Have We Reached The End Of The 1951 Refugee Convention?

Contributor(s): Professor Seyla Benhabib | The Annual Human Rights Day Lecture hosted by LSE Human Rights will be delivered this year by Professor Seyla Benhabib of Yale University. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are the main legal documents governing the movement of refugees and asylum seekers across international borders. As the number of displaced persons seeking refuge has reached unprecedented numbers, states have resorted to measure to circumvent their obligations under the Convention. These range form bilateral agreements condemning refugees to their vessel at sea to the excision of certain territories from national jurisdiction. In this talk Professor Benhabib will analyse these movements in the context of a dual dynamic of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. While socio-economic developments and the rise of the world-wide web have led to the deterritorialisation of domains of the economy and the media, escaping legal control, territorial presence whether on terra firma or vessels at sea, continue to be the basis for the entitlement to human and citizens’ rights. The period ushered by The 1951 Convention was based on a sovereignty regime of territorial containment which seems to be nearing its end today. Seyla Benhabib is Emerita Professor at Yale University since June 2020, and currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia Law School, with affiliation in the Philosophy Department of Columbia University. Ayça Çubukçu (@ayca_cu) is an Associate Professor in LSE Human Rights, Department of Sociology and the Co-Director of LSE Human Rights. LSE Human Rights (@LSEHumanRights) is a trans-disciplinary centre of excellence for international academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEHumanRightsDay