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

Publisher Description

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

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.

The long-awaited second edition of this seminal text, reconceived as a critical analysis of the world's leading comparative asylum jurisprudence.

As more restrictive asylum policies are adopted around the world, Ghezelbash explores the implications for the international refugee protection regime.

The places in which refugees seek sanctuary are often as dangerous and bleak as the conditions they fled. In response, many travel within and across borders in search of safety. As part of these journeys, refugees are increasingly turning to courts to ask for protection, not from persecution in their homeland, but from a place of 'refuge'. This book is the first global and comparative study of 'protection from refuge' litigation, examining whether courts facilitate or hamper refugee journeys with a particular focus on gender. Drawing on jurisprudence from Africa, Europe, North America and Oceania, Kate Ogg shows that courts have transitioned from adopting robust ideas of refuge to rudimentary ones. This trajectory indicates that courts can play a powerful role in creating more just and equitable refugee protection policies, but have, ultimately, compounded the difficulties inherent in finding sanctuary, perpetuating global inequities in refugee responsibility and rendering refuge elusive.