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‘Taking up the Slack’ in the Context of Refugee Protection

Remarks on David Owen

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Notes

  1. “[…] in many cases the refugee, by applying to S, makes herself vulnerable to S, so that what S decides cannot but help to determine her eventual fate. Consider the person who arrives at a land or sea border. If her application is valid but the state nevertheless turns it down, then by effectively forcing her back to the state from which she came, or back out into the open sea, it is actively exposing her to the risk of harm. So it has a duty of care towards her that arises from such vulnerability. This may not be so apparent in the case of someone who applies for a refugee visa from a distance.” (Miller 2016, 84).

  2. It should be added that Miller concedes that there is a duty of humanitarian aid to admit those remaining asylum seekers. However, that duty has to be weighed up against the preferences of citizens so that it never enables asylum seekers to have a claimable right to admission.

  3. There is a second source of problems with the fair share thesis: even if all states are willing to fulfil their fair share, in the absence of common institutions what they estimate to be their fair share could be too small. (cf. Miller 2016, 93; Owen 2016b, 284) However, as long as there are states who are not willing to fulfil their fair share and, for that reason, do not even determine what they regard as their fair share, we will never know if the estimated shares of the willing states are sufficient.

  4. For more critical positions on Miller’s fair share thesis, see Yong 2018; Herrmann 2018; Brezger 2016.

  5. More exactly, Owen mentions the duties to protect the rights of citizens and not to breach the rights of non-citizens (2016a, 150). In my view, Owen should replace ‘citizens’ with ‘people on the territory’ (in fact, a few lines earlier he mentions resident non-citizens): states are responsible for protecting the human rights of all people who are present on their territory, and not only of their citizens – it is not enough that states simply do not actively breach the human rights of inhabitants or travellers that are non-citizens.

  6. I defended the priority of the principle of non-refoulement in Hoesch (2016) and Hoesch (2017). Furthermore, I agree with Owen about the rejection of a purely humanitarian approach to refugee protection. Similar to what Owen develops in his In loco civitatis, I argue that there are duties of justice towards refugees as a result of the system of territorial states. Whereas Owen proceeds from a more constructivist view on political legitimacy, I use more natural law language, postulating an original common ownership of the earth by all humans. However, I can assume that there are no important differences between our views.

  7. I should mention here that Owen limits those obligations to what can reasonably be demanded by justice.

  8. For more recent data, see the UNHCR’s statistics on forcibly displaced people (http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html, accessed 22. May 2018) and the very detailed UNHCR’s Global Trends Report (http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2016/, accessed 22. May 2018).

  9. There have been attempts to create better institutional arrangements at the European and at the international level. However, these attempts were aimed at including more of the states which until now have been carrying less than their fair share, and not at reaching fairness between states that have already fulfilled their fair share.

  10. However, I will come back to the problem of comparing the burdens of highly burdened states and of Western democracies in section 5.

  11. This is more or less the situation discussed in Karnein (2014).

  12. http://www.unhcr.org/protection/resettlement/593a88f27/unhcr-projected-global-resettlement-needs-2018.html.

References

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the important comments of David Owen and the participants of the Workshop ‘Neuere Ansätze in der Migrationsethik’, University of Duisburg-Essen.

Funding

This work was made possible by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics in the Cultures of Pre-Modernity and Modernity’, University of Münster, Germany, through funding from the Excellence Initiative run by the Federal Government and the states.

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  1. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Johannisstraße 1, 48143, Münster, Germany

    Matthias Hoesch

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  1. Matthias Hoesch
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Correspondence to Matthias Hoesch.

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Hoesch, M. ‘Taking up the Slack’ in the Context of Refugee Protection. ZEMO 1, 163–175 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-018-0012-1

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