Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties and other international instruments
- Abbreviations for courts and tribunals cited
- Introduction
- 1 International law as a source of refugee rights
- 2 The evolution of the refugee rights regime
- 3 The structure of entitlement under the Refugee Convention
- 4 Rights of refugees physically present
- 5 Rights of refugees lawfully present
- 6 Rights of refugees lawfully staying
- 7 Rights of solution
- Epilogue: Challenges to the viability of refugee rights
- Appendices
- Select bibliography
- Index
3 - The structure of entitlement under the Refugee Convention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties and other international instruments
- Abbreviations for courts and tribunals cited
- Introduction
- 1 International law as a source of refugee rights
- 2 The evolution of the refugee rights regime
- 3 The structure of entitlement under the Refugee Convention
- 4 Rights of refugees physically present
- 5 Rights of refugees lawfully present
- 6 Rights of refugees lawfully staying
- 7 Rights of solution
- Epilogue: Challenges to the viability of refugee rights
- Appendices
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The universal rights of refugees are today derived from two primary sources – general standards of international human rights law, and the Refugee Convention itself. As the analysis in chapter 2 makes clear, the obligations derived from the Refugee Convention remain highly relevant, despite the development since 1951 of a broad-ranging system of international human rights law. In particular, general human rights norms do not address many refugee-specific concerns; general economic rights are defined as duties of progressive implementation and may legitimately be denied to non-citizens by less developed countries; not all civil rights are guaranteed to non-citizens, and most of those which do apply to them can be withheld on grounds of their lack of nationality during national emergencies; and the duty of non-discrimination under international law has not always been interpreted in a way that guarantees refugees the substantive benefit of relevant protections.
On the other hand, general human rights law adds a significant number of rights to the list codified in the Refugee Convention, and is regularly interpreted and applied by supervisory bodies able to refine the application of standards to respond to contemporary realities. Because both refugee law and general human rights law are therefore of real value, the analysis in chapters 4–7 synthesizes these sources of law to define a unified standard of treatment owed to refugees.
This chapter examines the fairly intricate way in which rights are attributed and defined under the Refugee Convention.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rights of Refugees under International Law , pp. 154 - 277Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005