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| A 'Timeless' Treaty Under Attack: Reconsidering the Convention
British Prime Minister Blair said it was now time to “stand back and consider its [the Convention’s] applications in today’s world.” British policy in future, he said, would be “asylum for those who qualify under the rules, fast action to deal with those who don’t.” British Home Secretary Jack Straw concurred that “the Convention is no longer working as its framers intended.” Citing a tenfold increase in the number of asylum seekers in Great Britain since 1988, Straw added that “would-be migrants are taking advantage of one aspect of the Convention—namely, that it places an obligation on states to consider any application for asylum made on their territory, however ill-founded.” Australian Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Philip Ruddock has become an outspoken critic both of the Convention and UNHCR’s overall performance. The agency, he said recently, “spends cents a day looking after people in Africa and we spend tens of thousands of dollars on people in developed countries who have been free enough to travel and had the money to engage people smugglers.” There appeared, he said “one standard for the UNHCR, and there is another standard that elements of the UNHCR impose on developed countries and I don’t think it can go on.” One casualty of this situation and the increasing number of people unilaterally arriving in Australia, Ruddock said, was the government might have to slash the numbers of refugees it admitted annually for permanent resettlement. Lawmakers from Washington to Berlin have worried that the Convention was a convenient screen behind which everyone from terrorists to mass murderers and dope dealers could hide. Humanitarian lawyers insist that existing provisions are already strong and flexible enough to meet these challenges and already exclude such categories of persons.
Lawmakers from Washington to Berlin have worried that the Convention was a convenient screen behind which everyone from terrorists to mass murderers and dope dealers could hide. Humanitarian lawyers insist that existing provisions are already strong and flexible enough to meet these challenges and already exclude such categories of persons. It may be open to interpretation, but according to Feller a restrictive reading of the Convention is not the appropriate reaction. “There are provisions in the Convention that could be written better; the letter, the terms have, to some extent, worked against the instrument in today’s world,” she said. “But you cannot interpret international law as though it is domestic legislation. It is in one sense an instrument of compromise, drafted by diplomats. The basis of the Convention is timeless.” While some governments of developed countries are reading the Convention evermore restrictively, and jeopardizing the safety of genuine refugees in the process, the quality of asylum in developing countries has been steadily deteriorating. Refugee camps have been attacked, armed militias have been allowed to mingle with, and intimidate, refugees with seeming impunity and civilians, including tens of thousands of children, have been forcibly recruited by the gunmen. Many developing countries host large numbers of refugees for long periods of time, with ruinous consequences for their already scarce economic and natural resources. Yet, they say, they receive little assistance from the developed world for doing so. Two countries in southwest Asia, Iran and Pakistan, host twice as many refugees as do all the countries of western Europe combined. Yet in 2000, the world’s wealthiest nations contributed less than $1 billion—one-tenth the amount they spent on maintaining their own asylum systems—to fund UNHCR’s protection work around the world.
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