Project description
Investigating the effectiveness of international refugee law
While numerous studies have examined the effectiveness of international human rights law (IHRL) and other areas of international law (IL) in the field of international relations, there is a notable lack of empirical research on international refugee law (IRL). The ERC-funded RefLex project will conduct the first comprehensive empirical study of IRL, addressing a significant gap in both refugee studies and IL. It will develop a refugee protection index for quantitative research and identify key cases that showcase the effectiveness of IRL. Additionally, it will explore legal mobilisation among both the UNHCR and refugees, and provide insights into how the global refugee regime is progressively diverging from international law by relying more on informal agreements that lack clear legal standing.
Objective
Is International Refugee Law effective? This is the central question of RefLex, a project that will offer the first comprehensive empirical study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of law partly imbricated with International Human Rights Law (IHRL), domesticated and judicialized to an extraordinary degree across the globe. There are many theoretically and empirically rich studies of effectiveness of International Human Rights Law (IHRL), as well as many other fields of International Law (IL) in constructivist International Relations (IR) in particular. The effectiveness of human rights courts and other bodies is also a well-established academic subfield. However, there are no analogous empirical studies of IRL in practice. RefLex will fill this huge puzzling knowledge gap, thereby making a vital contribution both to refugee studies and to scholarship on the theory and practical workings of IL. It will develop a new dataset, the Refugee Protection Index (RPI), in order to enable our (and other) large-n quantitative studies, identify key cases to trace how IRL comes to be effective, or not. It will also contribute to the burgeoning field of legal mobilization (LM) studies, which again, have failed to examine refugee legal mobilisation in comparative or transnational fashion. It will break new ground here also, by studying LM from above and below by studying both UNHCR’s own LM and that of refugees themselves, both acting via transnational organisations and in local settings. The analysis of the RPI will inform the choice of LM casestudies, in order to develop a new account of when LM emerges and when it is effective. The project aims to provide vital insights at a time when the Global Refugee Regime (GRR) is seen to be increasingly adrift from IL, with over challenges to core norms, and practices focusing on informal cooperation, ‘deals’ and political trading, lacking normative specificity and legal force.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
4 DUBLIN
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.