This is an excellent article. For anyone who wants to read anything in detail about the old (as in aged) refugee convention.
‘Western states negotiated the 1951 Refugee Convention to deal with the refugee population remaining in Europe after WWII that had not been repatriated or resettled by the International Refugee Organization (IRO)
One of the Convention’s biggest omissions is the absence of a clear path to durable solutions
A second grand omission is the absence of any meaningful burden-sharing or liability mechanism
A third tension is the Convention’s mandate to treat “refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin” (Article 3).
One last flaw is the Convention’s disregard for the Global South. States from this region were largely absent from the Convention’s drafting, and its ratification and acceptance remain spotty there.
Refugee Law’s Expansion: A Superstructure on a Wobbly Foundation
Over the last seventy years, these original defects were supplemented with additional obstructions.
First comes refugee lawyers’ blind focus on expanding the refugee definition instead of refugee rights. The refugee category of today is much broader than that of 1951. This redefinition was mainly achieved through legislative and judicial expansion, mission creep of UNHCRand academia, and an alliance with human rights law—a discipline under immense stress itself.
Second, at least in the Global North, the Convention has been translated into an unintelligible administrative thicket that is inefficient, expensive, and unpredictable (see also Hamlin, pp. 179-194).
The result of all these trends is universal alienation from international refugee law as embodied in the 1951 Convention‘