Den blev skrevet for 60 år siden og skulle tage højde for helt andre forhold, der eksisterede dengang, siger kritiske røster – analyse gennemgår konventionen og dens relevans i dag.
JOHANNESBURG, 26 March 2012 (IRIN) – Can an international convention drafted 60 years ago to protect a limited number of Europeans uprooted by World War II continue to provide protection to the millions of people around the world today forced to flee their countries for a variety of reasons?
Today, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is providing assistance and protection to over 15 million refugees throughout the world and the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees remains the cornerstone of that protection.
However, millions more people have fled their countries for reasons that the drafters of the Convention could not have predicted.
“The context has changed,” said Christopher Horwood, coordinator of the Nairobi-based Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS).
“Climate change, endemic (dybt rodfæstet) food insecurity, overpopulation and terrorism juxtaposed (stillet side om side) with technical advances that allow people to communicate and move more easily – this is the ‘perfect storm’ that has all the ingredients lined up so the flow of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees is large and complex and well beyond the environment in which the Refugee Convention was designed,” noted he.
The Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.
This definition has been criticized as too narrow in an era when people are forced to leave their countries for a whole range of reasons.
Both Africa and Central America recognized that the 1951 Convention was not adequate to cover the massive flows of refugees in their regions.
The 1984 Cartagena Declaration and the 1969 Organization for African Unity (OAU) Convention expanded the definition of a refugee to include people compelled to leave their country due to events that have “seriously disturbed public order”.
Volker Türk, director of UNHCR’s department of international protection, said most African governments respected the basic tenets (principper) of the OAU Convention, but Roni Amit, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said it was not widely applied by officials conducting refugee status determination.
“I think the Refugee Conventions definition is too narrow for the types of migration we see in Africa. However, states do not really have an interest in expanding the definition”, she said.
Arguing that “the language of the Convention is sufficiently (tilstrækkeligt) flexible to be able to deal with new threats”, Türk insisted that the problem lies more with its application (håndhævelse) and implementation which varies from one country to the next.
Too broad or too narrow?
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95144/Analysis-Has-the-Refugee-Convention-outlived-its-usefulness
