Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BEYOND (Protection without Ratification? International Refugee Law beyond States Parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-04-30
How do international treaties influence states that are not party to a given treaty? In the BEYOND project, this theoretical and empirical puzzle is addressed through a focus on the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. This Convention and its Protocol form the foundations of the international refugee system. While most countries have signed or ratified the two instruments, many important refugee-hosting countries have not. Scholarship has long viewed these states as ‘exceptions’ to international refugee law.
By bringing these states from the margins to the fore, the on-going EU-funded BEYOND project explores the influence of the 1951 Convention and Protocol in these non-signatory states. It also studies how these non-signatory states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime. The project focuses on four of the world’s top refugee-hosting states: Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey.
BEYOND’s overall objective is to reconsider the impact of international refugee law by developing a global and empirically based framework for understanding the behavior and position of states not party to the 1951 Convention. From this follows BEYOND’s secondary objective: to expose and analyze the various ways non-signatory states relate to the international refugee regime, i.e. the instruments and institutions of refugee protection with the 1951 Convention and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as cornerstones.
Two overarching questions guide this project:
1. What is the influence of the 1951 Refugee Convention in non-signatory states?
2. How do these non-signatory states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime?
BEYOND consists of six inter-related sub-projects aimed at examining the relation between non-signatory states and international refugee law on the global, national and local level. Sub-project 1 investigates UNHCR’s promotion of accession to the 1951 Convention and the processes of state ratification, while sub-projects 2-5 are empirical case studies in Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sub-project 6 is crosscutting and synthesizes, integrates and conceptualizes the project’s findings in an edited collection aimed at being a key resource in the field of international refugee law.
The project is methodologically ground-breaking. BEYOND combines legal dogmatic methods with socio-legal and international relations approaches in order to achieve a more comprehensive, richer idea of how international refugee law functions on both the global and the very local level. Through this combination of methods, the project has developed a novel mode of analysis appropriate for studying the 1951 Convention empirically.
By bringing these states from the margins to the fore, the on-going EU-funded BEYOND project explores the influence of the 1951 Convention and Protocol in these non-signatory states. It also studies how these non-signatory states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime. The project focuses on four of the world’s top refugee-hosting states: Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey.
BEYOND’s overall objective is to reconsider the impact of international refugee law by developing a global and empirically based framework for understanding the behavior and position of states not party to the 1951 Convention. From this follows BEYOND’s secondary objective: to expose and analyze the various ways non-signatory states relate to the international refugee regime, i.e. the instruments and institutions of refugee protection with the 1951 Convention and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as cornerstones.
Two overarching questions guide this project:
1. What is the influence of the 1951 Refugee Convention in non-signatory states?
2. How do these non-signatory states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime?
BEYOND consists of six inter-related sub-projects aimed at examining the relation between non-signatory states and international refugee law on the global, national and local level. Sub-project 1 investigates UNHCR’s promotion of accession to the 1951 Convention and the processes of state ratification, while sub-projects 2-5 are empirical case studies in Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sub-project 6 is crosscutting and synthesizes, integrates and conceptualizes the project’s findings in an edited collection aimed at being a key resource in the field of international refugee law.
The project is methodologically ground-breaking. BEYOND combines legal dogmatic methods with socio-legal and international relations approaches in order to achieve a more comprehensive, richer idea of how international refugee law functions on both the global and the very local level. Through this combination of methods, the project has developed a novel mode of analysis appropriate for studying the 1951 Convention empirically.
Mid-way into the project, BEYOND has already garnered significant achievements. We have hired Dr. Özlem Gürakar Skribeland and Dr. Arjumand Kazmi as postdoctoral researchers focusing on Turkey and Pakistan respectively. We have also hired Naureen Rahim to conduct a PhD study focusing on Bangladesh, as well as Nora Milch to provide research assistance for the project.
During 2022 and 2023, historical research has been conducted at the archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, and socio-legal research has taken place in our case study countries – Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The field research has involved undertaking interviews with key staff of international and non-governmental organizations (such as UNHCR) and legal practitioners. The team has also interviewed governmental officials. The data collection has allowed us to gain important insights into the many ways in which non-signatory states engage with international refugee law. Examples include: the engagement with the 1951 Convention by national courts in Turkey, Bangladesh and Pakistan; the historical establishment and operations of UNHCR in Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey; and historical and contemporary discussions of possible accession to the 1951 Convention in Bangladesh and Lebanon.
Our tentative findings have been disseminated at international conferences, through online and in person local workshops and seminars in our case study countries, and through internationally disseminated analysis and opinion pieces. To take only three examples:
1. In 2022, BEYOND PI Professor Maja Janmyr participated in a high-level panel in Oslo with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. Janmyr presented insights from the BEYOND project concerning the role of the 1951 Convention in today’s responses to refugees.
2. In 2022, the BEYOND project co-organized a half-day seminar on International Refugee Law and the Rohingya refugee situation at Brac University's Centre for Peace and Justice in Dhaka. The event was widely attended by students, academics, policy-makers and practitioners, and was featured in the English-language newspaper The Daily Star.
3. In 2023, we organized a 2-day online exploratory workshop aiming to generate discussions, form networks and explore collaborations for future research on the interplay between international refugee law and non-signatory states. In addition to one keynote, the event had 27 speakers from across the globe. We are currently collating chapters for our planned edited collection based on insights garnered at this workshop.
In addition, in 2021, the BEYOND project also published a Special Issue on ‘Non-signatory States and the International refugee regime’ in Forced Migration Review (2021), the most widely read publication on forced migration. It is published by the Refugee Studies Centre in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. To launch the special feature, two online roundtable discussions with authors were held. These were widely attended by a global audience of academics, practitioners and policy-makers.
During 2022 and 2023, historical research has been conducted at the archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, and socio-legal research has taken place in our case study countries – Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The field research has involved undertaking interviews with key staff of international and non-governmental organizations (such as UNHCR) and legal practitioners. The team has also interviewed governmental officials. The data collection has allowed us to gain important insights into the many ways in which non-signatory states engage with international refugee law. Examples include: the engagement with the 1951 Convention by national courts in Turkey, Bangladesh and Pakistan; the historical establishment and operations of UNHCR in Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey; and historical and contemporary discussions of possible accession to the 1951 Convention in Bangladesh and Lebanon.
Our tentative findings have been disseminated at international conferences, through online and in person local workshops and seminars in our case study countries, and through internationally disseminated analysis and opinion pieces. To take only three examples:
1. In 2022, BEYOND PI Professor Maja Janmyr participated in a high-level panel in Oslo with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. Janmyr presented insights from the BEYOND project concerning the role of the 1951 Convention in today’s responses to refugees.
2. In 2022, the BEYOND project co-organized a half-day seminar on International Refugee Law and the Rohingya refugee situation at Brac University's Centre for Peace and Justice in Dhaka. The event was widely attended by students, academics, policy-makers and practitioners, and was featured in the English-language newspaper The Daily Star.
3. In 2023, we organized a 2-day online exploratory workshop aiming to generate discussions, form networks and explore collaborations for future research on the interplay between international refugee law and non-signatory states. In addition to one keynote, the event had 27 speakers from across the globe. We are currently collating chapters for our planned edited collection based on insights garnered at this workshop.
In addition, in 2021, the BEYOND project also published a Special Issue on ‘Non-signatory States and the International refugee regime’ in Forced Migration Review (2021), the most widely read publication on forced migration. It is published by the Refugee Studies Centre in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. To launch the special feature, two online roundtable discussions with authors were held. These were widely attended by a global audience of academics, practitioners and policy-makers.
BEYOND combines legal dogmatic methods with socio-legal and international relations approaches in order to achieve a more comprehensive, richer idea of how international refugee law functions on both the global and the very local level. Through this combination of methods, the project has developed a novel mode of analysis appropriate for studying the 1951 Convention empirically. These methodological approaches are introduced conceptually in the scientific article "The 1951 Refugee Convention and Non-Signatory States: Charting a Research Agenda" in the International Journal of Refugee Law (2021) and elaborated on as a method in the scientific article “Ethnographic Approaches and International Refugee Law” in the Journal of Refugee Studies (2022).