Are the UN Member States Committed to the Global Refugee Compact's International Solidarity Norm?

The 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, including its 1967 Protocol, is the very fundament of the international refugee protection system. It establishes the legal category of “refugee”, defines the rights of the refugees, and designates the states as the main guardians and implementers of the international refugee law. It stipulates the states to protect people who need protection by admitting them to their safe territory, by not returning them to unsafety, by giving them territorial asylum, and by integrating them into their society. Other forms of protection – e.g., temporary protection, extra-territorial arrangements (e.g., internal protection, protection in safe zones, and refugee camps close to conflict areas), or financial or other aid to burdened countries, military interventions in conflict zones – are regarded as provisional measures within the liberal intergovernmental approach of the postwar international protection regime. In addition to these, although not a binding arrangement, the United Nations’ Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), which was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2018, reinstated the international refugee regime’s element of international collaboration, which had been briefly mentioned in the preamble of the Refugee Convention but was not an integral part of the international protection system in practice. 

Thus, the primary norms of the current international refugee protection regime implied in the 1951 Convention are access to safe territory, non-refoulement, territorial asylum, and international responsibility-sharing. However, research in the field of refugee studies has been reporting an increasing deviation from the norms of non-refoulement, access to safe territory, and territorial asylum in states’ protection policies and practices (e.g., Sicakkan 2008, Kritzman-Amir and Berman 2009, Foster 2012, Nagy 2017, Hathaway 2018, Bhattacharya and Biswas 2020). The international responsibility-sharing norm has now been revived, among other reasons, to prevent such deviation by easing the burden of the overloaded states. For international responsibility-sharing to be a viable method of strengthening the international refugee protection system, it is a prerequisite that states are truly committed to this norm. 

Are the states committed to the responsibility-sharing norm within the framework of the GCR? We endeavor to answer this question by studying the contents of the pledges that the states submitted to the UNHCR’s Global Refugee Forum (GRF) by the end of 2020. In the following, we first justify our focus on particularly the states’ commitments. Next, we define and measure the concept of international responsibility-sharing. Finally, we discuss the extent to which the states are committed to the new norm in their pledges to the GRF.