Persecuted but Undeserving

Abstract This article examines the rationale for the exclusion from international refugee status of persons who have committed serious crimes or guilty acts. Specifically, the article asks whether exclusion under Article 1F of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees on the ground that those with a serious criminal past are “undeserving” of international refugee status is compatible with a theoretical view that international refugee law serves as a “legitimacy-repair mechanism” for the international state system. It argues that to support this legitimacy-repair function, judgments of undeservingness must be grounded in a political ideal implicit in the founding documents of the United Nations. Judgments of undeservingness grounded in the United Nations ideal reaffirm the norms of human rights and self-determination necessary to ensure minimal conditions of legitimacy for the international state system. The resulting account allays some but not all of the legitimacy concerns raised by the reliance on “undeservingness” to justify and guide exclusion decisions.