ABSTRACT
Comparing banishment from one’s own country to the ‘social death’ associated with slavery, Zolberg et al. (1989:7) provide a mirror image of Walzer’s (1983:31) assertion that: ‘the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community’, otherwise expressed as Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’. For asylum seekers, the social death of exile and the quest for access to the foundational right of membership in some human community is mediated by the process of status determination and by formal definition of the ‘refugee’. This process is therefore located at the heart of a dilemma for liberal democracy – how to accommodate both sovereign self-determination and adherence to universal human rights (Benhabib, 2004:45). Benhabib (2004:5) has argued that even when other aspects of sovereignty
may have been undermined, the nation-state retains its monopoly power over immigration and citizenship policy. For states which are signatories to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (CSR, otherwise known as the Geneva Convention) asylum seems to stand as an exception to this claim, by virtue of the commitment to non-refoulement. This agreement not to return an asylum seeker to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened in effect means they must either be transferred to a safe third country, or given admission to the territory of the country of arrival, at least until their claim has been resolved. This does not, however, mean that control has been entirely relinquished, but rather that states respond pragmatically to the problem of how to blend the moral and the ethical, or the universal and the particular.
