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10 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 115 (1997)
Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: A Proposal for Collectivized and Solution-Oriented Protection

handle is hein.journals/hhrj10 and id is 121 raw text is: Making International Refugee Law
Relevant Again:
A Proposal for Collectivized and
Solution-Oriented Protection
James C. Hathaway*
R. Alexander Neve**
International refugee law is in crisis. Even as armed conflict and
human rights abuse continue to force individuals and groups to flee
their home countries, many governments are withdrawing from the
legal duty to provide refugees with the protection they require. While
* Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School of York University; presently Visiting Fromm
Professor of International and Comparative Law, Hastings College of the Law, University of
California at San Francisco. The research funding provided by the Ford Foundation and the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
** Legal Programmes Coordinator, Centre for Refugees Studies of York University.
Since the initial thesis for this project was published as Reconceiving Refugee Law as Human Rights
Protection, 4(2) J. REFUGEE STUD. 113 (1991), it has been debated, elaborated, and refined. In
the spring of 1993, a group of 12 top international refugee law scholars met in Toronto under
the sponsorship of the Centre for Refugee Studies to define the conceptual framework for a
reconceived system of international refugee protection. North-South teams of expert social scien-
tists were then established to generate critical empirical research on the mechanisms identified
to advance the project: collectivized administration, operational burden sharing, temporary pro-
tection pending return in safety and dignity, responsibility sharing, and repatriation and devel-
opment assistance. This research was summarized in five comprehensive Studies-in-Action,
which served as the basis for a meeting in May 1995 of 40 academics, government officials, and
representatives of nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental agencies from around
the world. Based on the deliberations of the May 1995 meeting, a draft synthesis of the proposal
for reform was widely disseminated among persons and organizations committed to refugee
protection, and was debated for several months by an international Internet discussion group
involving 80 people. Finally, consultations with leaders in the international human rights and
global governance communities were convened in London and Washington in October 1996 to
broaden the base of support for reform of the refugee protection system, and to secure strategic
guidance on how best to advance the project on the global agenda.
Most of the participants in the project's various stages acknowledged the urgent need for
refugee law reform to counter increasing resort by states to measures designed to block access to
asylum and otherwise to withdraw from their refugee protection responsibilities. There was a
strong consensus that global reform should be preceded by a sustained effort to build confidence
its the viability of collectivized and solution-oriented temporary protection, which could be
undertaken without calling into question the authority of the present Refugee Convention. This
Article seeks to respond to that advice by positing a relatively detailed proposal for reform of the
mechanisms of refugee protection at the sub-global level, conceived in a way that will lay the

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