Protection without Ratification? International Refugee Law beyond States Parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention

ongoing

Many of the world’s top refugee-hosting countries have neither signed nor ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. So do international conventions make a difference? The Refugee Convention represents a paradigmatic – and exceptionally timely – test of this theoretical and empirical puzzle, for refugee protection is increasingly politicized and has wide-ranging implications for state sovereignty. The BEYOND project fundamentally reconsiders the impact of international refugee law by developing the first genuinely global and systematic theoretical framework for understanding the behaviour and position of states that have chosen not to sign the Refugee Convention – especially those that still accept the lion’s share of the world’s refugees. These non-party states, overlooked by scholarship and seen as ‘exceptions’ to the international refugee law regime, are at the core of this project rather than the margins. BEYOND asks: 1. What is the influence of the Refugee Convention in non-party states? 2. How do these non-party states engage with and help create the international refugee law regime? BEYOND exposes and analyzes the various ways non-party states relate to international refugee law. It brings an innovative combination of methods to bear, including case studies on 4 of the world’s top 7 refugee-hosting states–Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The sub-projects investigate BEYOND’s two basic hypotheses: 1. The Refugee Convention has a significant influence on the behaviour of non-party states; and 2. Non-party states engage with, and help shape developments within, international refugee law. BEYOND sheds crucial, empirically grounded light on the prevailing assumptions about whether and why non-party states are exceptional. It also advances our theoretical and scientific understanding of the complex effects of international conventions more generally.