In this article, I contend that asylum should at times act as a form of reparation for past injustice. This function, I argue, stems from states' special obligation to provide asylum to refugees for whose lack of state protection they are responsible. After suggesting that the development of a theory of asylum as reparation necessitates a diachronic approach, I outline the conditions under which asylum should function reparatively, and draw on the reparations framework within international law to suggest that asylum can provide refugees with meaningful restitution, compensation and satisfaction. In particular, I seek to identify the conditions under which asylum constitutes the most fitting form of reparation for the harm of refugeehood that is available to states. Finally, I explore the question of how direct the causal link between a state's actions and a refugee's flight must be for the former to owe asylum to the latter.
Good international citizenship is generally seen, either implicitly or explicitly, as being a matter of fulfilling general duties in the realm of foreign policy. In this article, I challenge this prevailing view, by arguing that good international citizenship frequently involves discharging special responsibilities to protect, which in turn involves grants of asylum to refugees. While arguing that asylum should be seen as an important element of good international citizenship as a matter of course, it assumes an even more central role in this citizenship in two scenarios. The first is where humanitarian intervention is either imprudent or politically impossible without violating the procedural norms of international society. The second is when interventionwhether pursued for humanitarian or other reasonscreates refugees, and intervening states may thereby acquire special responsibilities to protect those refugees. 1998). There now exists a consensus that the basic content of good international citizenship involves a strong commitment to human rights, multilateralism, and international law, including the responsibility to protect (R2P). In short, good international citizens are committed to the common rules and values governing the international society of which they are members. Despite this basic consensus, a residual indeterminacy within the concept persists. Indeed, the simple vagueness of the term 'good' means that any understanding of what good international citizenship is and entails will, in the abstract, be contingent on whatever one considers 'good' state conduct in the international sphere to be (Williams 2002, 42-43). Although there is no expectation that states be perfect in order to qualify as good international citizens, it remains unclear how demanding good international citizenship should be taken to be, as well as how states should seek to balance and prioritise their often competing responsibilities towards their own citizens, other states, and non-citizens. Although scholars have not addressed these issues and ambiguities in as much depth as they might have donetending as they have done to raise them rather than systematically attempting to resolve themsome have sought to convert this impression of slight slipperiness around the concept into a virtue. Jonathan Gilmore, for instance, has recently argued that, while the concept cannot offer any 'objective determination' of when a balance between a states' various responsibilities has been achieved, it may nevertheless act as a 'discursive framework' through which the 'continuities and tensions' between these responsibilities can be explored (Gilmore 2015, 107-108). While this indeterminacy is, in common with all moral concepts, not entirely eliminable, leaving it unaddressed opens the door to under-demanding interpretations of what good international citizenship entails, which may well have the effect of justifying states' existing policies that are in fact highly problematic. ii
In the summer of 2014 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged as a threat to the Iraqi people. This article asks whether the UK and Australia had a ‘special’ responsibility to protect (R2P) those being threatened. It focuses on two middle‐ranking powers (as opposed to the US) in order to highlight the significance of special responsibilities that flow only from the principle of reparation rather than capability. The article contends that despite casting their response in terms of a general responsibility, the UK and Australia did indeed bear a special responsibility based on this principle. Rather than making the argument that the 2003 coalition that invaded Iraq created ISIS, it is argued that it is the vulnerable position in which Iraqis were placed as a consequence of the invasion that grounds the UK and Australia's special responsibility to protect. The article addresses the claim that the UK and Australia were not culpable because they did not act negligently or recklessly in 2003 by drawing on Tony Honoré's concept of ‘outcome responsibility’. The finding of a special responsibility is significant because it is often thought of as being more demanding than a general responsibility. In this context, the article further argues that the response of these two states falls short of reasonable moral expectations. This does not mean the UK and Australia should be doing more militarily. R2P does not begin and end with military action. Rather the article argues that the special responsibility to protect can be discharged through humanitarian aid and a more generous asylum policy.
In this article, I examine some of the theoretical and practical implications of understanding durable solutions as potential forms of reparation that can be offered to refugees for the unjust harms of displacement. I begin by making a basic moral case that durable solutions can act as forms of reparation, exploring the ways in which the creation or restoration of effective citizenship in a state through one of the durable solutions can go some way to providing restitution, compensation and satisfaction for refugees. I then discuss some considerations which need to be taken into account when seeking to identify which state should offer which durable solution as reparation to which refugees in any given case, such as the refugees' choice, their place of residence and social ties, any sense of group identity, and questions of state capacity and efficiency. Observing that bestowing a reparative function upon durable solutions would potentially create a tension with their classical humanitarian rationale, I move to explore how this tension might be navigated, with particular reference to the question of how states with limited resources should prioritise the needs of refugees for whose flight they are morally responsible vis-à-vis refugees for whose flight they are not responsible.
This commentary examines whether R2P is a fully-fledged norm. As a normative aspiration R2P is almost universally accepted. However as a standard of behaviour that states implement as a matter of course R2P is far from fully-fledged. By examining state responses to refugee crises in Syria it is argued that powerful states are failing in their special responsibility to protect.
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