Refugee Burden-Sharing: A Modest Proposal

Abstract

This chapter discusses some of the reasons why the current refugee protection regime is inadequate. It summarizes the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) experience, the most important example of a negotiated refugee burden-sharing arrangement. The chapter considers four broad strategies for improving refugee protection. It describes a proposal, which is intended to ameliorate some of the most important inadequacies in the current system. The proposal consists of two main elements. First, a group of states would agree to observe a strong norm of proportional burden-sharing for refugees, would seek to induce other states to join the group, and would arrange for an existing or newly established international agency to assign to each participating state a refugee protection quota. Second, the participating states would then be permitted to trade their quotas by paying others to fulfill their obligations. Although the proposal entails many problems, virtually all of those problems already exist, sometimes to an even greater degree, in the current system.

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