Publisher Description

This book assesses the ability of the Refugee Convention to encompass socio-economic based claims.

The only comprehensive analysis of international refugee rights, anchored in the hard facts of refugee life around the world.

This book examines the socio-economic rights challenges of refugees and asylum seekers in Africa. It seeks to fill a major gap in the literature by providing a nuanced discussion of the barriers to the realisation of the socio-economic rights of refugees and asylum seekers in Africa. It equally aims to provide some concrete recommendations to African governments towards the realisation of the socio-economic rights of refugees and asylum seekers. With the aid of lessons from selected African countries, this book highlights the gaps, challenges and good practices regarding the realisation of the socio-economic rights of refugees and asylum seekers in the region. The book will be useful to researchers, students, academicians, policymakers, and international organisations or institutions interested in advancing the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

This Handbook draws together leading and emerging scholars to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of international refugee law. This book provides an account as well as a critique of the status quo, setting the agenda for future research in the field.

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in the scale and importance of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights), culminating in the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in December 2008. The Protocol gives individuals and groups the ability to bring complaints about rights violations before the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Against this background, this book focuses on the question of how fundamental socio-economic human rights enshrined in international law are defined, interpreted, understood, and implemented. It assesses how effective efforts to realize ESC rights have been and investigates the contemporary challenges obstructing their protection. It sets out the impact of the global financial crisis and austerity measures, the human rights responsibilities of corporations, and trends in the justiciability of those rights at the national and international level. The interrelationship between ESC rights and other legal regimes such as trade and investment law, environmental law, international criminal law, and international humanitarian law is also thoroughly examined. After an introduction by the editors the book contains seventeen chapters looking at the main questions which shape the progressive realization of ESC rights and their monitoring mechanisms. The authors of the chapters, both scholars and practitioners, adopt interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond traditional analyses of ESC rights. In doing so, they clarify and illuminate multiple aspects of the law by bringing together the different aspects of ESC rights, restating the challenges they face, and assessing the progress that has been made in expanding their adoption.

Does human rights law help us to define who qualifies as a refugee? If so, then how? These deceptively simple questions sit at the heart of an intense contemporary debate over whether, or how, interpretation of the refugee definition in the Refugee Convention should take account of human rights law. In Human Rights and the Refugee Definition, Burson and Cantor bring a fine-grained comparative perspective to this debate. For the first time, they collect together in one edited volume over a dozen new studies by leading scholars and practitioners that explore in detail how these legal dynamics play out in a range of national and international jurisdictions and in relation to particular thematic challenges in refugee law.