UN Refugee Convention Needs a Major Overhaul

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and many world leaders, including President Joe Biden, have called for changes to what they call the “outdated” UN Security Council by significantly expanding the number of non-permanent and permanent members. Converting the 15-member Security Council into a mini-General Assembly is a terrible idea and will render it even more ineffective than it already is today. The schisms among the five current permanent members, which prevent the Security Council from tackling difficult issues that range from Ukraine and the Middle East to Sudan, will only worsen by adding more permanent and non-permanent members to fulfill geographic and demographic quotas.

UN bureaucrats, progressive world leaders like Joe Biden, and left-wing pro-immigration advocates have pushed successfully for much more liberal open border policies

There is an urgent need for reform in one area, however, which the UN bureaucracy rejects – changes to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which was last amended in 1967. The Refugee Convention, and the national laws that have been enacted to conform to the terms of the Convention, have enough loopholes to drive many truckloads of illegal immigrants through.

Article 1 of the Refugee Convention defines a “refugee” as a person who flees his or her country of origin based on a “well-grounded fear” of being persecuted because of that person’s “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” These words were clear enough to the drafters of the Refugee Convention and were meant to protect a defined class of people who fear for their lives if they are returned to their home countries. Yet, millions of people today who do not meet the criteria for being legitimately classified as a “refugee” mouth the magic words to falsely claim they fear persecution in their countries of origin. And they get away with it.

Domestic or gang violence, crime, discrimination, and economic hardship may well be good reasons to motivate someone to seek a better life elsewhere. However, those reasons are not supposed to be legitimate grounds to be granted refugee status and asylum in another country. But that is what has been happening because UN bureaucrats, progressive world leaders like Joe Biden, and left-wing pro-immigration advocates have pushed successfully for much more liberal open border policies.

The hordes of migrants who have left their countries of origin seeking a better life and claimed asylum under false pretenses have overwhelmed the resources of the migrants’ destination countries beyond the breaking point

The United Kingdom’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently critiqued the Refugee Convention in a speech that she delivered to the American Enterprise Institute. She complained that the grounds the Convention specifies for being legitimately eligible for asylum in a country, and for classifying someone as a “refugee” who has a “well-grounded fear of persecution,” have been stretched beyond any reasonable parameters. Unless the “definition of who qualifies for protection” is tightened, she said, the result will be to continue creating “huge incentives for illegal migration.”

The hordes of migrants who have left their countries of origin seeking a better life and claimed asylum under false pretenses have overwhelmed the resources of the migrants’ destination countries beyond the breaking point. They are “gaming the asylum system to their advantage,” UK Home Secretary Braverman explained.

Law enforcement agents are unable to control or vet who crosses the border into their country. This vacuum heightens the risk to national security from terrorists, violent criminals, and human and drug traffickers who manage to get into the country under the guise of seeking asylum. Moreover, unlike previous generations of asylum-seekers who had truly fled government persecution, many of today’s immigrants refuse to assimilate and accept the laws and cultural norms of their destination countries. The fundamental character of these countries is at risk of being eroded.

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Migrants who do not apply first for asylum in any of these safe countries or reject an asylum offer from one of these safe countries should be considered ineligible for asylum 

"Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate," said UK Home Secretary Braverman. "It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.” She added that “in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society." Islamist extremists are a prime example.

Secretary Braverman also noted the absurdity and unsustainability of the status quo in which people are “able to travel through multiple safe countries, and even reside in safe countries for years, while they pick their preferred destination to claim asylum.”

Migrants who do not apply first for asylum in any of these safe countries or reject an asylum offer from one of these safe countries should be considered ineligible for asylum in their preferred destination countries. As Home Secretary Braverman put it, “Seeking refuge in the first safe country you reach or shopping around for your preferred destination are not the same thing.” She called for requiring people to “claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.”

The Refugee Convention also gives a free pass to would-be asylum seekers entering a country illegally wherever they choose along the border

The Refugee Convention also gives a free pass to would-be asylum seekers entering a country illegally wherever they choose along the border, rather than crossing the border only at a legally authorized port of entry. Such a laissez-faire approach is dangerous. It has created complete chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border, for example.

The international refugee framework needs major reform to effectively weed out the pretenders who brazenly lie and manipulate the system. The UN bureaucrats and pro-open border progressives who say that the Refugee Convention is just fine as is and who criticize those countries that are trying to protect their national sovereignty and security are plain wrong. They are ideologues who are standing in the way of coming up with, in UK Home Secretary Braverman's words, “enduring solutions to the challenges of global migration” and delivering “an asylum framework fit for the modern age.”

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