Is International Refugee Law Effective?

ongoing

Is International Refugee Law effective? This is the central question of RefLex, a project that will offer the first comprehensive empirical study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of law partly imbricated with International Human Rights Law (IHRL), domesticated and judicialized to an extraordinary degree across the globe. There are many theoretically and empirically rich studies of effectiveness of International Human Rights Law (IHRL), as well as many other fields of International Law (IL) in constructivist International Relations (IR) in particular. The effectiveness of human rights courts and other bodies is also a well-established academic subfield. However, there are no analogous empirical studies of IRL in practice. RefLex will fill this huge puzzling knowledge gap, thereby making a vital contribution both to refugee studies and to scholarship on the theory and practical workings of IL. It will develop a new dataset, the Refugee Protection Index (RPI), in order to enable our (and other) large-n quantitative studies, identify key cases to trace how IRL comes to be effective, or not. It will also contribute to the burgeoning field of legal mobilization (LM) studies, which again, have failed to examine refugee legal mobilisation in comparative or transnational fashion. It will break new ground here also, by studying LM from above and below by studying both UNHCR’s own LM and that of refugees themselves, both acting via transnational organisations and in local settings. The analysis of the RPI will inform the choice of LM casestudies, in order to develop a new account of when LM emerges and when it is effective. The project aims to provide vital insights at a time when the Global Refugee Regime (GRR) is seen to be increasingly adrift from IL, with over challenges to core norms, and practices focusing on informal cooperation, ‘deals’ and political trading, lacking normative specificity and legal force.