Borders and Duties to the Displaced: Ethical Perspectives on the Refugee Protection System (original) (raw)
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Éthique et Économique / Ethics and Economics, 2011
This paper examines the ethics of refugee aid, attempting to answer "Why do States engage in refugee aid?" Moving beyond the simplistic answer based on the notion of charity, which demonstrably fits ill with the essentially positivist methodology of conducting refugee aid, an ethical model is construed based on the Weberian concept of action as an instrument of rationality. This is supported with critical readings from Hannah Arendt, amongst others, and also my own experiences as a former UNHCR aid worker. However, although this model better captures ground realities, it negates the individuality and humanity of refugees. Thus refugee aid as a form of global, transnational justice will be presented, based on readings from Amartya Sen.
This paper was written while I was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Migration Research Center Mirekoc and the Department of International Relations at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. I am grateful to the Director of the Center, Ahmed Icduygu, and the colleagues from the Center for their support. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 316796 The recent Syrian refugee crisis opened a debate on the under-theorized issue of migration law regarding the status and the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. According to UNHCR estimates, Turkey has, since the conflict in Syria begun, accommodated within its jurisdictional boundaries the most conspicuous number of refugees (around two million), but none of them have been recognized legally as refugees. Turkey, one of the signatory states of the 1951 Geneva Convention, still applies “geographical limitations”; that is, it does not grant refugee status to non-European to- be refugees, but rather extends to the latter a status of ‘temporary protection’. The paradox is that Turkey grants legal refugee status to European applicants (consider the very trivial number of applicants in need of refuge from Europe after 1951), whereas millions of non-European ‘proper’ refugees, including those currently in the country will not be granted refugee status. What can we learn philosophically from this law and practice? Most philosophers concur with granting refugees a fundamental human right, in line with the Kantian hospitality principle, to sojourn in other territories temporarily and also more permanently, including a lifetime. The principle is incorporated in the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, as the principle of “non-refoulement” (United Nations, 1951), obliging signatory states not to forcibly return refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin, if doing so would endanger their lives. Furthermore, asylum seekers’ and refugees’ claims to admission and more broadly to human rights protection are legally incorporated in the international human rights regime, and subsequently accepted by states (Benhabib, 2004). The fundamental human right to admission regards the admission of the asylee and refugee, and not that of immigrants whose admission remains “a privilege”, in the sense that it is up to the sovereign to grant such a “contract of beneficence” (Benhabib 2004). David Miller argues that when it comes to protecting human rights, states’ actions should reflect primarily the ‘terms’ of states, as they see fit: “your human right to food could at most impose on me an obligation to provide adequate food in the form that is most convenient to me (i.e. it costs me the least labour to produce), not an obligation to provide food in the form that you happen to prefer”; furthermore, states do not have a duty to automatically admit refugees, if for example, other similarly well off states can admit them, and the principle of non-refoulement is fulfilled (Miller, 2013). Miller rules out the theoretical possibility of human rights violations, in claiming that a state can deny entry to refugees, only if they are not returned to the country of origin and third countries where their human rights will be violated, and provided that some other state would take charge of them. Miller’s state-centrist view, assuming the point of view of states primarily, and second, wrongly assuming that the only theoretically salient feature is when refugees do not receive admission, as a result of which their human rights are violated, has pernicious implications. As an alternative, I argue that human rights are possible primarily when we view their defence as a primary moral concern, rather than instrumental and contingent upon what states see fit. I propose instead a philosophical view that genuinely assumes and acts upon the needs of refugees primarily, in both being admitted and rejected to sojourn in new territories. Very little effort has so far been expended by migration theorists to explain the character of a just distribution of refugees between states. Most studies instead have offered ample explanations regarding why refugees and migrants move to some states rather than others (Gibney, 2009). Since an adequate baseline from which to judge the justice of the distribution of refugees between states is still lacking, any new patterns of movement we might advocate creates possibilities for new unjust distribution patterns, a normative scrutiny that takes into consideration justice to refugees (besides justice between states) is of paramount importance. In this paper I analyse few of the main proposals of refugee distribution among states from a perspective of justice and argue in favour of the burden-sharing model that prioritizes justice to refugees. Specifically, I briefly analyse the “Syrian refugee crises” and I conceptualize it as an “engineered regionalism”, according to which the most conspicuous number of refugees end up seeking refuge in the region of their origin. In the second section, I explain why engineered regionalism is problematic from a justice perspective, and therefore explore alternatives we commonly think of in the literature as burden-sharing options. In the third section I argue that the respective alternatives are also morally unsatisfactory. They are all based on the presupposition that a right to free movement is what will entitle the refugee to (re)- settle to the country of one’s choosing, whereas this right is grounded on a philosophically informed principle of non-refoulement (as the ‘fire’ illustration proves). I attempt in the last section to propose a new model that is informed by the latter principle.
The Responsibility to Protect and the Refugee Crisis
The world is witnessing unprecedented forced displacement due to conflict, persecution, and human rights violations. This short article lays out the foundations for connecting the international norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to conflict-induced displacement, focusing on the refugee crisis emanating from the Middle East. Key challenges associated with implementing R2P as refugee protection regarding (1) refugee burden-sharing and (2) the securitization of refugees from Muslim-majority countries are briefly discussed.
The Ethics of Bordering A Critical Reading of the Refugee 'Crisis'
Laine, J. (2018). The Ethics of Bordering: A Critical Reading of the Refugee ‘Crisis.’ In: Besier, G. & K. Stoklosa (Eds.) How to Deal with Refugees? Europe as a Continent of Dreams, 278–301. LIT Verlag: Berlin., 2018
It is not the intention of this chapter to rehearse the whole history of anthropological ethics across borders; nor is it to seek to engage fully with the dense body of migration literature that the recent and ongoing European crisis has fuelled. Rather, this is an attempt to approach the situation by using borders as a prism which may allow us to focus on the unseen nuances of the phenomena unwinding before us. Borders are not one but many, and seem often contradictory in terms of their openness. While globalisation has made most borders more open to cross- border flows of goods, capital, and well-off citizens, there are heavy restrictions on such movements for those who might need them most. Being unevenly transparent for different groups, depending on their origin, citizenship, material condition, and socio-professional belonging, borders are inevitably associated with discrimination and social injustice.Where people hap- pen to be born is a morally arbitrary fact, a matter of chance, and as such it should n ot affect their access to opportunities or enjoyment of basic freedoms, yet “the law of birth” determines people’s mobility across the world, making the entire international system of political borders largely a manifestation of inequality between the global North and South, and rich and poor. Ethics across borders has been extensively theorised, especially in the field of anthropology,4 yet there is scarcely any clear consensus about the actual outcome. The main reason for this is that borders are not absolute, but perceived very differently by different people. Put simply, if people should have the freedom to move as they please, it should be equally ethical to allow those who wish to do so to draw the borders. Borders carry considerable moral weight in determining ethical responsibilities towards displaced persons, but a high moral value has also been assigned to national borders and state sovereignty. The question is thus how to balance, and how much relative weight should be assigned to, each; that is, to what extent can one prioritise one’s own benefits and responsibilities towards co- citizens of one’s own country before those of displaced persons? This chapter contends that much of the debate, both at a theoretical level and in public, has focused on the impacts and consequences of the refugee influx, on solidarity and states’ responses to refugees, as well as on the underlying ethos itself of the current refugee regime. While important as such, the debate has become so widespread and (often) emotional that it has largely overshadowed much of the analysis of the actual root causes of the current “crisis” and the possibilities for changing the regime that has caused it.
Refugees and responsibilities of justice
This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the shared responsibility of states to refugees and of how the character of that responsibility effects the ways in which it can be fairly shared. However, it also moves beyond the question of the general obligations that states owe to refugees to consider ways in which refugee choices and refugee voice can be given appropriate standing with the global governance of refuge. It offers an argument for the normative significance of refugee's reasons for choosing states of asylum and linked this to consideration of a refugee matching system and to refugee quota trading conceived as responsibility-trading, before turning to the issue of the inclusion of refugee voice in relation to the justification of the norms of refugee governance and in relation to the institutions and practices of refugee governance through which those norms are given practical expression. " We commit to a more equitable sharing of the burden and responsibility for hosting and supporting the world's refugees. "
When human rights violations occur within the rule of law of modern states as a result of the instrumentalisation of human rights, it is inevitable to ask what role and moral responsibility the individual has to protect those rights. Not least if the rights are referred to as fundamental. This thesis addresses the individual's role and moral responsibility to protect refugees' rights when the rule of law in modern states fails to do so. Furthermore, the thesis aims to look at the interaction between the morally responsible individual and the rule of law in those situations.