International Protections for Forced Migrants

This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet , and its special series dedicated to world politics. The aim of this series is to bring you the analysis of global affairs by the established and upcoming scholars, decision-makers and policy analysts from various world regions. This week, Phil Orchard (University of Queensland) discusses the state of international refugee regime and argues that “international cooperation around refugee protection and broader forced migration issues is breaking down.” The author points to the “ambivalence around the issue of refugee protection”, and shows there are different forms of global response to refugee problems since the first half of the 20th century. Actually, “we are now entering a new age of displacement”, Orchard argues, “one in which the response to refugees is increasingly limited, that is partially being offset with improved protection and assistance to the internally displaced.”

We seem to be in a period when international cooperation around refugee protection and broader forced migration issues is breaking down. We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of forced migrants globally, with UNHCR estimating at the end of 2014 that there were 19.5 million refugees and 38.2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). The Syrian conflict has been a significant driver of this increase, with half the country now displaced as 4.1 million refugees and over 6.6 million IDPs. At the same time, the recent EU-Turkey deal appears to be violating fundamental norms around refugee protection, particularly with accusations that Turkey has been deliberately refouling refugees, and cannot ensure full protections for refugees under international law.

But these tensions reveal an ongoing set of problems in the modern international refugee regime. This regime is based around the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol as well as the critical role played by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). While the EU-Turkey deal may appear to be the most egregious recent example, we can see similar violations of international law routinely occurring. Australia has been sending all boat arrivals to two detention facilities in Papua New Guinea and Nauru since 2013, with Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton noting that “We are not going to allow people to settle in our country who see to come here by boat” irrespective of whether they are determined to be refugees. And yet Australia, like other states, does not seek to leave the refugee regime. In fact, its detention policies cost AU$440,000 per year per asylum seeker and the government continues to resettle 13,750 refugees a year on the other, while also being one of the top ten funders of UNHCR.

We frequently see such ambivalence around the issue of refugee protection as I argue in my 2014 book, A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation. No government has yet adopted the strategy advocated by former British Conservative Leader Michael Howard in the 2004 election that if elected, “we will pull out of the 1951 Refugee Convention, as is our right… Its authors could not have imagined that it would come to be exploited by tens of thousands of people every year.” But President George W. Bush that same year argued that the United States will “turn back any refugee that attempts to reach our shore.” And yet, no states have actually followed Michael Howard’s view and left the Refugee Convention.

In fact, while forced migration figures have risen considerably (as shown in Figure 1 below), they do not come close to the flows following the Second World War. In 1945, there were 65 million refugees and displaced persons in Europe alone. Further, in the next five years- up to the point that the Refugee Convention was negotiated and UNHCR founded — new flows in the millions were generated by the partition of India, the creation of Israel, and the Korean War. By 1950, refugees were fleeing across the Iron Curtain into West Germany at a rate of 15,000 per month, a continuous refugee flow with little prospect of ending. Facing that crisis, states still agreed to build the regime that governs international cooperation today, albeit with some modifications.

You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.

Cover Image: Asianews.it