"Immigration and Refugee Law will assist legal practitioners and immigration consultants in understanding and implementing the new Immigration Act 2009 and the scope of immigration and refugee law in New Zealand today. Examines the similarities and differences of the two pieces of legislation and the ongoing influence the 1987 Act will have on the 2009 Act."--Publisher information.
This Handbook draws together leading and emerging scholars to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of international refugee law. This book provides an account as well as a critique of the status quo, setting the agenda for future research in the field.
The essays selected and reproduced in this volume explore how international refugee law is dynamic and constantly evolving. From an instrument designed to protect mostly those civilians fleeing the worse excesses of World War II, the 1951 Refugee Convention has developed into a set of principles, customary rules, and values that are now firmly embedded in the human rights framework, and are applicable to a far broader range of refugees. In addition, international refugee law has been affected by international humanitarian law and international criminal law (and vice versa). Thus, there is a reinforcing dynamic in the development of these complementary areas of law. At the same time, in recent decades states have shown a renewed interest in managing migration, thereby raising issues of how to reconcile such interests with refugee protection principles. In addition, the emergence of concepts of participation and responsibility to protect promise to have an impact on international refugee law.
Focusing on the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, this book in intended as an introduction to international refugee law. After a comprehensive introduction, the reader is divided into eight chapters. Each chapter begins with a short introduction which identifies the key issues and themes it deals with and the particular readings which address them, as also draws attention to the on-going debates in a bid to encourage critical thinking.
Under what circumstances can a state refuse refugee status to a person whose risk of persecution exists in only part of her country of origin? This book is the first monograph to examine the treaty basis and criteria for the ‘internal protection alternative’ (IPA), an exception to refugee status increasingly invoked by state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Through a critical analysis of the relationship between refugee law and related fields, Schultz finds that the legal scope for IPA practice is narrower than is commonly claimed. Since persons subject to an IPA analysis have a well-founded fear of persecution within their countries of origin, any limit on their right to refugee status must involve a careful balancing of the impact of continued displacement against the state's interest in preserving its restricted protection resources. She argues that the doctrine of implied limits in human rights law can provide analytic structure to the IPA concept and reduce the risk of overly broad application.
Does human rights law help us to define who qualifies as a refugee? If so, then how? These deceptively simple questions sit at the heart of an intense contemporary debate over whether, or how, interpretation of the refugee definition in the Refugee Convention should take account of human rights law. In Human Rights and the Refugee Definition, Burson and Cantor bring a fine-grained comparative perspective to this debate. For the first time, they collect together in one edited volume over a dozen new studies by leading scholars and practitioners that explore in detail how these legal dynamics play out in a range of national and international jurisdictions and in relation to particular thematic challenges in refugee law.
