Brief description:

Despite being characterized as a transitory phenomenon that lasts as long as the reasons for its granting persist, the practice of the Global North in providing refugee status, as envisaged by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, demonstrates, according to many, the enduring paradigmatical shift of temporariness towards the factual permanency of protection. A shift that may be possibly coming to an end. In stark contrast to the contemporary practice of Global North remain the cessations techniques employed in different regions and situations. The instances of collective cessations, predominantly applied in the African region, or the use of exceptional, group-oriented protection measures which are in the law explicitly oriented towards the repatriation of former beneficiaries (i.e., temporary protection in EU Law) prove the complexity of approaches States are undertaking when choosing the durable solutions for the formerly protected individuals.
The dissertation thesis aims to shed light on art. 1C of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the provision of the Refugee Convention not previously addressed in the literature in detail, and on the practical implications of cessations from the perspective of the State‘s international human right obligations, both enacted at the universal and regional level of international law. While the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol remain to be the cornerstone of refugee protection both at the universal and regional level of international public law, a number of later international (human rights) instruments, whether of a regional or universal nature and harmonized regional migration instruments (i.e., Long-Term Residents Directive or Citizenship Directive in EU law) pose a very different set of questions today: What are the practical consequences of the cessation of refugee status? And moreover, what are the normative limits to such undertaking in contemporary international law? Is there a point from which States must facilitate the integration of aliens instead of pursuing their repatriation when the protection is no longer needed? The dissertation thesis affords particular attention to the European and African regional context of protecting refugees and other categories of forced migrants due to the seeming divergence of these systems, especially in cases involving long-settled migrants. However, as demonstrated by the proposed Qualification Regulation in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum and the recent use of temporary protection in addressing the mass displacement of Ukrainian and some other third-country nationals, the notion of temporariness seems to be gaining new momentum even in EU law. As of the existing literature and primary sources, the dissertation project builds mainly on the recent work of Maria O’Sullivan (Refugee Law and Durability of Protection), the existing State practice in applying cessation clauses, and the existing case law of the ECHR and Human Rights Committee concerning the internationally protected right to private and family life of each individual.

Methodology:

The dissertation thesis employs an analytical framework as the core of the research and at the same time uses the means of conventional legal analysis. This choice implies the final design of the dissertation in several aspects. Although it may be possible to approach the issue from a value-based perspective, the chosen analytical approach remains wholly focused on valid and applicable legal norms. If the analytical approach is the methodological starting point of the work, which is also served to a limited extent by the descriptive approach for the purposes of the initial definition of the relevant legal framework, the main methodological contribution of the work is the analysis of existing legal categories and institutes and their contextual mapping and interpretation among the relevant institutes. The present dissertation, as already mentioned above, has set itself precisely the aforesaid objective – to place a specific institute of refugee law (i.e. the provision of the cessation clauses) in the context of the existing durable solutions to the refugee situation and, in particular, in the context of the ever-evolving human rights law. Consequently, the thesis aims to define the existing limits to temporariness of protection, i.e. the limits to the possibility of States to withdraw the refugee status of a particular person and to insist on his or her repatriation to the country of origin.

Keywords: 1951 convention, Temporary Protection, cessation clauses

Home University:

Charles University in Prague

Faculty:

Faculty of Law, Department of International Law, Center for Migration and Refugee Law

Supervisor: Věra Honusková

Added to catalogue on: 15-05-2023

Additional information: