Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, there are two necessary conditions for refugeehood: a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion and alienage – that is, being outside of one’s country of nationality or habitual residence. In 1985 Andrew Shacknove famously argued that both of these conditions should be rejected. Shacknove’s paper prompted much debate about the suitability of the persecution condition, but his rejection of the alienage (...) requirement has received significantly less attention. In this paper I argue, against some recent defenders of the Convention, that Shacknove was right to claim that the alienage condition should be rejected. On my view, people who would be granted refugee status if they crossed a border, but who remain in their country of nationality, should also be eligible for refugee status. (shrink)

In the scholarly debate, refugeehood is often understood to arise from a special need for basic protection, i.e., for protection of basic needs and rights. However, the main definitions of refugeehood shift to duties when aiming to develop this view. Either, refugees are defined as all those individuals who can receive basic protection from the international community, and thus arguably ought to be protected, or refugees are defined as all those to whom a special form of protection, namely protection by (...) admission is owed. The paper argues that either definition is incompatible with a commonsense desideratum on consistent and plausible criteria for refugeehood, since these definitions imply that refugeehood depends partly on the capacities of protecting states and on the needs of third parties. Instead, refugeehood is defined by the need for basic protection and by flight aiming to remedy this condition. (shrink)