UNHCR Protection Manual - Related sources

This paper proposes criteria for determining when international law, and when sound policy, permit a country to return an asylum seeker to a third country without deciding the substance of his or her claim. It is argued, contrary to conventional wisdom, that the criteria for returning asylum seekers to “safe third countries” are precisely the same as the criteria for returning them to “first countries of asylum.” In the course of constructing these criteria, the paper argues that various developments in international law now add up to a general “complicity principle:”

This book represents a key outcome, particularly of the second track roundtable meetings and the Summary Conclusions resulting from them. It focuses in a detailed manner on discrete legal issues of interpretation of the 1951 Convention, bringing together the expert papers presented to the participants at the roundtable meetings and their conclusions. The authors were asked to make proposals to establish common understandings on key issues of Convention interpretation in order to promote greater consistency in the application of the Convention in the different jurisdictions of the world. They were also asked to factor into their analysis subsequent developments in international law of relevance to forced displacement.

This paper is written in the context of the growing importance of religion-based claims, and with the recognition of the complicated historical and socio-political factors within which the claims arise. The approach to determining the key elements in a refugee adjudication – what is a religion, what constitutes persecution in the context of religious practice, when is the persecution “for reasons of” the individual’s religious beliefs – are less clear today than they were when 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted. This paper is intended to address the need for a contemporary review of religion-based claims, and the concomitant need for the development of a framework for refugee adjudicators.

Claims of persecution on the basis of religion are likely to be among the most complex, arcane, and incomprehensible that will need to be decided by an asylum adjudicator. While religion may involve group identity (like race and nationality) or voluntary affiliation (like political and social groupings), it also encompasses an enormous range of human activities and beliefs. This paper seeks to provide useful background information that an adjudicator should consider when interpreting and applying asylum law in religion based claims.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the UNHCR’s supervisory role within the broader context of its international protection mandate, to analyse its content, and to propose for discussion possible avenues that could be developed to enhance that role.

This document presents the conclusions and recommendations of a session which was to explore the extent to which tools such as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the Operational Guidelines for UNHCR's involvement with internally displaced populations are being used, and to explore the adequacy of UNHCR's organizational resources in relation to operations benefiting internally displaced people (IDPs).