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New approaches to asylum: reconciling individual rights and state interests.

Article Excerpt
The international refugee protection system, which was set up in the wake of the Second World War, has been showing signs of strain for some time now. Some say that it is ill-suited to meet today's challenges, especially those posed by globalization. In a world in which information, capital, goods, and services flow ever more freely across borders, the uncontrolled movement of people is increasingly seen as a threat to the sovereignty of states. Sadly, in an age of global terrorism, it is also seen as a security risk.

When the contemporary refugee regime was established, it was predicated on the willingness of states to relinquish a certain amount of sovereignty, in order to ensure that the basic human rights of a specific category of threatened individuals--refugees--would always be protected. On December 14, 1950, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 428 (V) establishing the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and giving it a mandate to operate on the territory of sovereign states on behalf of an especially vulnerable group of non-citizens--refugees. Just six months later, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted. It established an obligation for states to protect refugees from being returned to situations of danger and to grant them a certain basket of rights normally reserved for citizens.

The willingness of states to agree to this visionary system was in part a recognition that their performance in 1938 at the Evian Conference, and subsequently in turning back Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, should never be repeated. But it was no doubt also a sign of how little they could imagine the complexity which refugee problems would acquire.

In 1951, refugee problems indeed seemed limited in nature and in scope. As a result, the UNHCR was initially given just a three-year mandate. The agency was tasked with finding new homes for around 1.3 million refugees remaining from the Second World War, and would then be dissolved. After that first three-year period, the General Assembly renewed UNHCR's mandate every five years until just a few months ago, in December 2003, it finally lifted altogether...

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