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Kirsten McConnachie, Richard Carver, Martin Jones, The End of Refugee Protection?, Journal of Human Rights Practice, Volume 9, Issue 2, July 2017, Pages 175–176, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/hux019
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Extract
We are in an era of increasing intolerance of forced migration, with the movement of people framed as an unprecedented crisis and their needs as an impossible burden. States are adopting ever more inventive ways to avoid accepting refugees—and this practice includes historical defenders of human rights and international law, such as the United States and the European Union. New situations of conflict and violence in Syria, Yemen and South Sudan have forced millions of people to leave their homes, while long-standing situations of displacement (including those of Palestinians, Somalis and Afghans) have proven impossible to resolve. These dynamics, combined with rising populism fuelled in large part by anti-immigration rhetoric, present a direct challenge to the post-1945 refugee protection regime.
This is the backdrop for our collection of articles by leading refugee researchers, who explore the contours of international refugee protection at a critical political moment. David Cantor focuses on legal regimes, identifying a problematic insularity of international refugee law and consequent need to engage with related legal regimes; Martin Jones elaborates upon this concern in the particular context of the Middle East and Asia, which host a majority of refugees flowing out of Syria. Cathrine Brun and Anita Fábos consider refugee protection in relation to its conceptual underpinnings as a state-based regime which has defined protection in terms of sovereignty and law rather than from the perspective of refugees. Dallal Stevens explores a regional perspective in relation to the changing meaning of asylum in the EU, where refugee protection today is ‘not necessarily “dead”, but it is deeply circumscribed’.
