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

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.

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

Most Western liberal democracies are parties to the United Nations Refugees Convention and all are committed to the recognition of basic human rights, but they also spend billions fortifying their borders, detaining unauthorised immigrants, and policing migration. Meanwhile, public debate over the West’s obligations to unauthorised immigrants is passionate, vitriolic, and divisive. Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights combines philosophical, historical, and legal analysis to clarify the key concepts at stake in the debate, and to demonstrate the threat posed by contemporary border regimes to rights protection and the rule of law within liberal democracies. Using the political philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant the book highlights the tension in liberalism between partiality towards one’s compatriots and the universalism of human rights and brings this tension to life through an examination of Hannah Arendt’s account of the rise and decline of the modern nation-state. It provides a novel reading of Arendt’s critique of human rights and her concept of the right to have rights. The book argues that the right to have rights must be secured globally in limited form, but that recognition of its significance should spur expansive changes to border policy within and between liberal states.

Millions of people are forced to flee their homes as a result of various forms of persecution. The instruments to secure international protection are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. This book examines challenges to the Convention.

Armed conflicts are a major cause of forced displacement, but people displaced by conflict are often not recognized as refugees under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. They are frequently considered as having fled from generalized violence rather than from persecution. This book determines the international meaning of the refugee definition in Article 1A(2) of the Convention as regards refugee protection claims related to situations of armed conflict in the country of origin. Although the human rights based interpretation of the refugee definition is widely accepted, the interpretation and application of the Convention as regards claims to refugee status that relate to armed conflict is often marred with difficulties. Moreover, contexts of armed conflict pose the question of whether and to what extent the refugee definition should be interpreted in light of international humanitarian law. This book identifies the potential and limits of this interpretative approach. Starting from the history of international refugee law, the book situates the 1951 Convention within the international legal framework for the protection of the individual in armed conflict. It examines the refugee definition in light of human rights, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law, focusing on the elements of the refugee definition that most benefit from this interpretative approach: persecution and the requirement that the refugee claimant's predicament must be causally linked to the race, religion, nationality, and/or membership of a particular social group or political opinion. (Series: International Law - Vol. 15) [Subject: International Law, Humanitarian Law, Human Rights Law, Criminal Law]