I Book Review: Rethinking Asylum, History, Purpose and Limits
| Published date | 01 June 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/016934411002800213 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Part C: DocumentationI Book Review |
I Book Reviews
Netherlands Q uarterly of Human R ights, Vol. 28/2 (2010) 287
Matthew E. Price, Rethinking Asylum, History, Purpos e and Limits, Cambr idge
University Press, Cambridge, 20 09, 279 p., ISBN: 978–0–521–88116–6 (hardback)
and 978–0– 521–70747–3 (paperback)*
Who is a ref ugee? is is the question Matthew E. Price aske s himself and he a rgues
that the old politica l approach and the simple answer – he who has well-founded fear
of being persecuted in the sense of the 1951 Refugee Convention – should be preserved.
By stating this, Price seem s to take as point of departu re that the Refugee Convention
was never meant for groups – a h ighly contestable idea – for the Refugee Convention
was w ritten in order to deal with la rge groups of refugees adri due to World War
II. ree of t he ve persecution grounds mentioned in the Refugee Convention refer
to groups. Besides, the United Nations High Comm issioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status deals w ith
situations of group persecution, for example in pa ragraph 44, which reads:
While refu gee status must normally be d etermined on an individu al basis, situations have
also arisen in which entire groups have been displ aced under circumstanc es indicati ng
that members of the group could be considered ind ividually as refugees. In suc h situations
the need to provide a ssistance is oen extremely urgent a nd it may not be possible for
purely political rea sons to carry out an individua l determination of refugee stat us for each
member of the group, Recourse has t herefore been had to so c alled ’group determinat ion’
of refuge e status, whereby each member of t he group is regarded pr ima facie (i.e. in t he
absence of the contrar y) as a refugee.1
Price distinguishes between a humanitarian approach – meaning that the fac t of
being in need of protection should be conclusive instead of the reason why this need
of protection exists – and a political approach, w hich regards the granti ng of asylum
as an unfr iendly act against countries of origi n guilty of persecution. ose in favour
of the humanita rian approach think the fact of distress should be conclusive and not
the reason of the distress. e trend to a more humanitaria n approach in his view has
led to more restr ictive measures, oering only temporary protection. I n addition, he
argues t hat oering asylum i s just one of the ma ny ways to help refugees and even a
very inecient medium for humanitarian assistance (p. 12), as only a small fraction of
all refugees reaches t he Western world, and the costs are high because of the requi red
individuali sed determination (p. 13). Even if refu gee protection on the whole s hould
be more oriented toward meeting people’s basic needs, asylum in his view is the wrong
tool to accomplish that broad humanita rian mission.
* Ashley Terlouw is professor in Sociology of Law at the Radb oud University of Nijmegen, the
Netherlands , specialised in m igration, asylum a nd discrimina tion.
1 UN HCR, Ha ndbook o n Proce dures an d Crite ria fo r Dete rmining Refugee Status under the 1951
Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Statu s of Refugees, HCR/IP/4/Eng/R EV.1, UNHCR,
Geneva, 1979, re-edit ed January 1992.
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