Project description
What’s the influence of the Refugee Convention in non-party states?
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol form the foundations of the international refugee system. While most countries have signed or ratified the Convention and its Protocol, many of the world’s top refugee-hosting countries have not. For instance, since Jordan has not ratified the 1951 Convention, hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the country have no right to be recognised as refugees. Turkey is another example. Since it has not ratified the 1967 Protocol, Turkey only recognises refugees from Europe. The EU-funded BEYOND project will explore the influence of the Refugee Convention in non-party states. It will also study how these non-party states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime. The project will focus on four of the world’s top refugee-hosting states: Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey.
Objective
Many of the world’s top refugee-hosting countries have neither signed nor ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. So do international conventions make a difference? The Refugee Convention represents a paradigmatic – and exceptionally timely – test of this theoretical and empirical puzzle, for refugee protection is increasingly politicized and has wide-ranging implications for state sovereignty.
The BEYOND project fundamentally reconsiders the impact of international refugee law by developing the first genuinely global and systematic theoretical framework for understanding the behaviour and position of states that have chosen not to sign the Refugee Convention – especially those that still accept the lion’s share of the world’s refugees. These non-party states, overlooked by scholarship and seen as ‘exceptions’ to the international refugee law regime, are at the core of this project rather than the margins. BEYOND asks:
1. What is the influence of the Refugee Convention in non-party states?
2. How do these non-party states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime?
BEYOND exposes and analyzes the various ways non-party states relate to international refugee law. It brings an innovative combination of methods to bear, including case studies on 4 of the world’s top 7 refugee-hosting states–Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The sub-projects investigate BEYOND’s two basic hypotheses: 1. The Refugee Convention has a significant influence on the behaviour of non-party states; and 2. Non-party states engage with, and help shape developments within, international refugee law.
BEYOND sheds crucial, empirically grounded light on the prevailing assumptions about whether and why non-party states are exceptional. It also advances our theoretical and scientific understanding of the complex effects of international conventions more generally.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
0313 Oslo
Norway