Dhaka international University.

Banani,Dhaka.

Mid-Term Assignment

Subject - Immigration and Refugee Law-3203

Teacher: Ms. Sunita Rani Biswes

Assistant professor Department of law

Dhaka international University

Submitted By -
Student Name- Md.Julhas Miah
Roll: 03
Batch: 30
LLM-2 Years (Evening)
Definition of Refugee.

A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because
of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of
persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or
membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return
home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are
leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.
68% of those displaced across borders come from just five
countries: Syria , Venezuela , Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar .

Elements of refuge.

Asylum Seekers
An asylum seeker is another type of refugee who has not officially been
recognized as a refugee by the country they have fleed to.

This application process is a long and hard one and many asylum seekers
struggle through it, sometimes ending up without a place to sleep or in
subpar conditions in refugee camps.

Internally Displaced Persons

IDPs are those who have been pushed out of their homes but remain in
their home countries.

These conditions affect the person negatively as they struggle to secure

basic necessities like food or shelter.
Stateless Persons
These are people who are forced to live without a nationality. This means
that they do not belong to any country and therefore live without any
identifying documentation.

This type of discrimination bars people from rights like healthcare and
education among many more.

Returnees
These are former refugees and have now returned to their country of origin.

Returnees may need some guidance and support in their return and in
reestablishing their life in their home country.

Along with the different types of refugees, there are also many different
reasons for refugees to flee.

Religious or Political Affiliation

Many of the world’s refugees flee their homes because of discrimination
based on things like race or political affiliation.

Religion is one of the main ways people are persecuted and forced to flee.

Political persecution also creates refugees, like Cheng Muyang, and

causes them to fight in order to remain in another country that will
guarantee their safety.

Escaping War
War is the longest-running producer of refugees, displacing people from
countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently Syria.
Discrimination based on
Gender/Sexual Orientation
Women and members of the LGBTQ community continue to be ostracized
and persecuted around the world, forcing them to flee their homes.

It was only in 2012 when the UNHCR updated their guidelines to include
gender and sexual orientation as a reason to flee and seek refuge.

Hunger
Changing and unpredictable climates are forcing people to leave their
homes in search of secure sources of food.

Climate Change
As natural disasters continue to occur with more frequency more and more
people will be forced to leave their homes in search of food, shelter, and
safety.

Who can not be a refuge.

who is not a refugee? This has both important theoretical and practical importance. The
theoretical importance is that we need a clear boundary between the refugee and the not-
refugee upon which to build our definition of the former. The political importance is that what
we are saying when we define people as refugees is that they are entitled to a set of
international binding rights and protections. But at the same time we are saying that those
excluded from the definition are excluded from that set of rights and protections.

10 Sec

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There are some obvious examples where this is very worrying. First there are the internally
displaced – those who haven’t crossed an international border. Second are those fleeing
violence who are not being directly persecuted. The third, very controversially, is climate
change – those displaced by environmental disaster in general and climate change events in
particular. Asylum seekers are a fourth example: while they the right to have their claim
heard they have no rights about the conditions under which they can be held until there is an
outcome.
But I want to look at a different case, that of the economic migrant, because the standard
distinction people make here is between the refugee and the economic migrant. How that
distinction works is that the refugee is someone who is forced to flee their host country –
they have no choice and no agency. The economic migrant chooses to leave their host
country – they exercise choice and agency.
This distinction is standard in theory, policy and practice. If you look at the major global
institutions like the World Bank and the UNHCR they all use it in this form. For example, the
UNHCR, in explaining the difference between migrants and refugees, says:
“Migrants choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly
to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or
other reasons.”
But let’s look at the basic assumption behind the distinction, that the economic migrant is not
forced to leave their host country. That assumption doesn’t stand up for any longer than a
split second – to claim that people leaving their host countries through extreme poverty and
deprivation are not being forced to leave is to depend on a very tendentious definition of
what counts as being forced.
The other side of this, of course, is that a good number of refugees do exercise choice and
agency in choosing to get into Global North states rather than remain in the Global South,
and the Global North states would prefer them not to have any agency at all, or at least just
enough agency to get over the border into another Global South state – and so the
European Union and its members are doing their best to take away what little agency
refugees now have, and they are doing it very effectively.
At present 84% of the world’s refugees are being hosted by Global South nations, and 28%
are in some of the poorest countries in the world. See here. If you count refugees per one
million US dollars GDP, then the top five hosting nations are South Sudan, Chad, Uganda,
Niger and Lebanon.
This is a status quo the Global North wishes to maintain. In 2015 more than a million people
exercised agency and choice to get into Europe. In response to that the European Union and
its members have taken active steps to close down those routes, so much so that 390,000
got into Europe in 2016. The numbers dying in the Mediterranean, in contrast, went up, from
around 3,700 in 2015 to around 5,000 in 2016. Those measures include making deals with
states with dubious human rights records, most recently Italy’s deal with certain groups in
Libya, deals which – certainly in the Italy/Libya case – drive right through the European
Convention on Human Rights.
But what I want to draw attention to here are the not-refugees, especially those we classify
as ‘economic’ migrants but who are fleeing places in search of basic survival. This is not to
say that we have to get all of these groups inside our definition of the refugee – but it is to
say that we cannot simply ignore them so we can arrive at a neat definition which gives
refugees a set of internationally binding rights and protections. What we need to know is
what rights and protections are going to put in place to protect the fundamental human rights
of other forcibly displaced groups – including economic migrants.
And so the question, “Who is a refugee?” has its opposite, “Who is not a refugee?”, and the
two questions are inextricably entangled in complex ways, such that our focus on
internationally binding human rights and protections has to be included in our answers to
both of these questions.