YLS Sale Symposium: Interdiction of Asylum Seekers—The Realms of Policy and Law in Refugee Protection
I start with a high-altitude view of the history and contours of refugee protection, to provide perspective on the current use of interdiction – and also on the contrasting stances taken by the U.S. Supreme Court in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (509 U.S. 155 (1993)) and the European Court of Human Rights in Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy (Application no. 27765/09, Eur. Ct. H.R. 10 (2012)).
Refugee protection is not, at its core, dependent on fixed or expansive legal obligations of states or other political actors. Since Biblical times, refugees have been protected, even in the absence of treaty or legal edict. These were policy decisions by political leaders, influenced by compassion, but also by pragmatic considerations that ranged from assessments of absorptive capacities, food supplies, and the tolerance level of the leader’s subjects or fellow-citizens; through perceived advantages to be gained if the refugees seemed a particularly skilled or enterprising lot; to judgments about whether the exodus would strengthen or weaken the state against its enemies.