Phil Orchard

University of Wollongong | UOW · School of Humanities and Social Inquiry

Why do states protect refugees? In the past twenty years, states have sought to limit access to asylum by increasing their border controls and introducing extraterritorial controls. Yet no state has sought to exit the 1951 Refugee Convention or the broader international refugee regime. This book argues that such international policy shifts represen...

Today, there are over 40 million conflict-induced internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, almost double the number of refugees. Yet, IDPs are protected only by the soft-law Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement at the global level. Instead of a dedicated international organization, IDPs receive protection and assistance only through the...

This study examines the factors that influence refugees’ decision to return to their country of origin. The research employs exploratory factor analysis and linear regression to investigate the individual-level factors that influence these decisions. Data for the analyses come from a structured survey on 889 Syrian refugees in five different German...

What is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine? Within the academic literature, we can see it labelled as falling under any number of theoretical constructs but most commonly as a norm or complex norm which is frequently viewed as being under challenged or best by contradictory forms of practice. In this chapter, I argue that we instead need...

Forced transfers and deportations of civilian populations are a persistent theme in atrocity crimes. Criminalizing forced displacement not only responds to a major human rights and atrocities problem which is not directly covered by either refugee or international human rights law; it can also serve an important deterrent effect. And yet a critical...

Over the past twenty years, there has been a growth in international mechanisms to protect forced migrants who are victims of atrocity crimes. Within international criminal law, forced deportations and forcible transfers have been defined as potentially constituting both crimes against humanity and war crimes, while some forms of transfers (such as...

Over the last decades, the numbers of laws and policies on internal displacement at the domestic level have grown significantly. This momentum begun with the creation of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (Guiding Principles) in 1998 and has accelerated with regional steps such as the Kampala Convention. While the landscape of natio...

Submission to the to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement on the role of national legislation and policies in protecting internally displaced persons

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine appears to be well institutionalized at the international level. However, a growing body of scholarship points to the fact that institutionalization is not all that useful an endpoint by which to study the emergence of new international norms; rather, how they are implemented and interpreted by individua...

Effectively addressing violations of human rights requires dealing with complex, multi-spatial problems involving actors at local, national and international levels. It also calls for a diverse range of inter-disciplinary skills. How can tertiary educators prepare students for such work? This study evaluates the coordinated implementation of human...

How should we respond to states that deliberately displace their own populations? While the international refugee regime is anchored in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Convention is silent on the question of state culpability, and the UNHCR’s Statute established its entirely...

The concept of 'safe areas' emerged in the early 1990s as a way of responding to increasing displacement triggered by internal conflicts. As a form of protection, their record was mixed-for every success like Northern Iraq in 1991, there was a failure like the collapse of the Srebrenica safe area in 1995. But why did the safe area concept itself em...

With over forty million conflict-induced internally displaced persons globally, how the international community provides them with protection and assistance has become a critical issue. A core part of this response has been built around the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, first introduced in 1998. The Guiding Principles provide a compr...

Today, there are over 40 million conflict-induced internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, almost double the number of refugees. Yet, IDPs are protected only by the soft-law Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement at the global level. Instead of a dedicated international organization, IDPs receive protection and assistance only through the...

Asylum and refugee protection have long been a European concept. From the 19th century through the 1949-1950 negotiations which created the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Europe as a whole has played a key role. Not surprisingly, however, these efforts have varied both in their success and in whether they actually sought to...

Counting forced migrants runs into a number of hurdles related to their classification, to their experience of flight, and to the need to use myriad sources of data from governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. To complicate matters, three organisations have mandates to count different groups – the UN Relief Wor...

In 1993, the United Nations (UN) recognized that internally displaced persons, people who have fled their homes due to conflict but have not crossed an international boundary, were an international problem. Francis Deng was appointed as the first Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons, and played a key role in cr...

Forcible displacement can constitute a mass atrocity crime. This is something that is considered within the non-binding Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Efforts to implement the Guiding Principles at the regional level suggest one path to implement stronger legal protections for internally displaced persons (IDPs), in particular, agains...

There is a long history of state efforts to provide refugee protection prior to the twentieth century—one that can be traced from the flight of the Huguenots in 1685 through the French Revolution and political refugee flows in the nineteenth century. It is during this period that many of the normative understandings we now accept as the foundation...

Within international relations theorizing, political leaders are rarely cast as norm entrepreneurs or change agents. As heads of government, they have their own sources of legitimacy and authority, but also significant constraints. This article, based on new archival research, adds nuance to this model by exploring the leadership roles of Franklin...

Are safe areas an effective option to protect civilian populations from mass atrocities when they are targeted by their own state? Safe areas disappeared from the international lexicon following the failures in Bosnia and Rwanda. But they are now receiving a second look as a way of responding to mass atrocities without full-scale military intervent...

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), now ten years old, has been widely accepted at the international level. As the books under review demonstrate, debates around its legitimacy are over. Instead, we see a developing second generation of literature focusing on how the R2P needs to be understood more concretely in both academic and policy t...

Internal displacement is increasingly perceived as an international problem. This has led to suggestions that international norms have begun to govern state behaviour towards their own displaced populations. I argue that this change occurred through the innovative use of soft law, in particular the guiding principles on internal displacement, by a...

Regime-Induced Displacement – when governments deliberately use coercive tactics to cause mass displacement – is an increasing phenomenon. It is a problem for the international community because these situations challenge the ability of international and non-governmental organisations to provide the displaced with basic levels of protection and ass...

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-139).