#Rose puzzle in asylum how to#

At this point, we need to consider what happens after the flight, starting with the legalities that have been in place since 1951, that is, since the existence of the Convention on the Status of Refugees of 1951. More direct responsibility may be found where a mass exodus originates from a conflict situation often prompted itself by conflicting economic interests, but which is a situation for which states bear a more direct responsibility.Īt any rate the key question remains the lack of respect for human rights: the earlier chapters addressed the major clusters of breaches that occur before the occurrence of a mass exodus. Worse yet, it is seldom possible to isolate a specific perpetrator, and the only institutions that actually bear some responsibility to those that have been harmed, that is, the respective state bureaucracies, are and remain, for the most part, complicit in those harms, be they starvation/deprivation of resources or direct or indirect support of the practices that cause extreme weather events. The complexity of the situation cannot be denied: asylum seekers are demanding justice form a diffuse, complex group of legal individuals who have exercised their rights with no consideration for the ‘collateral’ damage they have inflicted (Sheldon 2004). We are clearly addressing a question de lege ferenda, as, to my knowledge, no presently existing instrument considers the situation from this optic. That responsibility, I believe, changes completely the situation of asylum seekers, from that of somewhat bothersome supplicants, to that of injured parties demanding justice, if not from a specific nation, then from the global community. The crux of the issue is the responsibility/accountability of both governing bodies and legal persons, for which I argued in Chapter 3.

#Rose puzzle in asylum how to#

This passage is one of the few that can be found in the scholarly literature that even raises the question of ‘breach of obligations’ on the part of states that precede an exodus, while – equally rare – the second sentence asks how to ‘prevent’ refugee outflows. Given the uncertain (and promising) legal situation that follows flight, increasing attention now focuses on the ways and the means to prevent refugee outflows (Goodwin-Gill and McAdam 2007: 2–3). Legal theory nevertheless remains imperfect, given the absence of clearly correlative rights in favour of a subject of international law competent to exercise protection, and the uncertain legal consequences which follow where breach of obligations leads to a refugee exodus. After the Flight: International Law and the Rights of Asylum Seekers Today