Refugee Protection In India: Building A National Refugee Law With Lessons From South Africa
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
Dr. Neelam Dighe* & Mr. Somesh Akolkar**
ABSTRACT
India today hosts one of the largest and most heterogeneous refugee populations in the world, yet it remains without a dedicated national statute governing the recognition, treatment, or protection of refugees. India is not a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, and refugees on Indian soil continue to be governed by the colonial- era Foreigners Act, 1946, alongside an assortment of statutes never designed with displacement in mind. This paper undertakes a doctrinal and contemporary analysis of India’s refugee governance framework. The study argues that India’s continuing reliance on executive discretion and ad hoc judicial intervention, in place of codified rights, has produced an increasingly securitized and discriminatory regime one in which protection now correlates more closely with religious identity and diplomatic convenience than with the fact of persecution. Comparing India’s position with South Africa, a Global South state that is party to the 1951 Convention and has enacted a rights-based domestic Refugees Act, 1998, the paper distils lessons of institutional design that remain available to India. It concludes by proposing the essential contents of a rights-based, non-discriminatory national refugee law for India.
Keywords: Refugee Law, Rohingya, Non-Refoulement, UNHCR, Article 21.
