Abstract This study examines how national adjudicators interpret and apply the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees guidance in asylum claims related to female genital mutilation. Drawing on a structured consistency analysis of 30 case rulings across diverse jurisdictions, primarily from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, and Ireland, it identifies three main sources of divergence: (1) implementation failures despite clear guidance, (2) restrictive interpretations enabled by under-specified standards, and (3) substantive ambiguities in areas not fully addressed by current guidance. Most inconsistencies stem from misapplications at the lower-court level, particularly in risk assessments, State protection analysis, and internal relocation evaluations, often corrected on appeal. Across several rulings, courts highlighted the need for stronger reaffirmation of existing principles, including the enduring harm caused by female genital mutilation or the State’s exclusive responsibility for protection. Only a limited number of cases revealed genuine doctrinal uncertainty, mainly in relation to parental asylum claims involving citizen children. These findings underscore not only the enforcement challenges specific to female genital mutilation-related claims but also broader implications for the adjudication of gender-based persecution within refugee law.

Abstract This article which includes analysis of interviews, examines New Zealand’s Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship programme in which both nominated and UNHCR referred applicants are selected for resettlement in a scheme which is additional to the state’s refugee resettlement quota programme (RQP). It argues that in New Zealand a “sustainable community” for refugee sponsorship has developed as a result of a “compact” between sponsors and other “actor-citizens” and government. It demonstrates the importance of manaakitanga, the Māori concept of hospitality within this “sustainable community”. It examines and responds to objections raised by some scholars to the role of the community in nominated sponsorship for refugee resettlement.

Abstract Building on Owen’s discussion of “displacement” as a potential reorienting concept for Forced Migration Studies, and recognising the interdisciplinarity of the field, I focus on the ethical bounds and implications of such a shift in discursive and decolonial terms, including points on binary framings of border crossing, hierarchies of deservingness, and agency. In doing so, I consider how insights from related areas of inquiry might inform such a shift. My response encourages work that does not adopt state-centric language as its default or definitive terms.

Abstract The past decades have seen the development of externalisation policies, with border controls and the administration of asylum systems increasingly taking place outside a State’s territory. One form of externalisation is extraterritorial processing, whereby States transfer asylum-seekers to another State to process their asylum claim and/or provide international protection. Yet the growing number of extraterritorial processing agreements stands in stark contrast with concerns about their legality, as they face challenges before multiple bodies, including domestic judiciaries as well as regional and international accountability mechanisms. Accordingly, this article explores the ability of multiple legal regimes to constrain the proliferation of extraterritorial processing agreements. It does so by focusing on three externalisation policies: Australia’s offshore processing in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, the asylum partnership between the United Kingdom and Rwanda, and the Protocol between Italy and Albania. The analysis focuses on the question of whether the policies are legal under domestic, regional and international legal regimes and to what extent litigation under multiple legal regimes can challenge these extraterritorial processing arrangements. The final section reflects on the added value of the coexistence of multiple legal regimes in the light of the proliferation of such externalisation policies.

Abstract Attempts to enhance efficiency in asylum processing by limiting procedural rights have often backfired, leading to poor decision-making, increased appeals, and longer delays. Australia’s recently abolished Fast Track review process at the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) provides an illustrative example of how this plays out in practice. This article draws on a novel data set collated by the Kaldor Centre Data Lab of decision-making outcomes at the IAA. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the IAA was neither fair nor efficient, and resulted in a system that was both slow and unjust. This analysis provides valuable lessons for the design and operation of Australia’s new Administrative Review Tribunal and other international reforms aimed at improving the efficiency of asylum review mechanisms. The article calls for a re-evaluation of the relationship between fairness and efficiency in this context, arguing that fairness enhances, rather than detracts from, efficiency.

Abstract The global refugee system prioritises self-sufficiency as a prime objective, but refugees may have different views of their success. To assess how refugees across varying contexts of exit and reception conceptualise success, this study draws on in-depth interviews with 36 adult refugees from Iraq and Democratic Republic of Congo resettled in Denver, Colorado, and St Louis, Missouri. This article makes four main contributions to the refugee resettlement literature. First, we find that refugees have multidimensional and contextually situated understandings of success that extend beyond self-sufficiency or economic performance. Secondly, when refugees did define success in terms of economic performance, their conceptualisations were more holistic than conventional views of financial independence or social mobility. Thirdly, most refugees defined success in terms of their ability to give back to their extended families and communities—a facet of social connectedness that receives little attention in existing scholarship. Lastly, using these definitions of success, most (89 per cent) participants considered the period of resettlement to be the most successful in their lives. Findings underscore the achievements of refugees but also the limits of resettlement policies and practices that prioritise expedient economic self-sufficiency over the development of strong social ties and sustainable community support systems.

ABSTRACT This article is part of a broader project aimed at rewriting refugee law jurisprudence from a lived refugee perspective. The co-authors, one of whom is a refugee from Afghanistan, have chosen internal relocation as the subject of this project as it is a problematic and controversial principle of international refugee law which we believe is frequently applied without due consideration of the practical experience of refugees. Internal relocation provides that a refugee may be returned to their country of origin if they can relocate to a “safe” part of that state where they would not have a well-founded fear of persecution. This principle is somewhat tempered by the application of a “reasonableness” test in most jurisdictions. That test aims to reflect that, in some cases, it may not be possible to require a refugee to relocate to another part of their country of origin to avoid persecution. However, a “reasonableness” factor is not always considered as part of relocation. Moreover, it aims to bring an “objective” standard of reasonableness, which can be critiqued on a number of bases. In this article, the authors rewrite an Australian Refugee Review Tribunal decision dealing with an applicant from Afghanistan to reflect the lived experience of refugees better and to encourage readers to think about whether some of the assumptions made in internal relocation jurisprudence have been fully interrogated. Much of internal relocation scholarship focuses on conceptual legal issues, for instance, whether relocation is grounded in the text, context or object of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and whether relocation fits within the “well-founded fear” or “state protection” limb of the refugee definition. While these are important conceptual debates about the treaty basis for internal relocation, we believe these have been well-analysed in the existing literature. Our article seeks to add to these core debates by reconceptualising the application of relocation to authentic refugee experiences and, through this, to highlight some of the weaknesses in the current approach to this complex question.

Abstract The European Union Agency for Asylum has emerged as an important actor in the Common European Asylum System in the past few years. In this article, we explore how the agency engages in capacity-building by looking at the development of bureaucratic instruments. We deploy the theoretical framework of instrument constituencies to investigate the agency’s development of instruments around resettlement. In relation to the literature on European migration management, deploying the theoretical framework of instrument constituencies is a novel approach. Given the European Union’s limited mandate to directly influence Member States resettlement programmes, we argue that the development of bureaucratic instruments is one of the few avenues through which the European Union can facilitate resettlement. This study reveals how the proliferation in the use of these instruments by Member State authorities is driven by a political ambition to create a more orderly form of migration and is contrasted with the seemingly uncontrollable nature of asylum. Beyond being a direct solution to a practical problem, the policy instruments studied here reveal how new bureaucratic practices around resettlement are gradually being established. We show how resettlement is continuously evolving in the intersection between Member States and the European Union in the governing of migration.

Abstract This article brings together temporality and gender in the refugee process and examines how refugee determination bodies and courts have interpreted gendered threats, as a specific form of intimate partner violence. A case law review of jurisdictions (that include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK) is conducted, revealing a flawed temporal phenomenon where decision-makers have focused primarily on the exogenous aspect of threats, namely, whether there is a real chance of a threat being actuated in the future, and have largely failed to assess the endogenous, psychological dimension of the threat, that encompasses past, present, and future aspects of time. The practice of treating threats of violence as a potential future harm rather than an already occurring harm exhibits an obvious privileging of the future over the present that is not rooted in the empirical evidence on intimate partner violence. Further, the predominant focus by decision-makers on isolated future events as harm fails to accommodate the broad temporal dimensions of systemic intimate partner violence, best suited to a predicament-based model of being persecuted. This article explores the temporal shortcomings and gendered interpretations that underpin this erroneous practice in case law, finding that the temporal governance of refugee law is still largely shaped by the male gaze and conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity, which contributes to the limited recognition of threats as a form of harm in themselves.