ABSTRACT
It should be clear by now that the international refugee regime, defined by the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 19511 (Refugee Convention) and its 1967 Protocol2 (Protocol), is becoming conceptually and practically obsolete.3 One reason for this is that the affluent countries of the North do not want to take on more than their fair share of the world’s refugees (as they see it), and would rather have a world system where refugee burdens are shared with other nations – preferably with those in the South – from where the majority of the world’s refugees come. For this reason, nation-centered ‘burden-sharing’4 is replacing the historical tradition of asylum, which has provided ‘freedom from seizure’ to refugees since the time of antiquity.5 The result is that the international refugee regime has now deviated from its historical roots. There are also changes on the world level which allegedly make it difficult to grant asylum-status to every person who qualifies for it. First, the rise of a post-modern globalized and de-territorialized economy has in itself undermined governments’ abilities to deal with such international problems as mass migration.6 Second, the escalation of religious, racial and ethnic strife in many parts of the world has led to more and more people fleeing from countries that they find uncongenial.7 As a result, more than at any other time before, the rights of refugees today are embattled and are therefore uncertain and shrinking.8
