The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization?

The UN Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration and the EU’s New Migration and Asylum Pact introduce clear objectives to improve the international refugee protection system. Still, they are relatively silent about the means to achieve them. The PROTECT Consortium endeavors to fill this gap. This essay provides a comprehensive presentation of the results of the project.

Observing that the main challenge of the international refugee protection system lies in an ideological struggle between the particularistic citizen-alien paradigm and the universalist human-rights paradigm, the project set out to identify configurations of the legal norms, governance systems, and discourses which may spark a transition from the citizen-alien paradigm to the human-rights paradigm. We explore the prospects for building an opportunity structure out of the two UN Global Compacts and the EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum to realize such a transition, assessing the resilience of the identified measures in times of crises, political turbulence, and media pressure.

Our findings suggest that a transition to the human-rights paradigm may be achieved by (1) disembedding the refugee and asylum laws, policies, governance, and institutions from those that handle other policy areas that are under national discretion, such as immigration, border, security, and development policy (2) introducing a clear distinction between conceptual tools concerning “refugees/asylum seekers” and “migrants” in citizen, civil society, and media discourses, (3) introducing new measures to protect other protection seeking migrants than those who fall under the categories specified in the Geneva Convention, and (4) implementing the Global Compacts in full.

Transitioning to a human rights-based international protection does not necessitate a radical transformation of the current international order. However, it does require that international refugee protection be treated as an exception from the international order’s imperative to impose state sovereignty on nearly all matters.