Abstracts

Daniel Ghezelbash: The Refugee Convention at 75: Still Sound, Still Relevant, Sabotaged in Practice

June 22, Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Özlem Gürakar Skribeland (University of Oslo)

75 years on, the Refugee Convention is under renewed attack from certain quarters, portrayed as outdated and unworkable. This keynote pushes back against such critiques, arguing that contemporary problems with the international protection regime are not the result of flaws in the Convention, but failures in implementation and political will.

Instead of honouring the spirit of the Convention, many governments have adopted a deliberate strategy of evasion, claiming to comply with the letter of the law while undermining its purpose. Hyperlegalistic bad faith interpretations are used to exploit ambiguities in treaty language, parsing obligations to their narrowest possible meaning. Obfuscation compounds this. Governments conceal what they are doing and their legal justifications, frustrating accountability. The result is an architecture of deterrence and exclusion, be it through externalisation measures that block access to territory and shift responsibility elsewhere, or through the hollowing safeguards and fairness of asylum procedures. These choices have produced the very failures now cited to justify calls for reforming the Convention: unequal responsibility sharing, slow and inconsistent asylum procedures, chronic underfunding, and the erosion of public trust.

The keynote sketches what it would take to close the implementation gap and restore the Refugee Convention to the place it was meant to hold: at the centre of an effective international protection regime. It sets out several priorities. The first are direct responses to hyperlegalism and obfuscation: interpreting refugee law alongside human rights and other international obligations to close the gaps currently being exploited (for example, developing binding minimum due process standards for asylum procedures) and deploying existing legal and public accountability tools more effectively to hold governments to those standards.

But the deeper repair requires broader shifts. Refugee expertise and leadership must be centred as a foundation, not an afterthought. Responsibility-sharing must become real, which requires wealthy states leading by example rather than racing to the bottom, and listening to the needs of host countries rather than coercing and lecturing them. More imaginative thinking is also required around the role of technology and AI, to transform them from instruments of surveillance and exclusion, into tools that help realise the rights the Convention protects.

About Daniel Ghezelbash

Daniel is a Professor and the Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney. His research spans international and comparative refugee and migration law, asylum procedures and law and technology. He is the author of Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World (2018), which traces the way restrictive asylum policies have spread around the world. He has led recent research projects examining fairness and efficiency in asylum procedures, the responsible use of technology in alternatives to detention, and AI tools for access to justice. He is the founder of the Kaldor Centre Data Lab, which uses computational and data-driven approaches to study administrative and judicial decision-making in refugee cases, and is the co-editor of a recent special issue in the Journal of Refugee Studies which aims to foster a broader a broader transdisciplinary research agenda on law within refugee studies scholarship. His research and advocacy are grounded in personal and professional experience, drawing on his family's refugee background and his practice as a refugee lawyer.

Roundtable: Practice, Not Principles: The 1951 Refugee Convention at 75

June 22, Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Seventy five years after its adoption, the 1951 Refugee Convention remains the cornerstone of international protection – yet the gap between its principles and state practice has rarely been wider. This high level plenary brings together scholars and practitioners to take stock of what the Convention actually does in today’s world.

Speakers will examine how states use reservations to reshape their obligations; how evolving asylum procedures affect access to protection; how refugee movements are instrumentalized in international politics as “weapons of mass migration”; and how institutional, financial, and political constraints condition implementation on the ground. The discussion will also highlight what the presence or absence of the Convention means in the concrete trajectories of people seeking safety in signatory and non signatory states.

Together, the panel asks whether the Refugee Convention continues to shape practice in meaningful ways, or whether it is being preserved symbolically while protection is hollowed out in law, policy, and everyday life.

Speakers:

• Lamis Abdelaaty (Syracuse University)
• Kelly Greenhill (Tufts University and MIT)
• Mohamad Kharita (independent)
• Cornelis Wouters (UNHCR)
• Terje Einarsen (University of Bergen)

Chair: Maja Janmyr (University of Oslo)

Cecilia Bailliet: Moving beyond the 1951 Convention: International Solidarity as a Corrective Protection Framework for Refugees and Migrants

June 23, Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Arjumand Bano Kazmi (University of Oslo)

For more than seventy years, the 1951 Refugee Convention has anchored the international protection regime. It helped generate a form of “solidarity” among states through responsibility-sharing mechanisms, but did so within a deeply state centric frame. In practice, this has often meant that border control and containment have taken precedence over the procedural rights and dignity of refugees and other displaced persons.

There have been moments of genuine solidarity, such as the coordinated responses to the Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s and 1980s, to Colombia’s decision in 2019 to grant citizenship to children born to Venezuelan parents in order to prevent statelessness. Yet such examples sit alongside troubling set backs, such as the warehousing of refugees within Africa, accelerated and discriminatory asylum procedures in Europe; and the externalization of refugee processing by states including the United States, Australia, and several European countries—often justified through narrow readings of the 1951 Convention’s extraterritorial reach.

Core customary norms, such as non refoulement, are further contradicted by militarized borders, push backs, and systematic detention and deportation processes without access to legal aid leading to collective expulsions. This is complicated by the prosecution of civil society solidarity actors engaged in rescue and sea and other types of humanitarian support to refugees and migrants.

There have been some recent initiatives to promote solidarity with refugees and migrants, such as the UN Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants, as well as the Inter-American Commission’s 2019 Principles on Migrants, Refugees, Stateless persons, and Trafficked Persons. However, these initiatives were stymied by the return of sovereign centered approaches to migration management, in part in response to the instrumentalization of migrants in geopolitical disputes and the EU’s Return Regulation and proposed “return hubs”.

Against this backdrop, this keynote explores the forthcoming UN Declaration on the Right to International Solidarity, expected to be adopted at the Human Rights Council in June 2026. It will discuss the Declaration’s aims to restore international cooperation to protect vulnerable refugees and migrants by centering on procedural justice as the core focus.

About Cecilia M. Bailliet

Cecilia M. Bailliet is Professor Dr. jur. at the University of Oslo and Director of the UiO Masters Program in Public International Law. She is the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity. Bailliet has published extensively on transnational and cross-disciplinary issues within international law including general public international law, human rights, refugee law, constitutional law, counter-terrorism, gender/women's rights, solidarity, and peace. She has contributed lectures on Refugee Law to the UN AudioVisual Library of International Law.

Bailliet's scholarship in refugee law includes articles on conscientious objectors to war and asylum (that influenced the UNHCR Guidelines on the topic), the dilemmas of disembarkation and processing of claims of asylum seekers rescued at sea, the effects of deportation of parents upon children in revocation cases, the non-discrimination standard in relation to refugees, asylum seekers, and IDPs, the weakening of procedural rights for asylum seekers within the EU, the common law bias in citations within UNHCR guidelines, the relevance of the due diligence standard when addressing harmful traditional practices within the home, kidnapping as a ground for asylum, mental health assessments in the context of refugee status determination, sexual violence in the military and asylum claims, responsibilities of the destination country in trafficking cases, internal displacement in post conflict contexts (including a gender perspective), and the use of internal flight alternative and non-state agents of persecution. She conducted the a study of UDI/UNE cases to analyse the difference between asylum and humanitarian protection. She has served as consultant to national and international organizations, and her research has been the basis for the creation of guidelines in various institutions. She created the course "Refugee and Asylum Law" at the University of Oslo.

Panel A1: Who is a Refugee? Theory and Practice

Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Dallal Stevens (University of Warwick)

Towards a Theoretical Account of the Refugee in International Law — Catherine Dauvergne (University of British Columbia)

This paper explores what it would mean to interject the concept of the refugee into theoretical accounts of international law and argues that this undertaking is overdue and increasingly necessary. Refugee law brings conceptual challenges to the heart of theoretical accounts of international law that will enrich and broaden those accounts. Moreover, richer and deeper theoretical accounts of international refugee law are required in order to advance the state of refugee law writ large, and therefore to begin to counter the intransigence of the politics that surround it. 

Building on my recent article in the International Journal of Refugee Law introducing this project, this paper presents an overview of the book length work that will bring this project to fruition. In particular, I am hoping for feedback on the proposed methodology for the longer work. The starting point for this argument is the twinned observations that the refugee is almost entirely absent from international legal theory, and that refugee law scholarship has rarely engaged with the grand narratives of international legal theory. 

I approach the first observation by considering several prominent theoretical accounts of international law which make little or no mention of the refugee, and certainly do not treat the refugee as a puzzle to be addressed. The second point is somewhat easier to address because the boundaries of refugee law scholarship are more visible than those of international legal theory. The work seeks to present an overview of the principal theoretical areas that refugee law scholarship has engaged with since the establishment of the Refugee Convention. The paper concludes by presenting ideas about how centering the figure of the refugee can fill an existing gap in theoretical accounts of international law.

Theorizing Forced Conscription as Persecution for Refugee Claims — Andrew Wai Phyo Kyaw (Chiang Mai University)

This paper attempts to theorize forced conscription as persecution to claim refugee status. It questions the prevailing ‘penalty-centric’ approach, which treats standard, proportionate conscription as legitimate and focuses primarily on whether punishment for draft evasion is excessive or discriminatory. The paper argues that coercive recruitment can already constitute persecution in militarized, abusive, or authoritarian settings. 

The first part locates forced conscription within the core notion of persecution in refugee law, understood as serious human‑rights‑type harm linked to a Convention ground, such as the conflict between state sovereignty in defense and the individual right to life. The second part theorizes when conscription crosses the threshold from civic duty to persecutory coercion, identifying key dimensions: the nature of the conflict; violations of international humanitarian law; methods and conditions of recruitment; and the meaning attributed to refusal, particularly when draft evasion is framed as political betrayal or religious defiance. A third part integrates international human rights and humanitarian norms, using freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, prohibitions of forced labor and slavery‑like practices, and protections against forced participation in international crimes as normative anchors for a rights‑centered reading of persecution in military‑service‑related claims. Lastly, it foregrounds gender, age, and actor‑specific dynamics in Global South settings, showing how forced recruitment of young men, women, and children by state and non‑state armed groups is embedded in broader patterns of structural violence, authoritarian governance, and protracted conflict in countries such as Myanmar.

Rethinking Article 1A(2): Statelessness, Refugee Protection, and the Limits of Legal Labels — Malak Benslama-Dabdoub (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention defines refugee status through nationality, statelessness, and access to state protection. While statelessness is often presented as a legal category designed to enhance protection, this conference presentation argues that, in practice, the label of “statelessness” frequently deepens exclusion rather than alleviating it.

The analysis is based on a qualitative and doctrinal study of Kurdish and Palestinian asylum-seekers from Syria. It draws on two main sources of data: first, a comparative analysis of asylum decisions issued in Britain and France between 2001 and 2021; and second, interviews conducted with asylum-seekers and legal practitioners involved in refugee status determination. Together, these materials reveal how nationality and statelessness are assessed and operationalised in everyday asylum decision-making.

The central argument is that Article 1A(2) relies on legal assumptions that do not reflect the realities of people whose lack of nationality is the result of long-standing political and historical exclusion. Rather than facilitating access to refugee protection, the classification of applicants as “stateless” often triggers higher evidentiary burdens, credibility doubts, and uncertainty around country of origin or return. In this sense, statelessness operates less as a protective status and more as a mechanism of legal marginalisation.

In doing so, the analysis explores the uneasy relationship between the Refugee Convention and the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions. It shows how the separation between refugee law and statelessness law creates protection gaps, particularly for individuals whose persecution and displacement are inseparable from their lack of nationality.

The 1951 Convention, Rightlessness, and the “Sphere above the Nations” — Adel-Naim Reyhani (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights)

The paper first reflects on the role of the 1951 Refugee Convention through the lens of Hannah Arendt's engagement with the encounter between refugees, states, and international law. Based on an analysis of its travaux preperatoir, the paper first reconstructs the intended purpose of the Convention. It claims that the drafters were concerned with symptomatically remedying the rightless condition of refugees whom they viewed ‘an anomaly for whom there [was] no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law’ (Jennings, 1939). For them, in a legal paradigm in which nationality was the ‘principal link’ between individuals and the protection of international law, the loss of nationality rendered the refugee a deviation from the standard of protection by the law. 

The paper then argues that, despite the establishment of the Convention and wide-reaching developments in international human rights law, which sought to extend basic protections to individuals irrespective of their nationality, the condition of rightlessness continues today, particularly in the context of externalization. It posits that, against the backdrop of the close relationship between refugee law and the nation-state based political order, reflections about state transcending models for the applicability of refugee law as a representation of the Arendtian call for a ‘sphere above the nations’. 

Ultimately, however, the paper notes that the rightless condition of refugees, as addressed by the 1951 Convention, reveals that we live in a lamentably deficient world order that demands an adequate practical response. In such effort, individuals, independent of their legal status, collaborate within dialogical communities (Bernstein, 1983) to build a world of equals.

International Refugee Protection in Unrecognized States — Nora Milch (University of Oslo)

What does international refugee protection look like in states that the international community does not recognize? As new research sheds light on the influence of global norms of refugee protection on states that are non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention (Janmyr, 2021; Janmyr, Skribeland, et al., 2025), the role of the international refugee regime in contested states becomes an interesting topic for further study. 

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) is one such entity: its existence lacks a legal basis and international recognition. Nevertheless, the northern part of Cyprus continues to attract substantial numbers of asylum-seekers and migrants from unstable and war-torn countries, largely because the relatively relaxed student visa regime allows for regular entry. For actors seeking to provide protection, such as international organizations, civil society groups, and migration lawyers, the complex legal landscape presents several challenges (Achiri & Klem, 2024; Dağtaș & Ilcan, 2025; Trimikliniotis et al., 2023). 

This paper will explore the status and characteristics of refugee protection in TRNC, focusing particularly on the emergence of alternative protection spaces (Janmyr, Hossain, et al., 2025; Jones, 2014) and on the delicate boundary between providing protection and inadvertently signaling state recognition. 

A 20-Year Deadlock in Taiwan’s Refugee Legislation: The Definitional Complexities of the 1951 Convention Amidst Cross-Strait Relations — Hsiang-Yu Liu (University of Warwick)

Standing at the front of one of the most intense geopolitical regions, Taiwan has taken pride in its democracy and commitment to human rights. However, it is not a party to the Refugee Convention and has struggled to establish a systematic refugee protection mechanism. Taiwan’s twisted relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bars it from participating in UN treaties and organisations. This situation further complicates the drafting of a refugee act, both for constitutional reasons and political considerations. 

Since the first draft of the Refugee Act was introduced in 2005, it has been shelved for twenty years, despite multiple attempts, which ultimately failed. This two-decade delay not only highlights a missing piece in Taiwan’s stated commitment, but it can also be said to be fundamentally rooted in the consequences of the Convention’s own definition of refugees. The Convention’s emphasis on international border crossing and the implicit definition of ‘foreign nationals’ happen to touch upon a sensitive nerve of Taiwan: the deliberately ambiguous approach in its constitution to the relationship across the Taiwan Strait. In addition, this mode of definition shapes the political calculations made by the main political parties when advocating for or opposing a refugee law. Consequently, if Taiwan were to publicly and officially accept Chinese refugees under the Convention’s definition, it would likely lead to political contestation and independence-related tensions. 

This paper will first outline Taiwan’s political background, constitutional framework, and relationship with the PRC. With this brief introduction to the complexity surrounding Taiwan, I will then examine the Convention’s impact on promoting refugee law in Taiwan and the political dynamics that emerged during the drafting process. Lastly, I will illustrate how international politics affect a refugee rescue movement in the Taiwan-China relationship, based on an interview.

Panel A2: Looking Outside the 1951 Refugee Convention: The Politics of Protection and Responsibility in the Global South 

Blue Room

Chair: Megan Bradley (McGill University)

Revisiting Refugee Protection and Responsibility-Sharing Through South Asian Histories: Comparative Lessons from India and Bangladesh — Bidisha Biswas (Western Washington University)

This paper examines two pivotal South Asian cases—the 1971 India–Pakistan refugee crisis and the ongoing Rohingya displacement in Bangladesh—to reassess the evolution and limits of global refugee protection norms from the perspective of Global South host states. The 1971 crisis, which brought roughly ten million refugees into India in nine months, triggered war and contributed to Bangladesh’s creation, highlighting the cataclysmic impact of weak international responsibility-sharing mechanisms.

In contrast, Bangladesh’s management of the Rohingya situation shows oscillation between cooperation with global norms to provide shelter and restrictive measures aimed at containment, repression, and forced repatriation. This protracted displacement underscores uneven application of refugee norms and persistent gaps in collective responsibility.

These cases demonstrate that Global South host states have long shaped refugee governance through evolving practices. Both reveal enduring gaps—especially around equitable burden-sharing—that undermine durable solutions. The paper argues that refugee governance has historically been driven less by principled norm diffusion than by strategic responsibility-shifting, with lasting global consequences.

By placing these cases in conversation, the study contends the global refugee regime must address first-host state priorities: meaningful burden-sharing, viable pathways to durable solutions, and recognition of geopolitical constraints. It challenges the binary framing of Global North as norm-setters and Global South as norm-receivers, showing how first-host states actively shape, reinterpret, and strain refugee protection norms—even when outside the formal 1951 Refugee Convention framework.

The Development and Dismantling of Fragmented Protection: Rohingya Refugee Experiences of Fragmented Governance Across India — Rohini Mitra (University of Göttingen)

Research has extensively explored the ad hoc nature of forced migration governance in India, with scholars arguing that India has tended to take a different approach to different asylum-seeking groups. Recent research also highlights how policy toward a single refugee group can shift drastically over time. 

What does this fragmentation and ad hocism mean for the everyday life of refugee and asylum-seeking communities? How does it affect the lived experience of refuge and protection in India? This article tackles these questions by examining the case of the Rohingya refugees in India—once granted official Long Term Visas as asylum seekers in 2012, now marked for detention and deportation as illegal immigrants in 2025. 

Drawing from fieldwork conducted with refugees, community leaders, and NGOs working across the country, this article examines how the combination of fragmented (forced) migration governance and divergent settlement patterns of the Rohingya in India has resulted in a form of fragmented protection, marked by different degrees of negotiated access to services such as health and education. At the same time, the precarity of the Rohingyas’ legal status in India (as UNHCR card-holders who are simultaneously deemed illegal by the Indian government) profoundly influences the operational space and potential impact of this fragmented protection. 

I show how fragmented protection is increasingly shaped by structural shocks including the political (negative government stance on refugees), the discursive (growing negative public perception of the Rohingya), and the administrative (drives toward all-encompassing digital identification schemes inhibiting the space for policy discretion).

Responsibility-Sharing and Narrative Tracing across Scales of Power: How Expectations in Geneva are Renegotiated in Beirut — Tamirace Fakhoury (Tufts University)

Responsibility-sharing lies at the heart of the international refugee regime. Yet, it remains a fuzzy concept subject to what we call ‘conceptual stretching.’ While the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) is among the latest instruments designed to operationalize responsibility-sharing, little is known about how actors perceive the Compact and its spelled-out objectives on responsibility sharing. 

This paper adopts a politics of scale perspective to problematize how global narratives such as responsibility-sharing travel and localize across different sites of power. Drawing on thirty interviews, it examines the contrasting narratives of responsibility-sharing articulated by UN officials in Geneva and local organizations in Lebanon, a country that has not signed the 1951 Convention and that is often positioned at the margins of power in the international refugee regime. 

Findings show that while stakeholders in both Geneva and Beirut recognize the rationalities of power underpinning the GCR, they craft narratives about its potential to operationalize responsibility-sharing in markedly different ways. UN officials celebrate the GCR’s multilateral partnerships, and supposed benefits for local agency. They also view the Compact’s non-binding character as a flexible pathway for creative problem-solving when states cannot commit. In contrast, civil society actors in Lebanon caution against superficial invocations of “localization” and “responsibility-sharing.” They argue that the GCR’s non-binding nature renders it a weak instrument and risks reducing it to a technical infrastructure within the international refugee regime. 

Narrative tracing does not only serve to map misalignments across scales of power. It also reveals underappreciated opportunities. One of the aims of this paper is thus to explore how narratives create openings for organizations such as the UN to learn from states and societies that have been framed as peripheral to the making of the modern refugee regime.

Between Mandate and Market: UNHCR, IOM and the Refugee Governance in Bangladesh — Naureen Rahim (University of Oslo)

This article examines how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—a normative agency—sustained its role alongside the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a non-normative actor that the Bangladeshi government designated to play a lead role during the 2017 Rohingya influx. This results in “regime shifting” (Morse and Keohane 2014), whereby an alternative multilateral organization that offers a more favorable mandate challenges the existing multilateral organization by shifting its authority within the regime. 

Drawing on archival materials and interviews conducted during fieldwork in Bangladesh, I argue that Bangladesh has tended to favor the IOM over the UNHCR primarily to avoid the latter’s intense normative pressures associated with stringent international refugee standards. The perceived lack of conducive durable solutions offered by the UNHCR for the Rohingya crisis has eroded the State’s confidence in the agency. By contrast, Bangladesh has increasingly relied on the IOM’s capacity to manage migration-related issues, viewing the organization as more practically aligned with its objectives for refugee management. Fieldwork data also indicate that the decision to engage the IOM during the 2017 influx was not made in isolation or solely by formal state institutions in Bangladesh; individual actors with personal or political stakes also played a role in shaping that decision.

Refugee Protection Beyond Ratification: Indonesia’s Hybrid Governance Model and Its Structural Gaps — Fransiska Susanto (Universitas Brawijaya)

Seventy-five years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, significant refugee-hosting states remain outside its formal legal framework, raising critical questions about how refugee protection operates beyond treaty ratification. Indonesia exemplifies this condition: despite being a non-party to the Convention and its 1967 Protocol, it hosts thousands of refugees under a fragmented regulatory regime shaped by immigration law, executive regulation, and sustained cooperation with international organizations. 

This article examines how refugee protection is constituted in Indonesia beyond the Convention framework, analyses the structural protection gaps produced by hybrid and non-binding arrangements—particularly under Presidential Regulation 125/2016—and reflects on the normative implications of governing displacement through administrative pragmatism rather than rights-based law. Employing a qualitative socio-legal method, the study combines doctrinal analysis of domestic legal instruments with policy review and case-based examination of reception practices, mobility restrictions, and access to basic services. 

The findings demonstrate that Indonesia’s approach enables limited protection through operationalised non-refoulement and humanitarian coordination, while simultaneously entrenching legal precarity, prolonged immobility, and uneven subnational implementation. This hybrid governance model mitigates immediate humanitarian risks but reproduces structural vulnerability and dependency. 

The article argues that refugee protection beyond ratification requires clearer domestic procedures, stronger integration of international human rights norms, and regionally coordinated minimum standards, offering a critical perspective on how the Refugee Convention’s normative influence persists—and fractures—outside formal membership.

Panel B1: Judicial Pathways in Refugee Law

Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Özlem Gürakar Skribeland (University of Oslo)

The 1951 Refugee Convention in Law and in Practice: Judicial Attempts To Curb State-Led Barriers to Asylum — Chiara Scissa (University of Bologna)

A persisting challenge to the correct application of the 1951 Refugee Convention in signatory States refers to administrative practices or omissions that, once individuals are within a State’s territory, impede the formalization of their asylum claims or the initiation of asylum procedures in contravention of core tenets of refugee law.

The article examines these procedural barriers that are designed to, or result in, preventing access to asylum through the lens of national courts. Particularly, it aims to understand whether and how domestic judicial remedies interpret their legality and what role the 1951 Refugee Convention plays in judicial interpretations. The article draws on the analysis of relevant jurisprudence from eight jurisdictions worldwide ranging from Europe to Africa and Latin America. These are: Italy, Greece, Poland, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and Kenya. This contribution presents the interim results of an in-depth data collection, including case law analysis, of domestic judgments where, inter alia, administrative flaws, backlogs, corruption, and scam procedures have been adjudicated.

The aim is to assess whether, and to what extent, Courts in jurisdictions bound by the 1951 Refugee Convention rely on it when adjudicating the lawfulness of procedural barriers that impede access to asylum. From a socio-legal perspective, the article examines the context-dependent influence of the Refugee Convention, drawing on national judicial behavior, legal culture, and other national and regional legal tools at its disposal. In turn, this study contributes to understanding whether domestic judges in different world’s regions use the 1951 Refugee Convention as a benchmark against unlawful practices and policies and to highlight instances of convergence and of divergence in the approach they endorse when adjudicating procedural barriers in light of their State’s obligations in the field of refugee law.

The 1951 Convention in the Context of Asylum Access Adjudication by Malaysian Courts — Lorett Mary Jesudoss (University of Bologna)

This paper sheds light on the role of the 1951 Convention in Malaysian court practice as regards the legality of barriers to accessing asylum. Moreover, it reflects on the socio-legal factors that influence judicial engagement.

Although a non-signatory, the Convention has been invoked, alongside other instruments, to challenge Malaysian deterrence and containment arrangements, including interception at sea, criminalization of entry, and immigration detention.

We undertake a qualitative analysis of 11 published Malaysian judgments from 2005 to 2025 on barriers to accessing asylum, focusing on habeas corpus and other criminal law pathways, complemented with interviews with key informants.

Our analysis first identifies patterns in the legal value courts have ascribed to the Convention, showing that a lack of binding force does not end the inquiry (Janmyr/Skribeland 2025). We demonstrate that the Convention functions primarily as a negative or indirect reference point rather than an enforceable source of rights. However, the Convention has shaped justificatory vocabulary and approaches at the margins. We reveal emerging constructive judicial pathways in anchoring the principle of non-refoulement in customary international law and relying on UNHCR as a functional proxy or factual/administrative hinge in a system without a domestic asylum framework and the evidentiary relevance of its documents.

A multi-level (macro, meso, and micro) analytical framework for socio-legal analysis (Lacchei/Moraru 2025) will be adopted to understand the factors influencing judicial decision-making. Among other things, we assess the impact of securitized political discourse alongside differentiated and selective protection, adjudication by non-specialized, resource-constrained courts, persistent evidentiary hurdles, and the role of non-legal intermediaries.

In conclusion, we will reflect upon the practical implications of our analysis for future asylum adjudication in Malaysia.

Gender Mainstreaming in International Refugee Law: The Contribution of the Court of Justice of the European Union — Salvo Nicolosi (Utrecht University)

This paper examines the role of gender mainstreaming in international refugee law and highlights the significant contribution of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in advancing a gender-sensitive reading of the Refugee Convention. Understood as the incorporation of a gender equality perspective in all policies at all levels and all stages, gender mainstreaming has been rather underdeveloped in international refugee law, as also acknowledged by the UNHCR. While the CJEU has played a major role in gender equality policy from the mid-1970s, it became less active from the mid-1990s, when gender mainstreaming gained prominence. 

In our analysis, we demonstrate that the CJEU has regained its pivotal role in a series of judgments on gender-based asylum, namely WS (Women victims of domestic violence), K, L, (Gender equality) and AH and FN (Afghan women). Through an integrated analysis of these recent rulings, the paper explains how the Court has strengthened the recognition of women as a “particular social group” while mobilizing the notions of systematic discriminatory and structural gender-based oppression to determine the existence of a risk of persecution for women. 

We argue that, drawing on international instruments such as CEDAW and the Istanbul Convention, this case law exemplifies systemic integration, giving concrete effect to international standards that states have often endorsed in principle yet implemented unevenly in practice. Additionally, we explain to what extent this case law embeds gender mainstreaming within a field that, as has often been pointed out, has especially evolved mirroring the dominantly masculine understanding of refugees. 

Finally, by explaining, through references to recent national developments, how the Court’s rulings challenge policy reluctance towards gender mainstreaming, we conclude that the CJEU has acted as a pivotal actor in bridging between international standards on women’s protection and national practices.

The Incidental Organic Evolution of Refugee Protection: How Bangladesh’s Courts Internalised Non-Refoulement — M Sanjeeb Hossain (University of Oslo)

This article shall essentially serve as a critical reading of key case law concerning refugees in Bangladesh, with particular focus on Faustina Pereira v. State (2001), which used constitutional rights and public-interest litigation to secure the release of foreign detainees which included ten refugees from Myanmar, and Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) v The Government of Bangladesh (2017), where the court explicitly recognized the principle of non-refoulement as a binding principle of customary international law.

I shall revisit these cases, utilising legal history, particularly oral history as a tool of excavation, through the recollections of Faustina Pereira and Md Minhazul Islam, the key figures behind them. In the process, the paper shall trace the gradual internalization of the principle of non-refoulement by Bangladesh’s courts between the years 2001 and 2018, and demonstrate that Bangladesh’s judiciary can indeed play an essential role in bringing international refugee law norms into the national legal system, with constitutional litigation serving as a key pathway for such change in countries that have not signed the Refugee Convention and do not yet have a domestic law that addresses refugee matters.

Overall, the paper responds to Professor Maja Janmyr’s call for a “closer examination of the relationship between the international refugee law regime and non-signatory States” and complements the understanding within refugee studies that the judiciary can be a “promising site for refugee protection”.

Refugee Convention and Obligations Erga Omnes Partes: Prospects for Litigating the Refugee Convention before the International Court of Justice — Elizabeth Mavropoulou (University of Westminister)

The paper explores the community interest nature of the Refugee Convention and investigates the extent to which some of its provisions establish obligations erga omnes partes. According to the case law of the ICJ, certain treaty obligations protecting shared values or common interests are owed by a state party to all the other parties to the treaty and thus all parties have a common interest in compliance with the relevant obligations. The legal consequences of such qualification entails a right of any party to the treaty to invoke responsibility in cases of breach and request reparations. Given the centrality of the principle of non-refoulement in the protection of refugees and asylum seekers, the paper explores to what extent the prohibition in Article 33 of the Convention establishes an obligation erga omnes partes. 

The questions asked are the following: 

• Does the prohibition of refoulement protect a fundamental value shared by all parties to the Convention and what that shared value might be?
• Does the status of the norm as customary international law binding upon all states and its potential candidacy for peremptory norm status (jus cogens) adduces the erga omnes character of the relevant obligations?
• What are the legal consequences of such qualification in terms of enforcement? 

In light of increasing non-compliance with Refugee Convention norms and specifically non-compliance with refoulement (evidenced in asylum seekers and refugees being denied access to territory and pushed back where they face serious risk of harm) this inquiry is imperative for pursuing state accountability. While to date no state party has brought a dispute before the ICJ regarding the interpretation or application of the Convention under Article 38, investigating the potential erga omnes character of non-refoulement related obligations sheds light to the prospects of future litigation and legal standing before the Hague Court.

Overlooked Avenues: Challenging Refugee Externalisation Through African Regional Mechanisms — Ramy Abdelhady (University of Bristol)

Throughout the past few decades, safe third country agreements and other externalisation practices have increasingly targeted African states as destinations for transferred refugees and asylum seekers. While critical literature has thoroughly examined the human rights implications of these arrangements, academic and practical engagement with this topic has been overwhelmingly focused on European instruments and the role of European regional mechanisms, namely the ECtHR and the CJEU, as avenues of adjudication. African regional and sub-regional mechanisms have received very little attention, representing a significant gap in both the literature and strategic litigation practice. 

This paper addresses this gap by examining four African institutions: the African Commission, the African Court, the East African Court, and the ECOWAS Court. It maps the litigation pathways these mechanisms offer, analysing procedural requirements such as standing and jurisdiction, as well as the substantive rights frameworks that can be utilised to contest externalisation practices before them. 

Beyond contentious litigation, the paper also considers the African Commission’s promotional mandate as a vital advocacy tool that must complement litigation efforts. It examines its standard-setting role, the contributions of its Special Rapporteur on Refugees in Africa, state reporting processes, and its historical engagement with externalisation. 

The paper argues that despite the structural barriers facing the four African mechanisms, these mechanisms provide viable, though often overlooked, avenues for developing a continent-wide refugee jurisprudence that would, in turn, influence the development of international refugee law jurisprudence. 

If international refugee law aims to be genuinely universal at the 1951 Refugee Convention’s 75th anniversary, it is time to rebalance the centre of gravity from Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and more towards Banjul, Arusha, and Abuja.

Panel B2: Re-reading and Re-imagining the 1951 Convention

Blue Room

Chair: Arjumand Bano Kazmi (University of Oslo)

Refugee Protection as Consular Protection? Re-reading the 1951 Refugee Convention Against the Backdrop of the Global Passport Regime — Sara Cosemans (KU Leuven)

What does international refugee protection protect? The legal narrative frames protection as the guarantee of non-refoulement and a bundle of rights derived from refugee status. This paper challenges that framing by recovering a crucial historical dimension that has largely disappeared from view: the consular logic at the heart of early international refugee administration.

In the aftermath of World War I, when the global passport regime became universalized and citizenship was cemented as the gateway to rights, the League of Nations developed the Nansen passport as a form of international consular substitute protection. Stateless refugees did not receive humanitarian assistance or equal citizenship rights, but rather juridical status and regulated mobility, enabling them to re-enter the newly passported international order. Protection, in this context, meant ensuring that no one circulated in the world without attachment to a state-like authority.

The 1951 Refugee Convention inherited this architecture but obscured its origins. The Convention returned responsibility for refugee status determination (and with it, authority over mobility) back to states. The humanitarian language of rights masked a deeper continuity: international protection remained a mechanism for reinscribing displaced persons into the nation-state order, not for challenging that order’s exclusions. By foregrounding border control and territorial sovereignty, the Convention preserved the assumption that every individual must belong to one state and derive protection from it.

By re-reading the Convention through the lens of the global passport regime, this paper offers a new interpretation of what refugee protection does: safeguarding the integrity of the nation-state system by controlling and regularising human movement. In a world shaped by postcolonial state fragility and proliferating displacement, this foundational consular logic continues to determine whose mobility is facilitated/contained

Refugee Convention and Cultural Heritage — Sherine Al Shallah (University of New South Wales)

I argue that cultural heritage is integral to refugee identity and that the refugee definition is interlinked with cultural heritage, such that refugee status determination is entangled with refugee cultural heritage and refugee protection is unfulfilled without the protection and safeguarding of refugee cultural heritage. My submission cuts across international cultural heritage law, international human rights law and international refugee law and undertakes a process of systemic integration of the three to extend refugee protection to refugee cultural heritage protection and safeguarding. 

The integration is based on linking the grounds of persecution in the refugee definition under the Refugee Convention (race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion) to cultural heritage. Linking the refugee definition to cultural heritage also enables linking cultural heritage protection and safeguarding to non-refoulement. Cultural heritage refers to historical or ethnographic inheritance from previous generations. Refugee cultural heritage therefore refers to refugee practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills, refugee relationships with their tangible cultural heritage, in addition to associated instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces. 

In cultural heritage law, the theoretical principle of inseparability implies that protecting the lives of refugees and safeguarding their intangible cultural heritage are inseparable objectives and inextricably linked. The safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage of refugees and the protection of their lives become conceptually and operationally inseparable. Refugee protection becomes concerned with the safeguarding of refugee intangible cultural heritage not for their own sakes, but for the sake of the people who care about them, and because it is impossible to separate a people’s cultural heritage from the people itself and that people’s rights.

International Refugee Law: from queer exclusion to queer reconstruction — Jaba Kaplanishvili (University of Westminister)

The 1951 Refugee Convention was not originally designed to protect individuals fleeing persecution based on their sexual orientation or gender identities. Although the definition of a refugee has been expanded, protection remains inconsistent and partial. 

The past migration complexities resulted in queering the refugee definition. Still, the current complexities of modern migration require an effort to adapt legal frameworks to the lived experiences of sexual and gender diversities. Among other criteria, the asylum applicants are trying to convince the decision maker that their identity does not conform to the cis/heterosexual norms. Different methods of assessing these characteristics have been identified, but none of them accurately reflect the current complexities of migration. 

The European Union had approached this challenge by adopting several methods of assessing sexuality and gender identity, which then violated human rights. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, decision-makers continue to rely on narratives that evoke emotions. However, those methods reflect binary and heteronormative prejudices and assumptions, excluding individuals who do not conform to them. 

This paper argues that international refugee law must move beyond such frameworks and assumptions by examining what constitutes sexual and gender diversity. Before any attempt is made to redesign the credibility assessment of sexual and gender identities, it is crucial to reconstruct sexuality and gender in international refugee law. To encompass this reconstruction, it is necessary to adopt a queer theory approach to understand the terms of sexuality and gender.

The Practitioner's Paradox: Local Realities and Relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention — Dilahan Bice-Kurtoğlu (University of Warwick)

Legal NGOs supporting asylum seekers in Greece hold a crucial position within the complex asylum system. They guide applicants through asylum procedures where success often hinges on demonstrating eligibility under the 1951 Convention's refugee definition, passing the threshold of localised admissibility criteria and establishing credibility under vague guidelines. 

Yet, during the author’s PhD fieldwork, when legal practitioners across various levels of seniority were asked to reflect on ongoing debates about the Convention's relevance and future, their responses revealed a striking paradox. Despite using the Convention as a foundational tool daily, some admitted they "haven't thought about it really" or were considering its broader significance "for the first time." 

This study, based on 19 semi-structured interviews conducted in Greece, reveals a tension between the Convention's theoretical centrality and its perceived marginalisation in practice.Participants described a nationalisation of refugee law that sidelines the Convention, with some criticising it as outdated and loose, failing to cover contemporary needs. Others, however, framed it as "a legacy to be maintained and preserved," emphasising its fundamental role in providing international protection to millions. 

This paper amplifies the voices of practitioners navigating complex and deficient national asylum infrastructures and an increasingly politicised legal landscape in Europe's periphery.Their ambivalence raises critical questions:Does the disconnect between daily reliance and lack of reflection signal a deeper crisis in how international refugee law functions? What does practitioners' unreflective use of the Convention reveal about the gap between international legal frameworks and their implementation in local contexts? 

By centering those who translate law into impact on their clients' lives and futures, this paper challenges scholarly debates to account for the realities of frontline legal practice.

Reimagining Compliance: Fortifying Refugee Protection in Africa through Community-Centered Approaches — Norman Pinduka (Africa University)

The 1951 Refugee Convention, while foundational for refugee protection, faces significant implementation challenges in Africa, prompting a pressing need for innovative, community-centred solutions. 

This research proposes that by harnessing local traditions and practices, African states can not only enhance compliance with the Convention but also foster a more inclusive environment for refugees. Utilizing a qualitative epistemological approach that relies on in-depth interviews with refugees, state authorities, local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and community leaders, and documentary analysis, this study illuminates the essentiality of grassroots initiatives in effectively complementing formal legal frameworks. 

From Zimbabwe’s ‘forgotten refugee crisis’, where community mediation by elders can ease host-refugee tensions, to Uganda’s progressive policies promoting refugee participation in governance and cultural integration through joint agricultural projects, innovative methods abound. South Africa’s complex refugee-migration landscape serves as a backdrop for community-led initiatives that raise awareness and counter stigma, while cultural exchange programs celebrate diversity and bridge divides. 

By analysing these diverse case studies, the paper highlights successful community-driven interventions and their profound impact on compliance with the Convention. As the geopolitical landscape continues to evolve, this study takes the opportunity to rethink and unthink the Convention’s role in safeguarding refugee rights. 

By showing how localised compliance mechanisms can resonate with the rich cultural tapestry of African nations, it ultimately seeks to enhance the conversation on refugee protection and pave the way for a more inclusive and successful response to forced displacement that upholds human dignity and promotes social cohesion.

Panel C1: Temporariness in Refugee Protection

Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Özlem Gürakar Skribeland (University of Oslo)

Ending Protection: Temporal Incongruities — Marjoleine Zieck (University of Amsterdam)

Refugee protection is by definition temporary, at any rate not meant to last indefinitely even though that is belied by many protracted refugee situations. The question is, when may protection be ended, in particular when the circumstances that gave rise to flight have seized to exist. It is a question that is of interest both to signatory and non-signatory states. 

For the first-mentioned because the cessation threshold was from the outset raised from the mere negation of the applicability of the refugee definition to durable change and then to the very demanding one propagated by UNHCR (restoration of protection, functioning legal system), thus prolonging the duration of the ban on refoulement. 

For the latter, the non-signatory states, the relevant cessation clauses are for obvious reasons not immediately relevant but not wholly irrelevant either since those states are arguably bound to observe the customary counterpart of Article 33(1), 1951 Convention: but what does that norm mean when cut loose from the 1951 Convention including its cessation clauses? In particular, when does it cease to be applicable? At the same time, many of those states are bound to observe non-refoulement provisions comprised in human rights treaties such as Article 7 of the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: do they cease to be applicable simultaneously? It becomes more complicated when UNHCR is entered into the equation – bound as it is to observe the same cessation clauses as signatory states – especially when it is operational in non-signatory states. 

A beneficial change of circumstances in the country of origin may, when qualified by UNHCR as ‘circumstances that are conducive to return’, be the moment it initiates an organized voluntary repatriation operation. But what if that assessment coincides with the time protection may be ended in and by non-signatory states?

Cessation and the ‘Temporary Turn’ in Refugee Protection — Jessica Schultz (Chr. Michelsen Institute)

During the past decade, as part of sharpened deterrence strategies, contracting parties to the Refugee Convention have increasingly exploited opportunities under Article IC to withdraw refugee status when the need for protection is deemed to no longer exist. The systematic protection reviews introduced in these jurisdictions are entangled with efforts to deny migrants permanent settlement, to combat fraud in the immigration system and to remove people with criminal records, leading to the erosion of substantive and procedural standards. 

In this contribution we examine dilemmas posed by current practice and propose approaches that better reconcile cessation practice with the broader normative requirements of ‘durable solutions’ including mobility rights.

The Gap Between Temporary Refuge and Asylum: How International Refugee Law Entrenches Crisis — Maciej Grześkowiak (European University Institute)

The paper offers a novel perspective on the inadequate functioning of the international refugee regime, characterised by soaring global refugee numbers, the crisis of so-called durable solutions, and the rise of protracted refugee situations. It argues that these developments are closely tied to a global shift towards emergency-driven, temporary forms of protection at the expense of durable asylum.

Scholars have long observed that the ‘traditional’ institutions of international protection (refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention and complementary protection) are, or are perceived to be, largely inadequate for addressing situations of large-scale, rapid displacement. Consequently, states have increasingly relied on emergency-driven tools based on the concept of temporary refuge. Although framed as time-bound measures, they tend to persist long after the immediate crisis has subsided, thereby entrenching the precarious legal standing of their beneficiaries.

With the underlying consensus that temporary refuge and temporary protection statuses can serve a useful function in managing large-scale influxes, they become deeply problematic over time, when states withhold durable asylum as a pathway to local integration. By analysing the interplay between temporary refuge and forms of asylum mandated by international law (refugee status and complementary protection), the paper reveals the extent to which international law enables, and at times incentivises, such outcomes.

To conceptualise this dynamic, the paper introduces the concept of ‘gap between temporary refuge and asylum’. Crucially, however, the paper does not stop at identifying and doctrinally delimiting this gap, but also draws on case studies to explore avenues for addressing it at both international and domestic levels. The paper thus contributes to ongoing debates about the capacity of international law to govern contemporary displacement and the prospects for improving that capacity.

(Between) Temporality and Durability of Refugee Protection — Maja Łysienia (University of Lausanne and HES-SO Valais-Wallis)

Refugee status is often seen as the most durable and permanent solution for persons fleeing their countries of origin. Meanwhile, other protection mechanisms are criticized for their temporary character and the entwined lack of certainty and stability. 

This paper questions this dualistic approach by investigating the temporalities inscribed into the 1951 Refugee Convention and the durability of other protection-focused regimes, in particular the EU’s temporary protection. Accordingly, the analysis starts with the interpretation of Article 1(C) (5-6) of the Convention that led to diverse national practices aimed at conducting periodic reviews of the refugee eligibility criteria, or to automatic reappraisal of granted refugee protection in reaction to the developments in the country of origin. 

Beyond the implementation of the cessation clause, the temporariness of refugee status has been also intertwined with and mirrored in the rules concerning residence permits and diverse rights granted to refugees. 

Meanwhile, temporalities have been similarly constructed in case of the EU’s temporary protection. The temporary character of this protection was firmly inscribed into the Temporary Protection Directive: its maximal duration was restricted to three years and the immediate return of beneficiaries was expected afterwards. 

Since the directive’s activation in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the temporariness of temporary protection was, however, watered down, mostly due to the EU Member States’ decision to extend temporary protection to five years. By comparing temporality and durability of refugee status and temporary protection, this paper aims at understanding the legal mechanisms used to create temporariness in refugee protection. 

It concludes by finding that, despite their differences, refugee status and temporary protection are both currently positioned between durability and temporality – in the state of “permanent temporariness".

Panel C2: Digitization and Artificial Intelligence

Blue Room

Chair: M Sanjeeb Hossain (University of Oslo)

AI, Borders, and the Relevance of the Refugee Convention — Abdullah Yassen (Erbil Polytechnic University)

This paper explores the complex relationship between the increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in border control and its potential impact on the applicability of the 1951 Refugee Convention. It questions how individuals can seek asylum if AI-driven securitisation prevents them from successfully leaving their home country to claim asylum and subsequently could obtain refugee status, suggesting this development could render the existing Convention obsolete and eventually violate the right to leave any country as guaranteed in Art. 12(2) ICCPR. 

We highlight a crucial aspect of the EU AI Act, specifically Recital 60, which mandates that AI systems must not be used to circumvent international obligations under the Refugee Convention, particularly concerning the principle of non-refoulement. Consequently, we argue that AI should not be permitted to impede state responsibilities regarding refugee protection. 

The discussion raises the specific issue of whether and in how far the new EU AI Act's provisions are relevant to the management of extraterritorial migration as well as border control and surveillance.

Intersecting Legal Principles: Refugee Exclusion and GDPR Implications — Didem Doğar (Tilburg University)

This paper critically examines the implications of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the processing and sharing of personal data related to asylum seekers who may fall within the exclusion clause of Article 1F, individuals suspected of having committed serious crimes. The practice of sharing Article 1F files with law enforcement authorities has become increasingly contentious, especially when explicit consent from asylum seekers cannot be obtained. 

Through doctrinal and comparative legal analysis, this paper explores the lawful bases for such data processing under GDPR Articles 6(1)(e) (public interest) and 6(1)(f) (legitimate interests), focusing on the required balancing test between the legitimate interests of law enforcement and the fundamental rights of data subjects, including privacy and protection against self-incrimination. The analysis is enriched by a comparative examination of national laws, such as the UK Data Protection Act and the Dutch UAVG, to assess how these frameworks interpret and implement GDPR requirements in the context of Article 1F. 

By contextualizing the discourse within more extensive discussions concerning the ongoing relevance of the Refugee Convention, this paper calls for clear and transparent legal standards and safeguards to ensure both effective law enforcement cooperation and the protection of asylum seekers’ rights.

From the Legal Refugee to the Computational Refugee in an Age of Algorithmic Prediction — Murtaza Mohiqi (University of Agder)

The 1951 Refugee Convention is grounded in a legal imagination that conceives refugee status determination as individualized, interpretive, and rooted in human judgment, centred on narrative-based credibility assessment and the ex post legal recognition of risk following flight and arrival. 

This paper argues that these assumptions are increasingly unsettled by the growing use of digital and algorithmic systems in contemporary asylum governance. Drawing on sustained engagement with human rights law across the Global South and Global North, and informed by legal technology and critical data studies, the paper examines algorithmic transformations in refugee protection through the heuristic of the computational refugee. It contends that refugeehood is increasingly constituted through anticipatory calculations of future risk, credibility, and governability, as asylum seekers are rendered legible through data extraction, profiling, and probabilistic modelling, often prior to formal legal recognition. 

The paper advances three interrelated arguments. First, algorithmic prediction reconfigures refugee protection from a rights-based legal determination into a pre-emptive form of risk governance. Second, computational logics systematically strain core principles of the Refugee Convention, including individualized assessment, the benefit of the doubt, and the meaningful operation of non-refoulement, all of which presuppose interpretive discretion rather than statistical inference. Third, these technologies reshape authority within asylum systems, displacing legal judgment with infrastructural forms of power that are opaque, weakly accountable, and difficult to contest. 

The paper concludes that without sustained critical engagement with algorithmic governance, the Refugee Convention risks shifting from a framework of legal safeguards to a legitimising reference for predictive and depersonalised control.

The Refugee Convention and the Crisis of the Voice in the New Frontier: The Case for Algorithmic Asylum — Angel Peña Perez (ECODE Foundation)

The Refugee Convention turns 75 at a moment of critical convergence. Born from the post-war humanitarian imperative, the asylum regime now intersects with Artificial Intelligence (AI). While asylum digitalization promises the ethical defense of the different, this process risks a regression toward dehumanization. Compounding this, pervasive data collection and constant tracking have rendered the geographical border elastic and liquid, extending surveillance far into the asylum seeker's life. 

This paper argues that the current data governance framework in asylum policies—focused narrowly on privacy (GDPR) and transparency—fails to address structural algorithmic profiling. Drawing on forensic empirical evidence, we demonstrate that AI systems used for assessing credibility, risk, and vulnerability are built upon a neuronormative bias. This bias systematically penalizes the full spectrum of the asylum seeker’s voice, specifically excluding: communication patterns indicative of post-traumatic stress, cognitively divergent styles, and narratives affected by cultural or religious biases minimized by the AI’s data set. We contend that the algorithmic penalization of human expression—by classifying it as "inconsistent" or "statistical noise"—constitutes a form of systematic digital persecution, thereby denying the right to Epistemic Justice.

Faced with the structural persecution exerted by algorithmic bias, the international community must respond with the creation and recognition of a framework for Algorithmic Asylum. We propose that Cognitive Equity must become a binding normative requirement for data governance in asylum. This framework, detailed through Five Pillars of Inclusive Governance (e.g., participatory co-creation and specialized ethical oversight), offers an innovative solution to adapt and reaffirm the Article 3 (Non-Discrimination) of the 1951 Convention against 21st-century digital threats.

Panel D1: Regression and Backlash

Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Marjoleine Zieck (University of Amsterdam)

Dismantling the Refugee Convention: The Trump Administration's Existential Challenges — Jaya Ramji-Nogales (Temple University)

On the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, the U.S. has hit the nadir of it “commitment and compliance with the Convention’s norms.” Over at least five decades after it ratified the Convention, the United States championed refugee law: it was the largest funder of UNHCR, the leader in refugee resettlement, and a key supporter of asylum law and policy domestically and across the globe. Though this commitment was politically motivated during the Cold War, the Refugee Convention was a powerful protection mechanism that shaped many domestic laws and policies. From his first presidential campaign likening Syrian refugees to “poisoned Skittles”, Donald Trump unraveled U.S. support for non-refoulement. As the Cold War ended, Trump’s explicitly xenophobic politics gained traction, targeting refugees in particular for hateful rhetoric. 

Under the first Trump administration, a range of laws and policies undermined refugee law, from closing the southern border under the guise of the Covid-19 pandemic to forcibly separating asylum-seeking families to overturning the legal basis for gender-based asylum. The second Trump administration has far exceeded those efforts, engaging openly and gleefully in refoulement, undermining the Convention’s protections at every turn. From closing the southern border through a policy previously determined to be ultra vires of the federal immigration statute to deporting hundreds of Venezuelans and Salvadorans, including asylees, to a maximum security prison in El Salvador with a brutal human rights record to deporting asylees to countries in which they have never stepped foot, Trump has opened a new chapter on bad faith noncompliance with the Convention. 

After discussing many of those changes, this talk will consider the road ahead for the Refugee Convention in the United States and around the world in light of the egregious anti-refugee actions of the second Trump administration.

Crisis and Opportunity: The Erosion of International Refugee Law in Moments of Chaos — Sophie Capicchiano Young (University of Galway)

As numerous large-scale refugee crises have endured, escalated, and unfolded over time, States have frequently sought to reinforce multilateral and regional law and policy restricting critical aspects of refugee protection despite serious concern about the legality of those actions and their compliance in general with international refugee law. This article asserts that at specific historical junctures, when large-scale refugee crises unfolded, States have exploited the inherent chaos and uncertainty of those events in order to affect incremental modifications to international refugee law and policy, and that at each of these junctures, those actions have eroded the fundamental tenets of the 1951 Convention by reconceptualising systems and structures that were previously well-established in international policy and practice.

This article posits that the most significant modifications to international refugee law have occurred at four historical junctures where large-scale refugee crises received an international response: the forced displacement of Russian, Armenian, Greek, and Bulgarian populations during the inter-war period, the refugee crisis spurned by the Vietnam War, the mass displacement following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the rapid influx of refugees to Europe in 2014-15, and most recently, the massive northward mixed migration from Latin America and the Caribbean. It concludes that these examples are demonstrative of the inherent risks involved in allowing States the opportunity to pursue a recalibration of international refugee law and policy during moments of chaos and uncertainty, which inevitably result in a more restrictive regime that does not benefit the refugee above and beyond the current order.

Criminalising Asylum in Ireland — Bríd Ní Ghráinne (Maynooth University)

Article 31(1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention provides that states shall not penalise refugees who enter or are present in their territory without authorisation. Such penalties may also violate international human rights law. However, from January 2024 until October 2024, there was a spike of at least 105 people who have been prosecuted in Ireland for arrival without such documents. Many of these people were asylum-seekers. These prosecutions are a form of ‘crimmigration’ – a term coined in the US context but whose practice and study has spread globally.

This paper is the main output from the TEARMANN project, a 12-month study in collaboration with the Irish Refugee Council and funded by Research Ireland. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with key informants, including the refugees themselves, TEARMANN asks to what extent such prosecutions are compatible with international law. Using Ireland as a case study, it aims to determine the circumstances in which these prosecutions happen, their effect on refugees, and their compatibility with the Refugee Convention, EU, and international human rights law.

First, the paper will contextualise the global trend of prosecuting refugees without valid travel documents. Second, it will examine the circumstances in which refugees are prosecuted in Ireland for failure to present a valid travel document at the border (e.g. the legal grounds and outcome of prosecution, defendant’s gender and nationality). Third, will examine the impact of such prosecutions on refugees. It will provide understanding on the extent to which such prosecutions cause personal harm (eg stigma, imprisonment) and/or legal harm (eg. difficulties in future in relation to naturalisation). Finally, it will determine the extent to which these prosecutions are in accordance with international/ EU law and set out the lessons learned from the Irish context for other states.

The Death Knell of Article 31? Penalising Asylum Seekers in the UK — Sarah Singer (University of London)

In providing certain protections against penalisation for irregular entry or presence, Article 31(1) of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees addresses an important aspect of access to territory to seek protection. Yet in countries across the globe such access is continually being eroded as new measures of containment, non-entrée and externalisation abound. This paper examines a particular facet of such trends by exploring the erosion of Article 31 protection in recent legal developments in the UK, and the ways in which a perverse interpretation of the provision is now being employed to deny, rather than facilitate, access to protection.

This troubling domestic interpretation of Article 31 has underpinned a significant expansion of the UK’s inadmissibility regime by which individuals may be barred from having their asylum claim considered in the UK. This regime is targeted at those making irregular maritime journeys via small boats or entering the UK via other irregular means, and has underpinned efforts to remove asylum-seekers to third countries such as Rwanda and France.

Concomitantly, the intended protections of Article 31 have been explicitly disapplied from the range of new immigration-related criminal offences created by the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act and 2025 Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act. These criminalise irregular arrival to the UK and other aspects of irregular migration journeys, and at the same time deny recourse to immunity from prosecution as should be required under Article 31.

On the ground, this has led to stark outcomes for many seeking international protection. This paper looks behind the law to probe the impact of these legal developments in practice and questions the future of Article 31 at this key juncture of asylum law and policy in the UK.

Panel D2: UNHCR and International Protection

Blue Room

Chair: Maja Janmyr (University of Oslo)

Problem Solved? Racial Aphasia, Colonial Unknowing and the Universalization of UNHCR and the 1951 Refugee Convention — Megan Bradley (McGill University)

International organizations play critical roles in protecting and assisting refugees, but an international organization has never been created to serve the needs of all refugees equally. The touchstone of international refugee law, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is widely recognized as an exclusionary instrument focused on displacement in Europe—a limitation amended through the 1967 Protocol. 

However, there has to date been strikingly little explicit analytical attention devoted to the fact that there has never been a universally-mandated international organization created to work on refugee and migration issues, and that the dominant international organizations in this field stem from agencies that were initially tasked (de facto, if not de jure) with serving white refugees and other migrants, and the interests of so-called ‘white men’s countries’ (Lake and Reynolds 2008) that control the creation and financing of international organizations concerned with mobility and displacement. 

Responding to this gap, this article deploys the concepts of racial aphasia and colonial unknowing to retheorize UNHCR’s role in global refugee governance. Racial aphasia (difficulty speaking meaningfully about race) and colonial unknowing (actively sustained ignorance of the historical and contemporary entanglements of colonialism and racism) provide vital lenses for investigating the power and persistence of racialized hierarchies in the refugee regime. 

Drawing on extensive archival research, this article interrogates the “universalization” of refugee protection through the tandem processes of the negotiation of the 1967 Protocol and the reform of UNHCR’s mandate, and probes the consequences of “globalizing” only those instruments and institutions originally focused on white people. The paper is part of a broader study on racialization and coloniality in the work of international organizations involved in migration, including UNHCR, IOM, UNRWA and UNKRA.

The Seventh Floor: Externalisation of Asylum and Reconstructing UNHCR's Mandate — Şükrü Kağan Sürücü (University of Edinburgh)

Despite its essential role in refugee management, the UNHCR remains as a black box. Whereas the understanding and implementation of its legal mandate is explained in detail by traditional institutional law accounts, these only construe the creation of UNHCR’s legal order to be solely through the dyadic interaction of the organisation and the member states. This argument is also especially evident to explain the UNHCR’s increasing involvement in externalisation of asylum projects. 

This research aims to go beyond such traditional accounts and conceptualise the mandate of the UNHCR to be more complex, and contingent on the practices and operation of human and non-human actors that exists within the organisation’s headquarters and its regional bureaux. Borrowing from ethnography, assemblage theory and actor-network theory, this research focuses on the process of UNHCR’s gradual involvement in externalisation of asylum and aim to answer how the legal order of the organisation, its governance structure, and ultimately its legal mandate could be made and remade through the operation of the internal network of actors, including staff members, departments, bureaucracy, organisational politics, culture and leadership structures. 

By relying on interviews with UNHCR staff and data collection from the UNHCR archives, this research aims to provide a deeper understanding regarding how the legal order of the UNHCR is produced, how its mandate is actually understood and implemented by an internal assemblage, which could be portrayed through the involvement of the organisation in externalisation of asylum processing. 

Furthermore, by clarifying how the legal order of international organisations is actually made using the example of the UNHCR, this research explores novel pathways of international lawmaking in the area of refugee governance, demonstrating the legal actorhood of practice, bureaucracy and other non-hard law activities produced by international organisations.

From Humanitarianism to Statecraft? International Organizations as Facilitators and Drivers of Organized Forced Migration — Judith Hopperman (SOAS, University of London)

International organizations, like UNHCR and IOM, frequently assist in state-driven population transfers, such as IOM involvement in US President Donald Trump's "self-deportation" plan, UNHCR participation in European return hubs and its involvement in refugee returns to Syria. This paper examines continuities and transformations in international organizations’ role in organized forced migration practices, tracing their evolution from League of Nations’ oversight in the interwar period to contemporary UN frameworks. 

Through archival research and semi-structured interviews with actors in Lebanon and Turkey, we analyze how IOs have functioned as instigators and facilitators of population transfers, exchanges, and "repatriations" across a century of statecraft. 

We argue that the 1951 Convention has not eliminated IO involvement in practices that counter its cornerstones of protection and non-refoulement. Instead, it has merely reshuffled the language and policy frameworks deployed, leading to nominal compliance while maintaining similar outcomes. Our research unpacks parallels and ruptures in terms of logics and mechanisms between historical practices before 1951 and contemporary refugee return regimes. By comparing the roles of actors involved in organized forced migration in past and present, we illuminate how IOs have increasingly assumed responsibilities for organizing and legitimizing state-driven forced population movements. 

This historical perspective reveals both the persistence of organized forced migration as a tool of statecraft and its adaptation to evolving geopolitical contexts and international humanitarian norms. In doing so, we help illuminate variations in contemporary return regimes and provide a basis for a global comparative examination of IOs and non-state actors in the organization and facilitation of returns across both signatory and non-signatory contexts of the 1951 Convention.

Non-signatory States and the International Refugee Regime: Shifting hierarchies of refugees and UNHCR engagement in Saudi Arabia — Charlotte Lysa (NUPI)

How do non-signatory states relate to the international refugee regime – and vice versa? In answering this question, this paper explores the case of UNHCR in Saudi Arabia, more specifically how UNHCR has viewed the situation of refugees in the country and what has determined when the agency has intervened. Based on archival material, interviews, and statistics from UNHCR, the paper explores four distinct cases of refugees in Saudi Arabia: Zanzibari Omani, Eritrean, Kuwaiti, and Syrian.

Saudi Arabia is a non-signatory to the Refugee Convention and has no law or otherwise uniform framework for providing asylum. UNHCR first opened a Liaison Office in 1987, replaced by a Branch Office (and later, Regional Office) in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Yet, already in 1981, an UNHCR official noted the presence of a large number of refugees in Saudi Arabia. The majority, it was further noted, came from former “governing classes” in the region and did not face any problems in Saudi Arabia - in contrast to “those uprooted in Africa by the various upheavals (…).” UNHCR would occasionally report on or intervene in such cases concerning refugees in Saudi Arabia. 

However, this paper argues that who is considered eligible for various forms of assistance (financial, legal, or even resettlement) depends on the shifting hierarchies of refugees constructed by the Saudi state. The highlighted cases of groups of refugees in Saudi Arabia serve as examples first of how several factors have led to the construction of hierarchies of refugees, determining how “easy” members of these groups have found refuge. Second, how this special status can shift rapidly in response to changing political priorities, and finally, how the UNHCR’s involvement in Saudi Arabia as a non-signatory state to the Refugee Convention comes as a response to shifts in these refugee hierarchies.

When Can One Become a Refugee? Latent Refugeehood and Reluctant Asylum — Georgia Cole (University of Edinburgh) & Sousan Ibrahim (University College London)

At the heart of this article lies the question: when can one become a refugee? We do not approach this as a question about the fulfilment of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and what constitutes persecution, protection and convention grounds. Instead, we present it as a legal, empirical and sociological question about when, during people’s journeys from persecutory situations, they can be recognised – and themselves recognise – that they have a right to asylum. 

We show the complexities around answering this question in practice when refugees are not formally recognised or ‘determined’ to be so for decades after their initial flight. We ask what happens to individuals who have fled persecution to non-signatory states where their claim to asylum lies ‘latent’ or ‘dormant’ for years, or even generations, who are forced to move once again? What does it mean to suddenly become a refugee having managed successfully, albeit not always intentionally, to live with an alternative identity for so long? And when, how, and indeed can, they activate that process of recognition having lived with another legal status for such a prolonged period? 

While in this article we present the case study of displaced Eritreans who had been living in Saudi Arabia for decades to begin answering these questions, their situation is far from unique. Their experiences of what we tentatively term ‘latent refugeehood’ similarly apply to other populations for whom displacement has occurred through long-term labour migration regimes rather than asylum systems. When they eventually, and sometimes reluctantly, apply for asylum, we highlight the need to ensure that systems of international protection are attuned to this pathway to becoming a refugee.

Panel E1: Externalization and Borders

Main stage, Scene Domus Bibliotheca

Chair: Georgia Cole (University of Edinburgh)

Beyond the Convention’s Intent? Externalisation and the Limits of the Refugee Convention — Gamze Ovacık (McGill University)

The current global mobility paradigm is geared towards stopping and deterring the arrival of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to the Global North through policies for externalization of migration control. Externalization is the strategy of shifting migration control functions, such as border controls or processing of asylum applications, that are normally undertaken by a state within its own territory, to another state's territory. A prime example of externalization policies manifests in the safe third country (STC) concept, which enables destination states to send asylum seekers to other countries. 

Refugee Convention prohibits sending refugees to places where they will be in danger, but there is nothing in the Convention that explicitly prevents sending refugees to safe countries. The STC concept is built on this silence and implies that when refugees do not arrive in a state directly from a country where their fundamental rights are at risk, they can be sent back to ‘safe third countries’ they passed through that are willing to take them back. Despite being promoted as a tool for responsibility-sharing between states, the STC concept tends to aggravate the rights violations asylum seekers face and obstruct their access to asylum by containing them in countries neighboring their country of origin, where they are most often incapable of building a future, due to lack of opportunities, discrimination, and often being undocumented. 

With its increased applications across the globe, STC practices represents the fundamental problems in the construction of the global asylum regime, one that prioritizes containment of human mobility at the expense of human rights. The proposed contribution takes a principled approach in interrogating the compatibility of the STC concept with the spirit of the Refugee Convention and traces legal evidence from the Convention beyond its silence on the matter.

Marketising Exclusion: How Europe’s Border-Security Economy Challenges the Refugee Convention — Giulia Raimondo (University of Fribourg), Martin Lemberg-Pedersen (University of Southern Denmark) & Joyce De Coninck (European University Institute)

This paper explores the challenge posed to the Refugee Convention by evolving European border control technologies, policies and arrangements, and the resulting legal and administrative architecture within which European Integrated Border Management (EIBM) is implemented. 

By combining critical political economy with international human rights law as applied to the principle of non-refoulement and the right to an effective remedy, this paper first maps out the opaque and dynamic relations of profit and positionality between private and public actors involved in European border security technologies. It explains how the tenders, contracts, and R&D grants issued by European governments, EU institutions, and their agencies cultivate blurred “markets of exclusion” within which private military and security companies operate. These markets have implications for the legal-administrative topography and architecture responsible for enforcing the Refugee Convention and other instruments of human rights. 

Second, the paper critically traces the relevant international and regional human rights and refugee law instruments applicable at European borders, highlighting the human rights sensitivities inherent to EIBM-activities implemented by Frontex and the Schengen Member States and how their conduct is monitored at national and supranational levels. 

The paper concludes with reflections on potential accountability routes given the barriers resulting from the political economy and market dynamics underpinning the roll-out of border security technologies in Europe. The aim is to clarify the international human rights and refugee law obligations applicable to the multiple actors involved in European border control and highlight the challenges deriving from this multiplicity when those obligations are breached.

The Border Turn in the EU Pact: Access to Territorial Asylum under the Legal Fiction of Non-Entry — Ruben Wissing (Ghent University)

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum (2024) relocates the core of EU asylum law to the Union’s external borders. Through mandatory screening and border procedures under the legal fiction of non-entry, combined with derogatory regimes in ‘crisis’ situations, the Pact embeds border control into the core of the EU asylum system. While official discourse frames these measures as efficiency and solidarity, they risk normalising rights restrictions and legitimising pushbacks.

By relocating the focal point of EU asylum law from Member States’ interior orders to the Union’s physical and legal external borders, the fundamentally territorial character of asylum under international law (Declaration on Territorial Asylum 1967, UNGA Res. 2312 (XXII), Art. 3) risks being undermined. This entails challenges for the guaranteed access to asylum and to the rights under the 1951 Convention, including non-refoulement.

This paper applies a critical legal discourse analysis to unpack the Pact’s normative contradictions and ideological assumptions – the underlying structural tension between the inclusive logic of international refugee law and the exclusionary logic of border security. It argues that the ‘border turn’ is not a technical reform but a paradigmatic shift in EU asylum processing from a protection to a migration control instrument.

This paper is part of a research project that will move beyond legal text and connect these findings to forthcoming fieldwork at EU external borders, exploring how law’s control/protection dialectic is understood and enacted by border officials, legal aid actors, and asylum seekers. By bridging doctrinal critique with empirical inquiry, the approach invites debate on law’s role in structuring migration governance and reproducing global inequalities.

Offshore Asylum and the Future of Refugee Protection: Lessons From the Italy-Albania Migration Agreement — Bresena Kopliku (University of Shkodra “Luigj Gurakuqi”)

As European states increasingly experiment with offshore asylum processing and the externalization of migration control, the foundational principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention face growing strain. This paper examines the Italy–Albania migration agreement as a revealing case through which to assess how contemporary policies challenge established protection norms and reshape the geography of asylum. Using critical discourse analysis of Italian and Albanian media reporting, policy statements, and early implementation details surrounding the reception centers in Shëngjin and Gjadër, the study traces how asylum seekers transferred under the agreement are constructed discursively and governed in practice .

The findings show that migrant identities are framed through competing narratives—ranging from humanitarian subjects in need of care, to irregular migrants portrayed as security risks, to administrative burdens to be relocated elsewhere. These framings legitimize the offshore processing model by presenting externalization as both necessary and benign, despite its profound legal and ethical implications. While officially described as cooperative burden-sharing, the bilateral protocol effectively enables Italy to exercise extraterritorial control over asylum seekers while limiting their access to domestic legal safeguards, judicial review, and meaningful procedural guarantees.

Positioning Albania as a “transit host” operating at the periphery of the EU’s migration regime, the case illustrates how offshore arrangements produce grey zones of responsibility, weaken accountability mechanisms, and risk undermining core Convention principles, including protection against forced return, access to fair asylum procedures, and safeguards against arbitrary detention. The analysis also highlights the tensions between national political narratives, local governance capacities, and media portrayals that shape public perceptions and policy legitimacy.

Panel E2: Alternative Solutions and Actors

Blue Room

Chair: Arjumand Bano Kazmi (University of Oslo)

Complementary Pathways, the Multi-Stakeholder Approach and the Future of Refugee Protection — Emiliya Bratanova (Lund University)

The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) calls for a multi-stakeholder approach which “recogniz[es] the primary responsibility and sovereignty of States”, but also “encourages” the inclusion of community members, local authorities, faith-based organizations, academics and businesses, among others, in refugee protection initiatives (GCR 2018, Paras. 33-44). 

Complementary pathways, which are a novelty introduced by the GCR, are an example of how this multi-stakeholder approach works in practice. They are "safe and regulated avenues for refugees that complement resettlement by providing lawful stay in a third country where their international protection needs are met” (UNGCR, 2019, 5). For example, they include humanitarian corridors where faith-based organizations and local communities are the leading actors implementing complementary pathways; or labour mobility schemes engaging businesses; and education mobility schemes run by universities or university networks. 

While state authorities remain responsible for the visa issuance, the security screening, the grant of residence permits to beneficiaries of such pathways, non-state actors carry out the protection-related activities post-entry – such as provision of accommodation, language learning support, access to employment, etc. 

Protection is understood as “the complex of obligations [of states] derived from general international law and from international refugee and human rights law” (G. Goodwin-Gill and J. McAdam, E. Dunlop, 2021, 537). However, if states delegate the provision of the content of refugee protection, under Arts. 2-34 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, to non-state actors, does this mean that complementary pathways do not offer protection or expand the traditional meaning of protection under international refugee law? If so, what are the implications of such a radical break with the conventional understanding of protection for refugees, for the states, for the non-state actors and for the refugee regime?

Resettlement Is Dead. Long Live Resettlement (Research)! — Astrid Espegren (NTNU), Ingunn Bjørkhaug (Fafo) & Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (University of Oslo)

Refugee resettlement has long been celebrated as the most ambitious of the three durable solutions, embodying international solidarity and humanitarian responsibility. Yet in recent years, resettlement has faced an existential crisis: quotas have reached historic lows, multilateral frameworks are fragmenting, and ad hoc, nationally driven initiatives are emerging where collective multilateral commitments are weakening. 

Paradoxically, as resettlement declines as a policy practice, the field of resettlement research is expanding. Drawing on scholarly literature published in 2024-2026, we synthesise recent contributions to identify emerging trends in resettlement research. We review key contributions across three analytical levels: the individual (experiences of waiting, mobility, and agency), the national (selection logics, deservingness, and racialisation), and the multilateral (shifts in law, governance, and technology). Synthesising these perspectives, we show that while resettlement is increasingly marginalised as a policy field, recent scholarship suggests it remains a useful lens for understanding refugee policy and protection.

Pushing for Action in Global Refugee and Migration Fora – a Mapping of Activist Engagements — Veronica Øverlid (VID Specialized University)

Norway is an important global humanitarian actor, including in within migration and displacement. Norway also influences policies in the global and regional refugee (law) context, such as Global Refugee Forum, Global Forum for Migration & Development, Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees, and in dialogue with EU on migration and refugee policies.

While there is limited research on Norway’s engagement in these fora, there is also limited information about the role organizations and other public pressure groups play in pushing for Norway’s adoption of specific positions in this regard. Such efforts exist, however. For example, NOAS – Norwegian Organisation for Asylum Seekers (NOAS) – was invited by the Norwegian government to provide input to the Global Refugee Forum in 2019.

My research from Central and North America (Øverlid, 2025) suggests that challenges to refugee law and policy from ‘below’ brings forth perspectives often silenced by mainstream narratives. Drawing on this and other literature on activism, displacement and critical approaches to international (refugee) law (Chimni, various; Janmyr 2025; Mégret 2019; Gonzalez 2023) I map the organizations and other public pressure groups that aim to influence Norway’s contribution in global fora related to migrants and refugees, and combine this with an analysis of the (legal) discourse resulting from such engagement.

Focusing especially on themes related to the concept of ‘responsibility-sharing’ and solidarity between states related to hosting refugees, including externalization of border control, and drawing on research related to emerging migration themes in Norway’s development aid policies (Tjønneland 2022; Paasche 2022; Schultz & Talleraas 2025), I ultimately aim to understand how refugee law (and related human rights) narratives are mobilized by both activists and Norwegian authorities (and to what end), and what opportunities or potential challenges appear in this regard.

Through the Eye of the Needle: Competing Logics in Norway's Resettlement of Refugees — Ragna Lillevik (Fafo)

Resettlement, the organized transfer of refugees to countries offering permanent protection, provides a solution to protracted displacement for a select few of the world’s millions of refugees. However, the selection of who is resettled, from where, to where, and how remains a voluntary, state-driven process, shaped by the priorities of recipient countries and humanitarian organizations. 

Critics argue that resettlement often reflects arbitrary and discriminatory practices, where recipient countries' interests outweigh refugees' rights, and factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, and functional ability influence access to protection. Therefore, third-country resettlement is even put forward as an example of how institutions of the current refugee regime are transformed by creeping policy changes that “deny access to protection for (…) refugees” that would legally meet Convention norms (Mourad & Norman, 2020). 

This paper presents findings from a multi-method case study of Norwegian resettlement policies and practices. It examines how eligibility for resettlement is constructed at the intersection of humanitarian, securitizing, optimizing, and legal 'institutional logics'. These intersecting frameworks result in both structured assessments—resembling asylum case processing and prioritizing humanitarian needs—and inequitable outcomes, as Norwegian political and strategic interests significantly shape selection criteria. 

The paper highlights the dual implications of these logics: while they enable codified, systematized assessments of protection needs, they also perpetuate unequal access to resettlement for refugees. By critically analyzing these dynamics, the paper reflects on the influence of refugee-receiving states' interests in developing "durable solution" to the global refugee crises, and challenging the norms of the Refugee Convention.