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(c) Joanne Mariner/Human
Rights Watch
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50 Years On
What Future for Refugee Protection? 
The right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution - a core principle of human rights protection and the very foundation of international refugee protection - is under serious threat, not least from the same states who were the primary architects of the international refugee regime fifty years ago. Although the vast majority of refugees continue to seek protection in the world's poorer nations, it is the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America, and Australia, that have adopted the most hostile and restrictive refugee policies designed to stem flows and keep people out. The retraction in refugee protection has been particularly pronounced in Western European states.
Asylum under threat Western Europe There has been a dramatic change in European asylum policy over the past ten to fifteen years. The convergence of growing political and economic instability in many parts of the world, as well as the increased availability of international communications and travel, meant that many more people were moving across continents by the 1980's - some to escape economic privations, others to escape conflict and human rights abuse. This trend coincided with the closure of legal immigration channels into Western Europe from the 1970's onwards. There was a dramatic increase in the number of asylum seekers, in particular between 1985 and 1992, when numbers increased from some 157,000 applicants, to 674,000 applicants per year. In response to the growing numbers of asylum seekers coming to Europe from the mid 1980's onwards, and the perceived abuse of the asylum system by those not considered to be in need of international protection, Western European countries sought to harmonize their asylum policies over the past decade. The result has been a harmonization towards the lowest common denominator in terms of human rights and refugee protection standards. First, many of the policies introduced by Western European governments have systematically obstructed the right to seek and enjoy asylum and have made it very difficult for those in fear of their lives to leave their country of origin freely and seek asylum elsewhere. These include visa requirements for nationals of common refugee producing countries, including those with well-documented human rights problems; carrier sanctions legislation to penalize companies that transport undocumented asylum seekers and migrants; and immigration "airline liaison officers" posted in main refugee-generating countries to assist airline officials in pre-departure checking of the authenticity of travel documents. Moreover, those asylum seekers who manage to evade such controls are often penalized on arrival in their country of destination for their irregular means of arrival. Governments increasingly resort to detention of asylum seekers who enter a country "illegally" and as a deterrent for others. The means of entry can also impact negatively on asylum determination decisions. In fact, many asylum seekers who flee persecution and human rights abuse leave their countries under extraordinary circumstances and have no opportunity to obtain visas or travel documents. The drafters of the Refugee Convention recognized this and included under Article 31 of the Convention provisions to prohibit countries from punishing refugees for illegal entry in the country of asylum, so long as the refugee travels directly from his or her country of origin and reports to the authorities in the country of destination without delay.Second, Western European countries have sought to shift responsibility for providing protection to refugees on to other countries. They have achieved this through a variety of policies. These include, "safe third country" policies and readmission agreements, which allow governments to send refugees back to so-called "safe third countries" through which they have traveled en route from their country of origin without considering their asylum claim; "safe country of origin" policies that allow governments to reject, or consider as manifestly unfounded, asylum claims from individuals who are considered to originate from so-called "safe countries of origin" - this applies to all E.U. nationals applying for asylum within the E.U, for example; and policies or strategies aimed at containing refugees within their regions of origin, or moving them to so-called "safe areas" within their country of origin. All of these policies risk violating the most fundamental principle of international refugee protection - the principle of non-refoulement, whereby no state may return an individual to a country where their life or freedom is threatened. "Safe third country" policies, for example, risk setting in motion a chain of deportations of asylum seekers to countries where they can not be guaranteed access to a full and fair asylum determination process and can not be protected adequately against refoulement. The blanket exclusion of whole groups of people merely on the basis of their country of origin carries a high risk of refoulement. Third, Western European governments have progressively diluted and undermined their obligations under the Refugee Convention over the past years with seriously detrimental consequences for those in need of international protection. One of the most worrying trends has been the overly restrictive interpretation and application of the Refugee Convention, in particular the refugee definition, which has resulted in excluding those at genuine risk of persecution from receiving international refugee protection. For example, some Western European states - such as Germany and France - have excluded individuals fleeing non-state agents of persecution or situations of state breakdown, such as those fleeing abuses in Algeria, from refugee protection. Some governments have rejected asylum claims from women fleeing persecution by private actors, such as family members, even though the abuse amounts to persecution and protection and adequate redress are not available in their own country. Other E.U. states have excluded individuals who have fled situations of generalized violence and civil war, such as in Colombia or Sri Lanka. More recently, several Western European governments, including Austria and the U.K., have suggested that the Refugee Convention is outdated and ill-equipped to deal with modern migration movements and have proposed that it should be adapted accordingly. The British Home Secretary Jack Straw in June 2000 proposed that E.U. countries should determine which nationalities and ethnic groups are most at risk of persecution and agree on quotas of asylum seekers from these countries. Asylum determination should be carried out in the regions of origin, and applications from those countries considered to be "safe" should not be entertained. Like all "safe country of origin" policies, these proposals risk refusing asylum to individuals in need of international protection merely on the basis of their nationality. Finally, the growing barriers to legal entry into E.U. countries has meant that asylum seekers and migrants are increasingly turning to the services of opportunistic, corrupt, and dangerous human trafficking and smuggling syndicates who are able to circumvent routine migration controls. In June 2000, horror stories of women trafficked from the former Soviet Union and held in slavery-like conditions in Western Europe appeared in the press alongside an account of fifty-eight Chinese migrants killed from suffocation in the back of a truck as smugglers attempted to transport them into the United Kingdom. By the late 1990s, EU governments considered the trafficking and smuggling of persons to be two of the most serious developments in transnational organizations crime, and joined forces to in a concerted effort to end the practices. Unfortunately, however, protecting the human rights of trafficking and smuggled persons has not been the primary motive behind governments' efforts to tackle the problem. Instead, combating human trafficking and smuggling became a central part of migration control strategies for most governments, with little regard as to why asylum seekers and migrants make use of these rings, or the root causes of outflows. Even less attention has been paid to maintaining the right of all persons to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution. The restrictive policies described above are implemented within a climate of hostility and xenophobia towards refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. Politicians and the media have shamelessly manipulated xenophobic and racist fears in order to muster political support. Restrictive immigration policies have forced asylum seekers and migrants to make use of "illegal" and clandestine means to enter European countries, thus, in the eyes of politicians, the media, and general public, equating asylum seekers and migrants with criminals and resulting in punitive penalties. Refugees and migrants are generally blamed for the social and economic ills of society, including rising crime and rising unemployment. All of these trends have undoubtedly contributed to the alarming rise in racist violence and xenophobia against refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants throughout Europe, sometimes with the complicit involvement, or tacit approval, of law enforcement agents, and usually without effective sanctions against the perpetrators. Challenges for UNHCR As a national of an E.U. member state, Ruud Lubbers should make European asylum policy a top priority as he enters office and should take a firm stance against those E.U. governments that seek to erode the international refugee protection system. He should remind European governments that as the architects of the refugee regime they have a special responsibility towards abiding by their obligations and setting a positive example to governments elsewhere in the world - many of whom face a much heavier burden in terms of hosting mass refugee influxes, with far fewer resources at their disposal. UNHCR should continue to challenge those policies that blatantly violate international and European refugee and human rights standards. Particular attention should be paid to:
The global picture Threats to asylum are not limited to Western Europe and other industrialized states. Elsewhere in the world, hostility towards refugees has grown in traditionally generous refugee hosting countries. Increasingly refugees are equated with threats to national and regional security, or are seen as an unsustainable drain on the local economy and environment. Governments have responded by closing their borders and restricting the rights and freedoms of refugee populations. Rising xenophobia and anti-refugee sentiment has resulted in attacks targeted against refugees. In East and West Africa, and in South and South East Asia, Human Rights Watch has reported on governments' declining commitment to refugee protection. In Tanzania , Guinea and Thailand, for example, governments have associated large refugee populations with serious threats to their national and regional security and have responded with border closures, forced repatriation, forced round-ups of refugees into refugee camps, withdrawal of assistance and protection in urban areas, and severe restrictions on freedom of movement. In Guinea, which hosts the second largest refugee population in Africa (some half a million Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees), inflammatory anti-refugee statements by President Lansana Conte in September 2000, led to widespread attacks, including gang rapes and sexual assault, against refugees living in and around the capital, Conakry Government incites attacks on Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees; UNHCR must act, The situation in Guinea further deteriorated throughout 2000, with armed attacks on and around refugee camps in the Forecariah and Gueckedou region on the border with Sierra Leone, killing both local civilians and refugees, displacing the local population, and forcing thousands of refugees to flee back into rebel-controlled areas of Sierra Leone. UNHCR was also targeted in the cross-border attacks and incursions. In September 2000 the head of UNHCR's office in Macenta on the Liberia border was murdered by unidentified attackers, and on December 7, 2000 the UNHCR office in Gueckedou was destroyed in fighting between government troops and rebels, during which hundreds of civilians were reportedly killed and thousands of refugees and local people fled for their safety. Pakistan, after more than 20 years of hosting some 1.2 million Afghan refugees, closed its borders to new arrivals in November 2000, claiming insufficient resources to absorb the latest wave of refugees All of these developments threaten the protection and security of refugees and the availability of safe asylum. While many refugee hosting countries have legitimate security concerns, including cross-border incursions, militarization of refugee camps, and the fear of conflicts spilling over from neighboring refugee-producing countries, efforts by governments to address these concerns should not result in a curtailment of the rights and freedoms of refugees. In particular, refugees must be protected against forced return to countries where their lives and freedom may be threatened, and the availability of safe first country asylum must be preserved. Challenges for UNHCR, host and donor governments UNHCR should continue to address problems of security in order to ensure safe first country asylum in refugee hosting countries. In particular, UNHCR, in consultation and cooperation with host and donor governments, should prioritize efforts to:
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An elderly Serb woman waits to depart Prizren in a convoy of fleeing Serb civilians on June 14,
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