Aslyum Seekers' Protection) project JRS Europe is working on. This is an 18 month project, where 400 aslyum seekers will be interviewed, many in detention centers around Europe, and I am only here for the beginning stage. This pretty much means lots of background reading initially and researching cases that have gone before the European Court of Human Rights in Strausbourg, France, not to be confused with the European Court of Justice. I am also familiarizing myself with all the European Union institution infrastructure.

      Hopefully, by the time I am back in the States, I will be an expert on the Dublin Regulation, which is an EU regulation that determines how a member state in the EU processes a  person's claim for aslyum (which essentially makes the country in which a person first entered the EU the country responsible for processing aslyum requests). Unfortunately, this is a broken system. Even though regulations, unlike directives which give more freedom as to how the end results are achieved, mandate how state actors in the EU must do things, the way this regulation has been interpreted has often been to the detriment of the aslyum seeker, particularly those who have been sent back to Greece where reception conditions have been found to be in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which forbids torture and other degrading forms of punishment. So, my research continues, and I will later delve more into what has been happening with this regulation.