Migration: Are states behaving like corporations trying to avoid taxes?

About creative legal thinking in the area of migration and refugees.

On the 20th anniversary for the US Supreme Court's ruling on the US program to interdict Haitian refugees on the high seas, Yale Law School convened a special workshop to discuss the current challenges to refugees posed by states' attempts to block or stymie asylum-seekers from arriving at their shores.

The Danish Institute for Human Rights’ (DIHR) Head of Research, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, was one of the invited speakers. His talk focused on the uneasy relationship between law and politics in this area and how states are increasingly resorting to "creative legal thinking" in order to circumvent or shift human rights obligations otherwise owed to migrants and refugees.

According to Gammeltoft-Hansen, states are behaving more and more like corporations seeking to creatively avoid taxes by exploiting gaps in the legal framework or shift their assets to offshore locations. Yet, this does mean that refugees find themselves in a "legal black hole" - international human rights law has equally developed over the last decades, effectively questioning many current policies.

The workshop and Gammeltoft-Hansen's talk has since been published as an online symposium on Opinio Juris.

Direct link to talk: http://opiniojuris.org/2014/03/15/yls-sale-symposium-sales-legacy-creative-legal-thinking-dynamic-interpretation-refugee-law/#comments