Refugee responsibility sharing or responsibility dumping?
The following article was written by Katerina Linos, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, and Elena Chachko, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, where she has taught foreign relations law as Lecturer on Law, as well as an academic fellow at Berkeley Law’s Miller Center. It was published by Just Security on 18 June 2021.
World Refugee Day is an opportunity to focus attention on one of the most pressing refugee law and policy challenges: almost 9 out of 10 refugees are hosted in developing countries. Better distribution of responsibility for seekers of international protection remains urgently needed. Policymakers across the ideological and geographic spectrum—including the United States under both the Biden and Trump administrations, Colombia, the European Union, the African Union, and the United Nations—have all invoked versions of responsibility sharing in their rhetoric, albeit in service of diverging policy objectives.
In a new empirical and analytical paper, forthcoming in the California Law Review, we identify, describe, and rate new responsibility sharing arrangements across the world. Some arrangements are progressive, if second-best policy solutions, that transfer seekers of international protection to more affluent, safer, more institutionally competent states. Others are regressive, third-best mechanisms, that in fact constitute responsibility dumping.
Our metric builds on existing assessments of responsibility sharing in key respects. To start, we move from the realm of political theory and wishful thinking to assess current practices. We also shift the perspective from obligations to individual asylum seekers to obligations host states have toward one another. [Read more here.]