ABSTRACT
Mechanisms to avoid processing claims for international protection abound. The EU Procedures Directive allows member states to reject applications for inter national protection under the concepts of ‘safe third countries’ and ‘first countries of asylum’, which challenge access to asylum by shifting responsibility to states with poor conditions for international protection. One future feature of such a shift could be the application of rules concerning protection elsewhere to asylum countries in which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) takes on core tasks of refugee protection, including refugee status determination and running camps. This contribution enquires into whether international restrains the application of protection-elsewhere policies to countries in which refugee protection is shared by states and the UNHCR. It proposes to reaffirm the 1951 Convention as the basis for protection-elsewhere policies, because the Convention provides principled arguments against the provision of ‘protection’ by actors other than states.
