Abstract
In a world where hundreds of refugees are drowning at sea and thousands are being turned away at the border, the question arises not only as to why so many nations have become unwelcoming to refugees early in the twenty-first century, but as to whether national conduct violates international, regional, and national laws relating to refugees. To explore this question, this chapter not only describes the laws that are applicable to persons qualifying as refugees, but also seeks to set those laws in an historical context dating back millennia, with special emphasis on the experiences during and after World War II that gave birth to the laws now being flouted by so many nations. The chapter focuses on Europe, the crucible that largely gave rise to modern refugee law and one of the major locations of the current refusals to fulfil those laws. Special emphasis is given to Italy as one of the frontline states most deeply challenged by the ongoing refugee crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
Some, at least, of them might have qualified as refugees, and not merely as “migrants.”
- 2.
For example, in the heart of Olympiapark in Munich there is a small wooded enclosure where a former prisoner of war now known only as Timofey chose to live as a hermit for 27 years after the war rather than return to the USSR.
- 3.
While the Japanese did not transport so many people around Asia during their war, the same patterns did play out there, including the expulsion of millions of ethnic Japanese from Korea and Taiwan after the war.
- 4.
If the refugee is stateless (without any nationality), the relevant country is the refugee’s former place of habitual resident.
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Dellapenna, J.W. (2020). Refugees at Sea in a Hostile World. In: Westra, L., Bosselmann, K., Fermeglia, M. (eds) Ecological Integrity in Science and Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46259-8_5
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