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81 of 180 DOCUMENTS The International Herald Tribune December 13, 2001 Thursday

Cards Are Stacked Against Refugees

BYLINE: Bill Frelick SOURCE: International Herald Tribune SECTION: OPINION; Pg. 6 LENGTH: 689 words DATELINE: WASHINGTON

This week governments are meeting in Geneva to reaffirm their commitment to the UN Refugee Convention on its 50th anniversary. But the convention remains an unfulfilled promise. Nations have been developing increasingly sophisticated methods for avoiding obligations toward refugees. Basic principles underlying the treaty are challenged as never before. The Refugee Convention laid out as a fundamental principle of international law that a person with a well-founded fear of persecution in his or her home country cannot be forcibly returned. It failed, however, to establish a corollary binding right to asylum. It told states that they could not forcibly return refugees, but it did not require states to admit them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established the right to seek asylum from persecution in another state as a basic human right. But the declaration was nonbinding. Few states openly commit refoulement (the forced return of a refugee to persecution), but many regularly deny asylum or prevent would-be refugees from seeking asylum. The United States, European Union member states and other refugee-receiving states, such as Australia, are building ever higher barriers to prevent migrants -- including genuine refugees -- from gaining access to their territories and to the procedures that would enable them to lodge asylum claims. Even before Sept. 11, vigorous border controls, widening visa restrictions and the posting of immigration officers from well-to-do countries in foreign airports prevented unknown numbers of refugees from escaping their home countries. Since Sept. 11, further restrictive measures have cast a net that also prevents asylum seekers from reaching safety. The lack of legal alternatives for seeking asylum leads many would-be refugees directly into the hands of smugglers and traffickers. Governments blithely treat smuggling solely as an immigration enforcement problem. By painting the issue as one of criminality, states can gloss over the underlying motivation of at least some of the migrants -- the needto escape persecution. Kept out of sight of human rights monitors and journalists, held outside territories where legal due process rights would kick in, interdicted migrants are treated as an undifferentiated mass. Refugees among them are not found because no one is bothering to look.

Page 2 Cards Are Stacked Against Refugees The International Herald Tribune December 13, 2001 Thursday

Recently, states have banded together to draft protocols on smuggling and the return of migrants. These include a UN convention and related protocols signed in Palermo, Italy, last December and an agreement among Western Hemisphere states last March. These agreements, overwhelmingly law-enforcement-driven, formally acknowledge the applicability of the Refugee Convention's prohibition against refoulement, but they fail to spell out refugee screening standards and procedures or other minimal rights, such as whether officials have a duty to inform migrants apprehended on the high seas of their right to seek asylum, and what standards should be applied aboard ships to distinguish potential asylum seekers from economic migrants. These agreements make no mention of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose agency has a specific mandate arising from the Refugee Convention to protect refugees. The Western Hemisphere agreement repeatedly mentions the International Organization for Migration as its designated partner for the return of migrants. Unlike the UNHCR, the IOM lacks a protection mandate and hasno competence to judge refugee claims. The World Refugee Survey counts about 14.5 million refugees in the world. These are the known, the counted. Their plight is real, their conditions often dire. But many other persecuted and abused people are trapped in such places as Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma and Sierra Leone -- those who would flee if they could, if a door were open and the promise of asylum were real. The writer is director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a nongovernmental advocacy group. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune. [Not to be reproduced without the permission of the author.] LOAD-DATE: December 13, 2001 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH Copyright 2001 International Herald Tribune