Don't punish refugees for the Paris attacks

Erika Feller writes 'Don't punish refugees for the Paris attacks'  in The Drum. Ms Feller will be delivering the keynote address at the Kaldor Centre conference tomorrow.  She writes:

The repercussions of the terrible events in Paris, just as with the horrifying September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, will be felt for a long time, including in the refugee context.

It would be unrealistic to assume otherwise and indeed appropriate mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that there are no loopholes in national asylum practices that could conceivably be exploited by terrorists, allowing them to gain admission to territory through the asylum channel.

Under international refugee law, refugee protection should be denied to persons seriously and reliably implicated in grave crimes. The so-called exclusion clauses should work, if rigorously applied, to make identification of such persons not only possible but necessary and to deny them refugee status, with their criminal prosecution, expulsion or extradition unimpeded.

The challenge, of course, will always be to strike the right balance between the security interests of states and the protection needs of genuine refugees, who are themselves escaping persecution and violence, including terrorism. Equating asylum with safe haven for terrorists is not only legally wrong, but it vilifies refugees in the public mind and exposes persons of particular races or religions to discrimination and hate-based harassment. No society can afford to create such rifts at any time, but particularly the present...

Read the full article.