 I'm presenting an article recently published in the Yale Journal of International Law on the phenomenon of so-called closed camps that impose restrictions on freedom of movement and other human rights to such an extent that these sites often start to resemble open air prisons. This research is not exactly on the theme of the panel, but I think it's still indirectly related by examining how states respond to security concerns presented by populations that were governed by armed groups after those groups are militarily defeated. So, this work comes out of my recent service leave of absence from academia, where I was working as a policy advisor for nine months to the UN in Iraq on efforts to repatriate Iraqi nationals who are among more than 60,000 people, including Syrians and third country nationals who after more than 60 countries who have been stranded in camps and prisons in northeast Syria since 2019 on suspicion of having family or other ties to the Islamic state. I'm now back to academia trying to make sense of what I learned from this time working with humanitarian practitioners and policy makers, and this short article is a first attempt to outline some problems and questions that I plan to explore further in the coming years. And since this is an interdisciplinary group, I'll also just note that I'm both a political scientist and a lawyer trying to work at the intersection of those two fields. So this paper is a bit more aimed at a law audience, but I think it raises some empirical questions that hopefully are also of interest to social scientists. So there's an inherent tension between the fundamental human right to freedom of movement and the establishment of camps to provide temporary housing and humanitarian assistance to migrants, which has been the UN's primary strategy in camp, and I mean for managing migration since the establishment of UNHCR and IOM after World War II. All camps impose some degree of limitation on rights, including movement, and UNHCR actually calls this the defining characteristic of a camp. And international law does allow states to restrict migrants to freedom of movement for a narrow set of lawful purposes, including identity verification and security screening in situations of war, emergency, or other grave and exceptional circumstances. But importantly, there are some very clear limitations. These restrictions need to be proportional, non-discriminatory, and time-limited. In practice, however, states and non-state actors are increasingly violating these requirements by operating closed camps that in some cases resemble open-air prisons and all by name. Closed camps are defined as supposedly temporary sites from which migrants are not free to leave, or at least their exit is significantly restricted to some degree. My paper focuses on the particularly troubling example of our whole camp located in the Autonomous Region of Northeast Syria currently controlled by the predominantly Kurdish-Syrian Democratic Forces. And shown in the photo on this first slide. This is a closed camp from which residents are not free to leave. UNHCR is providing tents and some assistance to the population, but there are major gaps and unmet needs. So residents of this camp have no access to formal education or courts in very limited health care. They're also at risk for human rights violations, including gender-based violence, human trafficking, and extrajudicial killings by other camp residents, including no nice sleeper cells as they're called who are living among them. The UN primary response to this crisis has been to urge the more than 60 countries with nationals in the camp to repatriate those people as soon as possible. But the countries have been very slow to do that over security concerns because the camp's population is severely stigmatized over its purported associations with ISIL. Fear of stigmatization of the population in El-Hul has been driven by overly simplistic and sensational narratives in media coverage of the camp with some local and international media outlets describing it as a mini-caliphate or emirate. In reality, the population is much more complex and diverse, including not only ISIL supporters, but also many victims of ISIL's crimes. Those victims include hundreds of Yazidis and Turkmen women and children who were enslaved by the group, as well as Sunni Muslim women and children who were involuntarily trafficked by their husbands or other male relatives through deception or coercion, as well as more than 10,000 Iraqi refugees who had fled to El-Hul during the first Gulf War long before the existence of ISIL and had no association with the group prior to being confined and exposed to the influx of suspected ISIL affiliates and who arrived in 2019 during the nearby fighting to recapture the group's final territorial stronghold in the Northeast Syria. So closed camps like El-Hul are a relatively recent development in the modern migration management regime, as shown in this table with some very rough data I'm starting to collect on the prevalence of these camps over time, which shows that... So the first closed camp was established by Hong Kong's government in 1982 to receive migrants and refugees fleeing Vietnam. And since then, the number of camps of countries operating closed camps has increased steadily. And although some of these camps have closed, even more new camps have been opened. So I estimate that there are currently at least 20 closed camps operating in the world today. I identify two factors that I believe have contributed to the rise of closed camps. The first is the increased frequency of subnational conflicts, particularly in weak and failed states. Such conflicts have become more common since the end of the Cold War and intend to result in high levels of internal displacement. And then the second factor is the growing securitization of systems and policies for managing transnational flows of so-called mixed migrants, a term used to describe diverse populations that may include asylum seekers, economic migrants, as well as victims of human trafficking and also potentially criminals. So when state authorities are faced with a challenge of determining the identities and possible criminal liabilities of large numbers of mixed migrants who may include suspected members of a designated terrorist organization such as ISIL, they have tended to respond with collective and over-broad measures that indiscriminately restrict the movement of entire populations. Such measures often include closed or partially closed camps. Some closed camps allow a limited freedom of movement in and out. For example, Tanzanian law allows refugees to leave camps but only within a radius of four kilometers. Other closed camps like Al-Hol impose severe restrictions on free movement movement that approximate detention. And at the most restrictive end of the spectrum are actual migration detention centers, which are generally distinguished from closed camps by their reliance on administrative detention, usually ordered or should be ordered by some administrative or judicial authority, whereas closed camps confine migrants in conditions that often amount to detention but lack a legal or administrative basis. Closed camps are not well-defined or regulated by international law or the UN, and their legality has increasingly been called into question. In 1995, a report by the UN Economic and Social Council cautioned that the preconditions of lawful detention of internally displaced persons in closed camps remain unclear and they identified this as a clear gap in international law and also recommended some future international instrument to provide clear guidance on the UN's engagement with such camps. But to date, there has been no global UN-wide guidance on minimum conditions that closed camps most meet in order to comply, in order to receive UN assistance. Although some individual UN agencies at the country level have provided sort of ad hoc recommendations for specific camp situations. So, including guidance on certain rights and conditions that need to be fulfilled, those include access to education, healthcare, documentation, courts, as well as the ability to communicate and have contact with the family. But in the absence of oversight and accountability mechanisms, the states and non-state actors who manage such camps have generally violated those conditions with impunity, including an al-Hul. So, just a few conclusions and questions for future research. Closed camps are one of many examples in which states' concerns about national security have been allowed to override fundamental human rights to movement and due process. So, it's true that some residents of al-Hul likely have committed crimes for which they should be held accountable, including a number of known ISIL officials who have been arrested in the camp and other unidentified armed actors still at large, who have committed a number of murders, arson attacks, and other violent crimes in the camp. But the mass confinement of a very diverse population of more than 60,000 people on the basis that some of these individuals, perhaps a small minority of the population, may have committed crimes, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with the requirements of international law the longer they are confined, which is more than three years in the case of al-Hul. And in addition to their uncertain legality, I argue that closed camps may also worsen those same security risks that they seek to contain. So, when migrants are collectively stigmatized and treated as security threats on the basis of their perceived, but not necessarily actual association with a criminal group, rather than on the basis of their individual liability under prison-like conditions in which their humanitarian needs are not met and their dignity and human rights are routinely violated. The resulting grievances tend to increase the likelihood of criminality and extremism in a kind of negative feedback loop that is well-documented in this literature. Closed camps raise a number of questions and concerns that were beyond the scope of this small article, but I plan to explore in future work. So, although purportedly temporary, closed camps have several features that contribute to their long-term persistence and perhaps permanence. So, some residents of closed camps are unable or unwilling to return to their areas of origin for reasons including lack of documentation or fear of prosecution. Children are increasingly being born in closed camps without birth certificates or proof of citizenship, which then puts them at risk for statelessness. And countries of origin may oppose the repatriation of their citizens, as has been the case without a whole. So, historically closed camps were intended to serve as temporary transit sites for screening and verification, verifying the identities of migrants in preparation for their onward movement, whether repatriation to their countries of origin or seeking asylum in a third country. But a whole is an example of a closed camp that serves a contrary purpose of what some scholars have called warehousing migrants who really have nowhere else to go. So, in conclusion, although the UN has provided some guidance on minimum conditions, including education, healthcare, documentation, courts that should be provided in closed camps, though those conditions are in practice difficult or impossible to achieve in contexts like a whole, where the UN has very limited ability to monitor the compliance and provide services for other political and security reasons I discussed more in the article. But I do think there's a risk that the UN's previous guidance on minimum conditions in some country settings, if not enforced in camps where the UN is actively providing humanitarian assistance like in a whole, runs the risk of legitimizing indefinite detentions in other violations of international law under the guise of encampment, when it is in fact sort of more like detention. So I'll stop there and look forward to any questions.