Opening up a new chapter of law‐making in international law: The Global Compacts on Migration and for Refugees of 2018

Peter Hilpold

doi:10.1111/eulj.12376

Abstract

AbstractThe endorsement/affirmation of the Global Compact on Migration and the Global Compact for Refugees in December 2018 has been accompanied by an intense discussion about the need to introduce new norms in these fields and about the actual legal force of the respective provisions. There was and there persists an open contrast between the openly declared non‐bindingness of these Compacts and the widespread fear that they would either severely constrain national sovereignty in highly delicate areas or dilute arduously achieved standards (especially with regard to refugee law). Eventually, this whole discussion leads to the question about the meaning and the status of soft law in international law. With regard to the European Union, the transformative impact of the Global Compacts will depend on whether the EU further proceeds on its path of “emancipation” from international law while internally finding no consensus on the values here at issue.

Highlights

It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the historic refugee and migration crisis of the years 2015 and 2016
The actual practice by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international institutions has formed out of an enlarged refugee concept that has been partly transformed into hard law by the European Union's Common European Asylum System (CEAS)
Much depends on how the Compact will be implemented in practice, it is unlikely that the Compact, as it is, will be able to address the normative gap on burden sharing in an adequate and a comprehensive manner.”