ABSTRACT
Based on the account of the refugee concept as an exceptional claim to territorial entry, this chapter discusses its conditions of codification. First, mechanisms of refugee protection were created in the early twentieth century, yet it was only with the 1951 Geneva Convention that a first abstract definition of the refugee was laid down. While the definition has been an important achievement for securing refugee rights, it also reflects particular assumptions about legitimate motives for flight. This chapter looks at competing definitions in the 1969 African Refugee Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, contrasting them with the approach of complementing concepts of protection, such as the subsidiary protection in the EU. These politics of denomination illustrate the normative dimension of the refugee concept beyond its legal codification. With a view to this core rule of who is a refugee, the chapter discusses the democratic questions underlying refugee law: while the normative idea of the refugee is dynamic and situational, a legal codification has to lay down specific criteria. And while the refugee concept references a claim against the state from outside, the legal definition of criteria takes places through the structures of the state, thus from inside.
