ABSTRACT
The law on forced migration continues to be divorced from general international law. Yet, at a time when it is possible for the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of ostensibly sovereign states to prevent human rights abuses, enforce democracy, and to fight international terrorism, it is surely right that the fluid distinction between refugees and other groups of forced populations is also recognized, because all these actions create displaced populations. In the last chapter, we have seen how the actions of ‘non-state agents’ in a State often go unredressed by the 1951 Refugee Convention and by general and specific provisions of human rights law. In this chapter, we will see how the 1951 Refugee Convention also fails to catch the emerging categories of ‘environmental refugees’ and ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs). The international community had much rather subject these wider categories of displaced populations, on the whole, to a policy of ‘containment’, which can be described as comprising a variety of deterrent, exclusionary and diversionary measures, designed to avoid having to take international responsibility for displaced populations.1 However, ‘forced displacement’ presents a problem that is far bigger and complex than that of Convention refugees. Indeed, the term ‘refugee’ does not apply happily to so-called ‘environmental refugees’. These are people who have crossed borders. As a result, they cannot be IDPs. Yet, they are not environmental refugees in the strict sense either under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Nor are they pure environmental refugees as often an environmental disaster has complex political or man-made factors behind it. Powerful nations often make the distinction between refugees who are properly so-called and those who are fleeing environmental disasters because they want to avoid having to deal with the problem of forced migrations. In doing so, they create an even greater instability in the international system. This attitude of the international community is not only dangerous. It is inconsistent and illogical in the light of its own recent history. In this chapter, I want to argue that the focus of the international community today should be on ‘forced displacement’ and that the continued adherence to the rigid classification between IDPs and refugees is making less and less sense, because it over-looks a practical inter-connectedness and unity
between these two groups. I shall then deal with those who may be referred to as seeking, ecological sanctuary, namely, the ‘environmental refugees’ because if the position of IDPs is precarious, that of ‘environmental refugees’ is even more so, since they are technically neither refugees nor IDPs, having crossed borders into another state.
