The Notion of Complicity in UK Refugee Law

Abstract

In recent years, UK case law has analysed the arrival of new terms in refugee law, which determine a person’s complicity in the commission of a crime falling under the exclusion clauses of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. These terms have included concepts of ‘individual responsibility’, ‘individually responsible for the crime’, and ‘otherwise participate in the commission of crimes’, which are drawn from international criminal law. This article traces the use of these terms in the modern law relating to the exclusion from refugee status and suggests that a simple standard of identifying ‘a sufficient level of participation on the part of the individual to fix him with the relevant liability’ should be uniformly adopted in cases of complicity.