Reconceiving Refugee Law as Human Rights Protection

This paper proceeds from the view that refugee law is fundamentally a means of reconciling the national self-interest of powerful states to the inevitability of involuntary migration. As industrialized states have become increasingly dissatisfied with the attentiveness of the Convention-based refugee law system to their exclusionary objectives, the reform of refugee law has been placed on the international agenda in a variety of fora. The paper suggests that it may be possible to re-orient the reform movement towards an alignment of refugee law with international human rights law. This requires that the current regime be re-focused on the restoration of the refugee's right to community membership, and that a binding system of inter-state obligation be enacted to ensure temporary asylum. By defining the duty of protection beyond the first asylum stage to be a function of the relative resources and absorptive capacities of states, it is posited that the substantive scope of refugee law could simultaneously be extended to a significantly broader class of involuntary migrant than at present.