Our Responsibilities to Refugees (original) (raw)

Appraisal of the principle of burden-sharing in refugee protection

Nnamdi Azikiwe University Journal of International Law and Jurisprudence, 2021

The issue of refugees and internally displaced persons is a recurring decimal, which is precipitated by the fact that societies, communities and nations have always had reasons to be entangled in conflicts with one another. Often times these conflicts result in violence and this violence brings about the displacement of people, who then seek refuge either within national boundaries or outside national boundaries. Victims of such conflicts who seek safe havens outside their national boundaries are termed refugees. The bond of humanity and international solidarity has always driven other people and nations to cater for such people who flee from crises and conflict zones. This article therefore x-rayed the principle of burden-sharing in refugee protection. The doctrinal method was consequently adopted in the conduct of the research. A historical overview of how the principle evolved was undertaken, citing several documented efforts at the international level. The paper also appraised the practice of the principle of burden-sharing. Challenges currently bedeviling the practice of the principle were also discussed. It was recommended that a holistic international legal framework be put in place by the UN to make burden-sharing a binding obligation on Member States.

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. "

BURDEN SHARING AS AN EFFECTIVE MECHANISM OF HANDLING THE REFUGEE DILLEMMA.

Refugee’s one of the most contentious terms within the international human rights law. On one hand, some scholars argue that one becomes a refugee immediately he/she meets the conditions of the 1951 convention, subject to the 1967 protocol and on the other hand others like Shaknove have advocated for the broadening of this term to include victims of environmental disasters and civil wars. However, this paper, considers a refugee along the definition lines of the 1951 UNHCR convention. This paper begins by exploring the different conceptions of burden sharing and traces the history of the practice. It explores the various strategies of informal burden sharing that have been tried in the past, before delving into current burden sharing strategies and options, both in law and practice. An attempt is made to examine the different ways in which a hybrid of burden sharing strategies can be utilized to guarantee the wellbeing of refugees.

Humanity and the Refugee: Another Stab at Universal Human Rights

This paper takes up the questions of (1) how the refugee crisis exhibits the fault lines in what might otherwise seem to be a robust human rights regime and (2) what kinds of ways of seeing and thinking might better attune us to solving these problems. There is surprising agreement internationally on the content of human rights, although there is a huge gulf between international agreements on human rights and the protection of those most vital. The subtitle of the paper, " another stab at universal rights, " has a double entendre: in the midst of a crisis that is stabbing international agreements on human rights to its core, I will take a stab at using the crisis situation to point a way forward toward a cosmopolitan social imaginary that uses human imagination, not just as an ability to represent in one's mind what one has seen elsewhere, but also as an ability to imagine something radically new. This social imaginary points to the necessity of according everyone, refugees included, as having a right to politics and thus a hand in shaping their own world, including their new, host communities.

Not Duties but Needs - Rethinking Refugeehood

There is a lively debate about how to define refugeehood, for instance about the question whether an individual fleeing hunger is a refugee. This paper argues against the two most prominent characterizations of refugeehood. Both characterize the refugee by reference to a duty - either to the duty to admit (e.g., Lister) or to the less concrete duty to protect (e.g., Shacknove). However, both are inadequate from the perspective of commonsense as well as for moral and political purposes, I argue, since both imply that, when two individuals are fleeing threats of the same kind, only one of them may be a refugee. This result is due to the fact that duties depend partly on the capacities and decisions of duty-bearers, as well as on the needs of third parties. Much more plausibly, a refugee is defined simply as a person whose basic needs and rights are threatened and who migrates with the aim to find protection. Although this definition coheres with commonsense, it has so far been neglected in the philosophical and political debate.

REFUGEES: STATE RESPONSIBILITY, THE COUNTRY OF ORIGIN AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The concept of State responsibility is as old as the human civilization. It has been the perennial responsibility of the State to protect the life and liberty of its citizenry. Today an individual has become central to the entire human rights discourse and is being regarded as a subject of International Law. Moreover, national boundaries are losing their meaning. Consequently a new world human order is being emplaced. The human rights of all individuals including that of refugees have become a polemical debate heralding a new premise whereat state concerns and individual rights are at loggerhead with each other. In this conspectus, it is incumbent upon the state to reconcile this paradox in an age of transnationalisation of human rights and civil liberties. Asylum countries are not as much responsible as country of origin. Thus, country of origin should squarely be held responsible for the refugees' flows and it is the responsibility of the refugee generating state not to create problems of galling proportions for the other states as it is contrary to the notion of a civilized state. The responsibility of the country of origin is higher than the responsibility of state of reception under the International Law.