 It's a great honor to receive this doctorate from the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of London, and thank you very much. I'm not sure that I deserve it, because the only successes or achievements that I can document coming out of my book, Imposing Aid, is now that refugees, at least according to policy, should receive shrouds to bury their dead. Before the book, refugees used their blankets to wrap the corpses before placing them in the grave. When they needed more blankets, UNHCR would accuse them of having sold their blankets when they asked for more. The other improvement that I can point to is that again, at least theoretically, women in refugee camps now receive sanitary towels. That came about because the only way I could get men to leave my meetings with women was to talk about menstruation. Knowing that women had nothing to protect themselves, I asked them how they managed to deal with the blood on those horrifically long trips and lorries from the border to the camps. Other than these, seem to have unfortunately gotten much worse in the humanitarian assistance field, not better. Turning to refugee studies, I being an old fashioned person and believing in traditional disciplines, always saw refugee studies as a multidisciplinary field comprising law, anthropology, psychology, health, politics, history. And at the refugee study program, we never managed to properly encompass health, although we always had, of course, nutrition for social scientists. Because after all, if you're going to work in the humanitarian field, you're responsible for the rations. In the old days, the idea was to introduce students to the literature and theories in these different disciplines and then they could return to their discipline to go on to advanced degrees or go to work in the humanitarian field. So has, has for some time been in a strong position to compete with the refugee studies center's masters. In refugee law, you have the lute suite, sorry, and you have the skills to start a refugee law clinic which could supplement the great need for people to represent asylum seekers. One thing I learned during my years in Uganda, Kenya, and Egypt after retiring from the RSP was that it was legal assistance rather than humanitarian aid that matters most in a refugee's survival. In the social sciences, you at SOAS have Stefan Spurl, Tanya Kaiser, Laura Hammond, Richard Black, Naja Al Ali, Rubisala, John Campbell, and Palo Novak, all with strong field experience in a refugee affected region. If you're just able to add psychological issues, a vast field in refugee studies, you will only need to change the name of the degree. And you have the skills, sorry. Sometime back, I wrote a slightly provocative article entitled, can humanitarian work be humane? Recently, we had a round table at the refugee studies center where a medical NGO was relating the hard decision that it took to divert part of its work to rescuing people on boats sinking in the Mediterranean and putting some of its scarce doctors to work in the illegal detention centers in Southern Europe and in North Africa. Catherine Costello, the RSC's new lawyer, wrapped up the conversation by saying to the effect, can we really call ourselves humanitarians if we are only involved in saving people from drowning or only treating the psychological scarring from illegal detention? Should we not actually be transporting people across the sea away from the persecution to safety? Should we not be helping refugees escape illegal detention? Unless we are involved with refugees in ways which we put our own reputations and lives and livelihoods at risk, can we truly consider ourselves humanitarians? And in fact, was not what organizations like the International Rescue Committee, wasn't that what they were doing at the end of the Second World War? Just giving an address, a home, to a destitute asylum seeker here in the UK is something that almost a lot of us could do. And I'm thinking of, at this moment, Julius, who arrived and he didn't know anything about asylum, much less he didn't know that homosexuality was grounds for refugee status. He has spent 15 years as a destitute refugee sleeping on others' couches and hiding from the police. Another gay Ugandan who had sought asylum and got refugee status brought him to Oxford. We took his statement and got him a lawyer and now he has submitted a fresh case for gaining refugee status and we're all holding our breath.