Refugee Registration as Foreclosure of the Freedom to Move: The Virtualisation of Refugees' Rights within Maps of International Protection

Abstract

The lack of solid footing in political space is what makes the human rights claims of refugees most vulnerable in the contemporary international order. However, modern international human rights law and protection are predicated on a spatialised sense of the subject of rights that is formed in opposition to and in exclusion of the refugee. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) seeks to locate refugees as part of the universe of human rights through refugee registration exercises; it attempts to map their displacement within the geography of emplaced citizenry. Its conventional efforts in this regard fail, though, and, rather, serve to illustrate how the informal international movement of refugees still exceeds and, thus, undermines the universalism of the UN vision of human rights and freedoms. Consequently, the UNHCR has recently resorted to the highly sophisticated computerised registration technology, called proGres, under its Project Profile system. While the detail and complexity of Project Profile allow for a mapping no more capable of accurately tracing the movements of refugees within the global geography of universal human rights, the complex of digitalised mapping systems brought together within Project Profile permit the production and performance of an international space in which humanitarians may expect refugees to fit. The force of the UNHCR's new registration system is to produce a manner of spatialising refugees that can legitimate and moralise their constraint within orders of international politics and security which allow little room for response to the rights claims of refugees. Rather, their claims to human rights become foreclosed within a virtual understanding of human displacement with respect to emplacement in the state.