The 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) and Refugee Policy in Southeast Asia: Twenty Years Forward What Has Changed?

This chapter suggests that the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) legitimized an already recalcitrant region when it came to recognizing and implementing international refugee law. The CPA legitimated an existing notion within the region that asylum seekers, for the most part, were a temporary burden to which States had to provide no more than a 'transit service'. The chapter demonstrates the CPA endorsed the Southeast Asian position that asylum seekers were illegal migrants until proven otherwise. This meant that non-signatory States were applying the 1951 Convention's refugee status determination procedures without the 'benefit of doubt'. There is little doubt that the UNHCR was vulnerable to both budgetary and political attacks in relation to the Indochinese refugee crisis. The abrupt political turnaround by the resettlement States undermined the notion that States' responsibility to uphold international refugee law was enduring.