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TODAY’S MIGRANTS, TOMORROW’S REFUGEES?…
V. Honusková, E. Flídrová, L. Janků
Today’s Migrants, tomorrow’s refugees? The Status of Migrants Who Need
Protection in International Law
[Dnes migranti – zítra uprchlíci? Postavení migrantů, kteří potřebují ochranu,
v mezinárodním právu]
Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Law, Prague, 2014, 196 p.,
Studies in Human Rights; vol. 8
There is no doubt that migrants today have to face many complex situations in
which their rights may be endangered, violated or insufficiently guaranteed. There are
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 the publication ‘Today’s Migrants, tomorrow’s refugees? The
Status of Migrants Who Need Protection in International Law’ is to highlight the
issue of so-called ‘improper’ refugees and to attempt to find possible approaches to
solving dilemmas related to it. Thus, the book focuses 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 a clear legal determination of their status in international
law; they must rely on the benevolence of individual states and/or the existence of
a 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. According to the authors, 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 the
publication.
The book gives attention to two main issues. Firstly, it attempts to define individual
categories of forced migrants in more detail (we call them “improper refugees”) and to