Externalization and the UN global compact on refugees: unsafety as ripple effect

Introduction

The end of 2021 marked three years since the adoption of the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees (GCR),1 an international non-legally binding framework for ‘predictable and equitable responsibility sharing’ to refugee situations, and two years since the first Global Refugee Forum,2 which brought together a diverse range of actors who collectively committed to contribute to better protection outcomes for refugees around the world through concrete pledges. The first Global Refugee Forum (GRF), convened in December 2019, in many ways presented a breakthrough in international refugee protection in terms of the strong political commitment of both states and nonstate actors to a common agenda to increase refugee protection, self-reliance, responsibility sharing and solidarity with both refugees and refugee-hosting nations and local communities.

A first stocktaking event, the High-Level Officials Meeting (HLOM),3 was held in December 2021 to assess progress and maintain momentum towards the achievement of the objectives of the Compact. In the face of new and re-emerging humanitarian crises, including the large-scale displacement caused by the war in Ukraine and return of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and its broader implications, as well as a clear trend towards more protracted displacement situations, the urgency of translating GCR political commitments into action has not diminished.

At the same time, however, low- and middle-income countries continue to shoulder most of the responsibility, hosting more than 83% of the world’s refugees,4 and lack of political will and leadership remains an impediment for the achievement of more equitable global responsibility sharing system. In some high-income countries, such as Australia, and some European States, recent years have seen hardening of positions and negative rhetoric towards refugees and asylum seekers, and an acceleration of attempts to contain and deter refugee movements and to shift protection responsibility to other countries. Yet, despite this trend, the GCR is curiously quiet on the centrality of access to territory and to asylum to the upholding of the refugee system.

The EU’s response to the refugee displacements emerging from the war in Ukraine has been an uplifting reverse of the negative trend, although in this case, solidarity has been clearly confined to a limited group, raising discrimination concerns. Despite the positive narrative and approach in the response to those displaced from Ukraine, and some sense of momentum at the HLOM in December 2021, it is, however, difficult to ignore the multiple parallel developments and attempts by States to evade responsibility for non-European refugees and their protection through third-country migration management arrangements and recent restrictive changes in asylum law and policy. In particular, renewed efforts by some European States to offshore asylum processing to third countries prompt a range of illegality questions from an international and EU law perspective, as well as more overall concerns of the risk that such transfer models would represent to the global refugee protection and human rights regime.

This Policy Brief describes and analyses these developments in the European context. It explores the relationship between externalization efforts and the GCR with an emphasis on the protection and human rights implications at the level of individual asylum seekers and refugees as well as potential ripple effects to the protection system as a whole. It ends with a set of policy recommendations on how to achieve genuine responsibility sharing by States.

Read the full policy brief.