The elephant on the boat: the problem that is the refugee convention

The 1951 United Nations convention on refugees was written for a different world. Today it causes far more harm than good. It is largely blind to the millions of refugees mired in poverty and forgotten in camps overseas. At the same time it tempts tens of thousands of people in poor countries, who have some money, to pay smugglers to get them across the borders of Western countries that have signed the convention. This leads to voter resentment and ever-increasing efforts on the part of signatory countries to prevent asylum seekers from taking that final step across their borders. A deadly game of cat and mouse is in play but asylum seekers who do manage, as it were, to touch home base usually feel it was worth the risk. Others, however, die in the attempt. The Australian Labor government has introduced a cruel twist; it has made touching base more attractive while, at the same time, putting more resources into border control. The structure underpinning this miserable farce is the 1951 convention: it is time that Australia and other signatory countries renounced it and committed themselves to a genuinely humanitarian refugee policy. Copyright. Monash University and the author/s