The Unbearable Arabness of Being: Anti-Arab Racisms in the Human Rights Sector

One unseasonably cold night in the middle of August 1997, I arrived in the UK with my parents and siblings as a refugee from Libya. Even though I was very young, I understood intimately and painfully exactly what the perilous journey my family had made meant. My parents were honest: we were escaping the Libyan regime’s violent crackdown on all forms of political dissent—which had already claimed the lives of many relatives and friends—and we were now exiles, unlikely ever to return ‘home.’

Those first few weeks in the UK are, of course, very much a blur. But our endless visits to the (often shabby, at times even decrepit) offices of various pro-bono lawyers stand out as clear, enduring memories. There, it seemed to me, there was action. The various lawyers we met throughout our asylum application were fighting, even though their weapons of choice were not the rifles and guns I had grown up seeing slung on the backs of security officers and military personnel patrolling our Benghazi neighbourhood. Rather, their weapon was the law–specifically human rights law. Looking back, I can now say that this was the moment I was drawn to the human rights world. I liked that the human rights lawyers I encountered were doing something–and I wanted to join in, to be part of the fight.