The future for asylum seekers in a changing world

Although the Refugee Convention has been historically concerned with the persecutory actions of states, the preceding chapters have demonstrated that over the last decade, measures of surveillance, information sharing and deterrence of the “unauthorised” movement of people have increased across developed nations. Border security has come to dominate state preoccupation to deflect the protection needs of asylum seekers. Most Western states have implemented a raft of measures directed at deterring and keeping out asylum seekers who seek to invoke the states’ protection obligations. These measures include carrier sanctions, detention, the imposition of visa requirements on refugee-producing states, the placement of immigration officials in overseas airports and ports, intercepting asylum seekers to prevent their entering into the territory of the state, forced deportation, rebuttal of the principle of refoulement through provision of inadequate avenues to apply for refugee status, extraterritorial determination systems and processing, safe third country determinations, and the removal of judicial review rights (Morris 2003; Sianni 2003; Tazreiter 2003). Further, in recent times, asylum seekers who arrive at the shores of industrially developed states are rendered as illegal and deviant through state discourses and subjected to law and order practices (Pickering 2005). This has been amply demonstrated throughout the book, in particular in the chapters written by Babacan and Gopalkrishnan, McCulloch and Briskman. Interdiction and interception frequently result in arbitrary detention and the adoption of measures which do not leave asylum seekers with proper and adequate procedures to make an asylum claim or to seek civil remedies. As Dastyari and Taylor have, for example, demonstrated, extraterritorial protection in the form of third country processing centres (such as Australia’s Pacific Solution) and regional protection areas work to deterritorialise the protection provided to asylum seekers. In the process, such measures not only constitute a retreat from the Refugee Convention, but also shift the burden to developing countries, come at a high economic cost to the state and leave asylum seekers in limbo both in terms of their human rights and their civil rights.