Asylum before the UN human rights committees: a surrogate refugee regime?

The project investigates the asylum jurisprudence of the UN treaty bodies in three key respects:

• The dominance of asylum cases in the jurisprudence of the UN treaty bodies raises a number of questions about the effectiveness of the committees’ in fulfilling their mandate in monitoring implementation of treaties globally
• The legal weight of the treaty bodies’ jurisprudence in this area
• State responses to the committees’ views.

Background

Asylum cases are over-represented in the jurisprudence of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies, with non-refoulement claims the single most common complaint raised before all treaty bodies’ individual communications.

Presently, 80 per cent of the Committee Against Torture’s case load relate to the deportation of failed asylum seekers. While existing research extensively analyses the asylum jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, little work considers the role of the United Nations treaty bodies in this area.

Moreover, Denmark is over-represented in the treaty bodies jurisprudence and the Danish government is increasingly reluctant to respect the treaty bodies’ asylum jurisprudence. In 2016, for example, Denmark had 168 individual communications before the Human Rights Committee, second only to Belarus.