REFUGEE RIGHTS AND THE UN PROTOCOLS ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND SMUGGLING

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 11 - 32, 21.07.2019

Olawale Lawal

Abstract

The UN protocols on human trafficking and
smuggling nitpick from the international protection which refugee conventions
have offered to asylum-seekers. This, however, is anathema to the general
appellate position of international law in matters of human rights violations.
The Protocol's primary goal is to achieve border control rights for states and
also promote, in some way, the human rights of migrants, but it has loopholes
which are exploited by states outside the context of its intent. States often
deny international protection to refugees using procedures that pronominally
encourage the closure of the border to all levels of migrants. This work
contends that in the process of assisting states migration policies, the
protocols encroach on international protection regimes which often do not query
the means to escape persecution. It brings to focus the municipal nature of
migration policy and its peril elements when only the state has a subjective
right of interpretation. The protocols, in the view of this work, appear to be
obstacles to a fair assessment of migration claims. Of particular importance
are the claims of asylum-seekers who often use the same modes of the entrance
that the human trafficking and smuggling protocols have come to criminalise.
This work maintains that states are to respect the peremptory framework of
refugee admission and consider the fact that refugees, in their bid to flee
persecution, also enlist the services of concern to the protocols. States are
enjoined to imbue within their immigration system, experts who can detect push
from pull factors. The UNHCR has to make a re-presentation to the UN to show
how rabidly border closures to smugglers also are shutting out asylum-seekers.
This work is a contextual analysis of the collateral damage which occurs in the
protection of the state's right to border control and migration policy.

Keywords

Protocols on Human Trafficking and Smuggling, Asylum system, Migrations, Border Control

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