Access to justice for refugees

Abstract

This chapter argues that refugee law and the refugee protection framework are at ‘crisis point’ and ripe for a new imaginary. It suggests that international cooperation and solidarity, as originally understood in the development of the refugee protection framework, appear to have little traction at present when the international refugee regime is based on cooperation between states. The discussion focuses on the extent to which the current legal framework is failing refugees and whether recent initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the World Humanitarian Summit, the interest of the World Bank in forced displacement, the New York Declaration of September 2016 and the Global Compact on Refugees 2018 constitute new ‘paradigmatic shifts’ as claimed, and provide a workable new model.