Statelessness In A ‘Modern Era’
By Thanges Paramsothy -July 16, 2014
Thanges Paramsothy
Statelessness in a ‘Modern Era’: The Everyday Life of Sri Lankan Tamil Failed Asylum Seekers in the UK
We often hear of people from conflict and post-conflict settings enter into the borders of industrialized or Western countries as ‘illegal travellers’ to seek asylum or refugee status. Travelling without legal permit from one state to another is not a new phenomenon, but it has increasingly become a legal and global issue following the stringent policing of the borders separating one state from another in the ‘modern Era’. The UNHCR adopted a convention in 1951 relating to the status of refugees with a view to protecting a person fleeing his/her country of origin, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion and/or membership of a particular social group. This is usually called the ‘1951 Geneva Convention for Refugees’. A person who suffers generalised repression, violence and poverty does not qualify as a refugee. Asylum or the status of refugee is the protection granted by a state to a person who cannot return to his/her home country due to fear of prosecution. It is obvious that most Western countries reject asylum migrants stating that their claims for asylum do not satisfy the definition of the refugee.
Contemporary asylum migration challenges this narrow definition, which sees persecution as a precondition for one to claim refugee status. For many asylum migrants, being a refugee means more than having to leave or escape home due to insecurity or potential threats. At present, many see leaving home and becoming an asylum migrant as a pathway to begin a viable life outside their home country. For asylum migrants, exile is not only a safe haven, but it is also a state in which they expect to improve the quality of their lives in socio-economic terms. It is important to note that multiple socio-economic, political and personal reasons play a crucial role in contemporary asylum migration particularly when an asylum migrant chooses a country of destination to seek refugee status in. Analysing the reasons for asylum migration through the lens offered by the official definition of a refugee will not provide a holistic picture of contemporary asylum migration. Papademitriou (1993: 212-213) has commented on this obvious problem as follows: Increasingly, both pure refugees and purely economic migrants are ideal constructs rarely found in a real life; many among those who routinely meet the refugee definition are clearly fleeing both political oppression and economic dislocation.
