This article aims to highlight peculiarities relating to the realization of the state duty to protect human rights during the crisis situation after the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. It proposes that we engage more seriously with the context of a strong authoritarian state, which does not have people’s protection as a priority and deliberately involves business in human rights violations. Such a context is at odds with the more often presumed model in the BHR discussion: a strong business and a weak state that cannot protect its people. Two systemic factors, which stem from the authoritarian nature of the Belarusian political regime and which worsened during the crisis are discussed in the context UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: the use of business as a tool to achieve political goals and the dependence of all institutions in the country on the authorities. One of the key conclusions of the article is that the Belarusian crisis, aggravated by the complicity of Belarus in the Russian aggression, prompts businesses to adopt a new optic on human rights due diligence and to assess their long-term risks and strategies in authoritarian countries. At the very least there is an awareness among businesses of the direct link between political and human rights risks.

This study analyzes empirically how 236 German court decisions assess the credibility of asylum seekers’ accounts of their persecution. In their reasoning, the courts rely on generally accepted content-based credibility criteria, including consistency, level of detail, and timeliness of the claim. But they also rely on conduct-based criteria, which have been resoundingly discredited in the relevant scientific literature. Too rarely, the courts considered confounding factors such as cultural distance or interpreter mistakes. They need to be more aware of their duty to confront applicants with negative credibility criteria. Article 4 (5) Qualification Directive played no role whatsoever in the sample analyzed in this study, which can be explained by specifics of German asylum law.

The human judgment that is required in the balancing of credibility criteria and confounding factors is problematic for its subjectivity but unavoidable. Attempts at replacing this human credibility assessment with seemingly objective technical means have led to arbitrary decisions and encroached gravely on applicants’ human rights. While the credibility assessment procedure employed in German courts is far from flawless, it can produce convincing decisions. It should be further refined and provided with safeguards to arrive at decisions that are as rational and objective as possible.

The current paper examines the aetiology of persecution committed against the Rohingya in Myanmar from a criminological perspective. Criminological theories focusing on one level of analysis may not fully explain the incidents concerning the systematic implementation of policies of persecution against the Rohingya for decades. Thus, the author scrutinizes the factors which are involved in the aetiology of persecution at three different levels: macro (national), meso (organizational) and micro (local community and individual) within four dynamics – namely, motivation, opportunity, control and constraint. This paper employs the case study method and collects data through focus group discussions with the Rohingya in the Kutupalong refugee camp in the Cox’s Bazar region of Bangladesh. It limits its analysis to the data that covers the events of persecution against the Rohingya in Myanmar, such as revocation of their citizenship, deprivation of their fundamental rights, and different forms of atrocity crimes, from 1962 to 2019. It reveals that, despite the heterogeneity of the actions that led to atrocity crimes against the Rohingya, the military leaders in charge of Myanmar (and somewhat Myanmar’s civilian government), military personnel and other security force members, paramilitaries and vigilantes played various roles in the perpetration of such crimes.

The resurgence of racist rhetoric and policies concerning people fleeing the war in Ukraine serves as a reminder that the ostensible goals of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol are regularly eschewed by states making decisions about how to allocate grants of asylum. This Essay makes the claim that racial tiering of protection-seekers demonstrates that states use international refugee law to negotiate their national whiteness contracts and to secure racially hegemonic geopolitical ordering.

The UN Human Rights Committee's finding in Teitiota v New Zealand has garnered widespread global attention for its recognition that the effects of climate change may put people's lives at risk or expose them to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, thus triggering States’ non-refoulement obligations. However, a secondary—and highly problematic—consequence of the decision has been its confusing and misplaced focus on ‘imminence’ of harm. This reflects a concerning, albeit uneven, trend in human rights cases generally (and cases concerning climate change and human rights, in particular) to recognize violations only where rights are immediately threatened. This short article reflects on the assumptions that Teitiota has triggered about the place of imminence in international protection claims, identifies the source of confusion, and suggests a more appropriate framework to guide a category of case that is likely to become the subject of intense litigation in the future.

This article contributes to the debates on the role of anthropology in refugee law research by showing the added value of an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of complex asylum claims related to cultural and religious beliefs that are unfamiliar to the Western perspective. Based on the analysis of asylum claims in UK courts involving witchcraftbased persecution in the country of origin—both applicants who feared becoming victims of witchcraft practices and those who could be accused of having engaged in witchcraft practices—I demonstrate how anthropology can provide the tools for bridging the gaps between the law in the books and its implementation in practice and solving issues that are beyond the scope of the law. In particular, anthropology can feed into a broader legal conceptualization that accounts for the realities of our diverse societies and helps explain how fear of persecution due to witchcraft can indeed be real and connected with serious human rights violations. Moreover, cultural expertise can assist in assessing asylum claims in their cultural, historical, and political contexts, affording the claimant a fairer and better adjudicated outcome. Nevertheless, the use of anthropology inevitably comes with some challenges related to the different fields’ epistemologies, languages, and styles, as well as a lack of appreciation for interdisciplinarity in some areas of academia.

Looking at the migration management policies at Europe’s external Aegean border, this article examines how and why infrastructures of protection come to function as technologies of border violence. The repurposing of rescue rafts for extreme border violence in the Aegean Sea reveals a little-examined dark side of European ‘migration management’ as a process purportedly aimed to ‘civilize’ Greek coastguard operations. In transforming life-saving materials into life-threatening ones, patterns of border violence tell an alarming story about the relationship between law, politics, and the materiality of physical objects: absent concrete political and moral commitments to international protection, rescue’s physical infrastructure has been weaponized. The weaponized life raft further challenges the assumptions underpinning European ‘migration management’: the idea that technocratic solutions can fix structural injustices, or that ‘neutral assistance can ensure human rights compliance. The case study thus demonstrates the incompatibility of managerialism with human rights protection in the context of contemporary migration.

This article proposes re-thinking the history of refugee protection in the Southeast Asia region, focusing on the post-World War Two period (1945–1979). It fills a gap in the literature on this period, drawing on archival material. It disrupts a narrative of “human rights exceptionalism” in Southeast Asia. First, it examines the small but powerful role of Southeast Asian states during the drafting of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. These states challenged colonial powers and asserted human rights. Second, it considers the role of key refugee-hosting states in Southeast Asia in developing—with other post-colonial states—regional standards to protect refugees under the auspices of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee, the Aliens Principles of 1961 and Bangkok Principles of 1966. Third, it places international and regional action in the domestic context by drawing on the example of Thailand's protection of Vietnamese refugees. It concludes that the approach in the post-WWII years points to an extended history of protecting refugees in Southeast Asia, and valuable lessons from the Global South for the region and beyond.

This article sheds light on the legal instruments and policies adopted by the Organization of African Unity/African Union (AU) in relation to international humanitarian law. It also offers analysis on the role of the AU institutions that provide humanitarian and disaster relief. The article highlights the importance of the institutions established to improve the capacity of regional and national institutions for humanitarian prevention and response. It reflects on the reasons why the AU focuses on early warning systems to address the root causes of conflicts and humanitarian disasters, rather than only adopting reactive policies after the fact, in order to save lives and prevent human suffering.

Research has rarely investigated the actions bureaucrats take to challenge the status quo of their organisation from within. Proposing a power-analytical approach to voice, exit and everyday resistance as political strategies of challenging the bureaucratic status quo, I study the difficulties of achieving organisational change in a context of structural constraints on junior bureaucrats’ reformative power. During field research in Niger's Refugee Directorate, I found that despite the associated risks, junior bureaucrats criticised their working conditions and, in confidential conversations, the administration. As precarious staff, they often combined criticism with compliance. In frequent acts of semi-private criticism amongst peers and with external actors, they problematised their working conditions and the state, but performed symbolic conformity in the everyday to avoid sanctions. This strategy nevertheless created autonomy for themselves and mobilised external actors for change-making. In rarer acts of direct criticism voiced to their superiors, the junior staff often complied with the same informal solidarities they vocally criticised.

The situation of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion exemplifies, as the organizers of this symposium note, both a shock to the international order and a powerful international response. Europeans, and Global North states more broadly, have welcomed Ukrainians with a generosity that sits in stark contrast to their treatment of the vast majority of contemporary refugees. This exceptional response demonstrates a key gap in the legal architecture, namely the absence of an international agreement on shared responsibility for hosting refugees. It also highlights a substantive shortcoming in international refugee law: its failure to protect most people fleeing armed conflict. In contrast, regional law from Africa and Latin America has for some time extended refugee protection to individuals escaping generalized violence. Beyond the substantive law, in many cases, regional protection is a preferable option for individuals fleeing violent conflict. In addition to these structural and substantive concerns, the exceptionally rapid and generous response to the Ukrainians demonstrates the deep politicization of international refugee policy and highlights the invidious role of race in the international legal order.

This paper proposes an integrating interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ in the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, 1979, grounded in international human rights and refugee law. It argues that the exposure to harm as a consequence of the conditions under which sea migrants endure irregular journeys raises vulnerability concerns and the need to search for mechanisms of redress. It further claims that sea migrants are marginalised by states’ refusal to allow their disembarkation on land. It also argues that a narrow interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ risks perpetuating, if not exacerbating, situations of vulnerability and marginalisation among sea migrants. Key themes addressed in this contribution are vulnerability and marginalisation of sea migrants, vulnerability reasoning in the interpretation process and the scope for a more integrating reading of the term ‘place of safety’ that is responsive to the specific needs among sea migrants.

The article tests the claim of feminist scholars that concerns about gender have been marginalised in refugee law, by exploring the interpretation given to the concept of a ‘Particular Social Group’ set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is argued that recent practice at the supranational level in the European Union has contributed to the deterioration of refugee protection standards for women seeking asylum from gender-based violence. However, the article demonstrates that a human rights-based approach to the interpretation of ‘Particular Social Group’, which is supported by extensive examples of good practice in individual Member States, has the potential to redress this.

Denied citizenship and persecuted in Myanmar, the Rohingya have fled to various countries, including Malaysia. However, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. It also has weak domestic legal and regulatory mechanisms to protect refugees and asylum-seekers. In this paper, the authors study the treatment of Rohingya refugees in Malaysia and suggest how the Malaysian legal system can better protect them by adapting international legal practices.

So-called “safe zones” pose an increasingly pressing threat to genuine and robust international legal protection for persons fleeing conflict. This paper aims to address the key challenges and risks of safe zones under international law and to provide some clarifications on the legal framework which must be respected by refugee-receiving States. Through assessing the intentions of preventing migration flows which underlie their creation, this paper will demonstrate that the existence of safe zones cannot be used to circumvent the obligations of refugee-receiving States under international law, specifically the right to leave and seek asylum and the prohibition of non-refoulement. This paper concludes that safe zones should only be created as an urgent response to humanitarian crises in order to ensure the immediate safety of civilians in conflict zones, and only under very strict conditions. In this respect, this paper will demonstrate that even if safe zones comply with certain minimum protective standards, because of the volatility and complexities of the conflict environment they should not and cannot act as a substitute for genuine refugee protection under international law.

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) has become the buzzword of much of the advocacy and work today around business and human rights.1 It is almost commonplace that companies have the responsibility to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address these adverse human rights impacts as part of their ongoing HRDD processes, in line with the UNGPs.2 The assessment of human rights impacts (HRIA) is a critical step in this process.3