From refugee to refugee lawyer

The extraordinary journey of Marina Brizar ... From war torn Bosnia to refugee work in Australia ... The recipient of the LCA gong for Young Migration Lawyer of the year ... A reminder of the welcoming possibilities of Australia ... Kevin Childs reports 

Brazir: LCA's 2015 young migration star

FOR award-winning lawyer Marina Brizar life has come full circle. Her family was split by the war in Bosnia but eventually made it to Australia where she has just been named Young Migration Lawyer of the Year.

The Law Council of Australia award commemorates the great Melbourne refugee lawyer, John Gibson, who died three years ago aged 62.

Marina and her two brothers were born into a multi-racial family, meaning difficulty for her electrical engineer father and accountant mother when civil war broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1992.

At the age of three Marina, her mother and her brothers, then two and nine, fled Sarajevo, with Marina's aunt. It was, she says, a harrowing experience for a close-knit family.

A relative in the army got them on a military aircraft to Belgrade. With just two suitcases they moved on to Montenegro, expecting to stay a short time. But for 18 months the five of them shared a single room studio apartment.

They knew nothing of their father, who had been ordered from his home by the Serbian army, which surrounded Sarajevo. There were no phones for civilians, and no computers.

"There was constant news of the ravages of war in Sarajevo – indiscriminate shelling and gunfire, bombs going off, buildings in ruins, a mass exodus of people, brutal killings…" she says.

She and her family moved to a makeshift refugee camp in a small village on the Croatian coast. Croatia and Serbia/Montenegro were at war, so a journey of a few hours took three days through Budapest and Zagreb.

For two years there was no news of her father. She says he was motivated by the U2 song Miss Sarajevo, as performed by Bono and Luciano Pavarotti, especially the lyrics "And I cannot wait for love any more ..."

Through charitable organisations he tracked down his family and after weeks of travel on foot and by bus found them, to their "disbelief, surprise and absolute joy". It had been two and a half years.

John Gibson:celebrated refugee lawyerThe family was offered refugee status by the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The sandy beaches won them over and exactly three years after leaving Sarajevo they arrived in Sydney.

They were among the  more than 2.2 million people who left their homes during this war, the greatest displacement since the Second World War. "Ethnic cleansing was rife and brutal," she says.

The Bosnian Research and Documentation Centre found 97,207 innocent Bosnians were killed between 1992 and 1995, almost a third of them women and children. The estimate of the number of girls and women raped ranges from 20,000-50,0000. Marina says only some of the rapists were called to account.

"I have moved from being a refugee myself to helping asylum seekers seek refuge in, and migrate, to Australia."

Admitted to practice in 2013 after completing an LLB and International Studies at UTS, Marina has made a significant contribution to migration law, including pro bono work. She was team leader of task forces in  the immigration detention centres of Leonora in outback north Western Australia and Curtin in  the Kimberley region. She was also a claims assistance provider at the regional processing centre on Manus Island. 

Essay considered eligible for the Hemingway Review

And for something totally different she moved to Spain, where she completed a research project on the influence and impact of Ernest Hemingway on the success of the famous Running of the Bulls Festival. Her essay has been recommended for publication by the Hemingway Review.

She volunteered with Anti-Slavery Australia, the country's only specialist legal research and policy centre focussed on the abolition of slavery, human trafficking and extreme labour exploitation.

Harvard University is studying visa programmes from many countries from 1960 until today to build a database for lawyers, economists, social scientists and the public. Marina's weekends have been spent as a researcher with this study.

She is now supervising solicitor and a migration agent with Playfair Visa and Migration Services. The inaugural winner of the award last year, Afghanistan-born Besmellah Rezaee, was also from Playfair.

Marina also worked with major international and Australian clients, such as Canon, eBay and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and last year was co-winner of the Bronze Tax Partners Award at her former firm Ernst & Young.

Those lucky enough to have known John Gibson recognise how much he would have applauded Marina.