Thesis 100dpi

DEAD WORDS ON PAPER
Insight into 1951 UN Refugee
convention, 1967
Protocol and European
Union’s Dublin Regulation
The UN’s Refugee Convention, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention
or Geneva Convention, is a United Nations multilateral treaty
that defines who is a refugee. It sets out the rights of individuals who
are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum.
It was updated with the 1967 Protocol, which removed both the
temporal and geographic restrictions, “as a result of events occurring
before 1 January 1951” and “events occurring in Europe” or “events
occurring in Europe or elsewhere”.
Certain regions have their own regional policies, e.g., the Cartagena
Declaration on Refugees for Latin America, the Organization for African
Unity, and the EU’s Dublin Regulation, analyzed in this chapter.
GENEVA REFUGEE CONVENTION AND 1967 PROTOCOL
1. DEFINITION
“A Refugee is a person owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted
for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a
particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of
his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to
avail himself of the protection of that country.”
80 REFUGIUM
The Convention has
three main challenges:
the scope of the definition,
what protection it
offers, and its status in
international law.
The problem is that this definition excludes refugees who are fleeing
violence. The vast majority of people we consider refugees are not outside
of their country because they fear persecution. They are fleeing
violence and their home is no longer safe: for example, it has become
a war zone. So most of those seeking shelter from violence are not,
as far as the Geneva Convention is concerned, actually refugees. The
Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)
itself is working outside the framework of the Convention by using the
catchall term “persons of concern” to describe all people in need of
UNHCR assistance.
Another issue is that in order to be a refugee, one has to cross a
national border – otherwise he or she is classified as an Internally Displaced
Person. The number of IDPs is double the number of refugees,
and many are probably struggling to leave their national territory.
It seems wrong and arbitrary that the recognition of one’s refugee
status is reliant upon crossing the home country’s border. According
to the Geneva Convention, one is only a refugee once a host state has
granted the status – in the meantime, a person remains an asylum
seeker. So once more the vast majority of people fleeing violence in
the world today are not, according to the Convention, “refugees” –
they are “people seeking refuge”.
A displaced person is at the mercy of the host country in which he
finds himself. Each country individually interprets whether the person
meets the definition of “refugee” or not and, accordingly, whether