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TODAY MIGRANTS, TOMORROW REFUGEES?
Linda Janků, Věra Honusková, Eliška Flídrová
It is obvious that migrants today have to face many complex situations in which
their rights may be endangered, violated or insufficiently guaranteed. There is a variety
of issues relating to migration and to the rights of migrating people, ranging from the
regulation of freedom to migrate and to enter the territory of foreign states, through
the regulation of the legal status of persons finding themselves in the territory of
foreign states, to the actual guaranteeing of rights arising from their legally recognized
status, and the potential of migrants to effectively rely on those rights.
The objective of this book has been to highlight one rather poignant issue within the
whole branch and to attempt to find possible approaches to solving dilemmas related
to it. The book has focused on the position of migrants who did not voluntarily opt for
migration, but were forced to undertake such a difficult step by external circumstances
preventing those people from staying in their country of origin. At the same time, these
are persons whose legal position has not been unequivocally regulated by international
law. The “privilege” has been safeguarded only for a relatively small portion of those
persons, namely refugees within the meaning of the Convention Relating to the Status
of Refugees (“Convention”), i.e. those escaping from their country of origin due to a
specific form of persecution caused by precisely defined (relevant) reasons. Many other
categories of so-called forced migrants lack such clear legal determination of their
status in international law; they must rely on benevolence of individual states and/
or the existence of particular (regional) regulation of their status, or subsidiary protection
ensured through non-refoulement by universal, and more frequently by regional, systems
of human rights protection.
Particularly the absence of regulation of the status of this category of forced migrants,
which worldwide includes a substantial number, contrasting with relatively developed
regulation of the status of refugees within international refugee law was an impetus for
the drafting of this book. On the one hand, the book has attempted to define individual
categories of forced migrants in more detail (we call them “improper refugees”) and to
identify the scope of proposed regulation of their position within the recent system of
international law, or to determine its possible substance
de lege ferenda
. On the other
hand, the book has focused on the existing subsidiary system of the protection of
rights of forced migrants, the basis of which lies in international human rights law; it
has identified the key areas where this branch of international law can contribute to
the protection of rights and position of forced migrants in a situation when another –
more relevant and concrete – regulation is missing.