Law of the Sea

YLS Sale Symposium: Interdiction of Asylum Seekers–The Realms of Policy and Law in Refugee Protection

[David A. Martin is the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law, University of Virginia.]

I start with a high-altitude view of the history and contours of refugee protection, to provide perspective on the current use of interdiction – and also on the contrasting stances taken by the U.S. Supreme Court in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (509 U.S. 155 (1993)) and the European Court of Human Rights in Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy (Application no. 27765/09, Eur. Ct. H.R. 10 (2012)).

Refugee protection is not, at its core, dependent on fixed or expansive legal obligations of states or other political actors.  Since Biblical times, refugees have been protected, even in the absence of treaty or legal edict.  These were policy decisions by political leaders, influenced by compassion, but also by pragmatic considerations that ranged from assessments of absorptive capacities, food supplies, and the tolerance level of the leader’s subjects or fellow-citizens; through perceived advantages to be gained if the refugees seemed a particularly skilled or enterprising lot; to judgments about whether the exodus would strengthen or weaken the state against its enemies.

Protection that rests on policy is uncertain and unpredictable – by definition not wholly or even principally guided by humanitarian considerations.  But it has nonetheless at many times afforded true shelter to multitudes.  And after 60 years of operation under the major international treaties relevant here, we can hardly say that treaties assure reliable and consistent humanitarian responses either.

Comes now a new generation of tribunals and treaty bodies that seem to believe they can end the modern era’s inconsistency and usher in a virtually pure humanitarian practice of refugee protection.  Their methods include reading selected provisions in refugee and human rights treaties quite expansively, deploying broad notions of a state’s jurisdiction – territorial and otherwise – and projecting onto the relevant treaties a mono-thematic conception of object and purpose, seeing only an objective to provide protection and issuing their interpretations accordingly.

This newly ambitious legal effort, most clearly exemplified in the Hirsi Jamaa decision, certainly is capable of improving protective outcomes for certain asylum-seekers in specific flight situations.  But there are reasons for deep skepticism that this idealistic effort to carpet the entire field with judicially enforced legal prescripts will somehow overcome or crowd out all those benighted considerations of tawdry policy that state leaders tend to take into account.  It may even interfere with efforts to optimize protection within the real-world constraints that government officials must account for.  I offer here four reasons for skepticism.

Original intent and government buy-in. 

First, this mono-thematic focus was not what states agreed to – not in 1951 or 1967, not in the European Convention on Human Rights.  The treaties have a more complex set of objectives.  Humanitarian shelter is one of them, to be sure, enough to motivate setting into law a floor reflecting modest but important commitments, focused on persons already present on the state’s territory – a floor, it must be emphasized, not a whole edifice.  Other important treaty objectives, given only muted expression but still decidedly on the minds of the diplomats creating the treaties, were to preserve the core of national control over migration by foreigners and also to protect against criminal and security threats.  There was no clear template for the mechanisms to be employed toward these ends, but states clearly regarded it as important to keep their protection commitments in balance with the sovereign right to make deliberate decisions about inbound migration.  At each stage governments provided clear signals that they were not writing a “blank cheque” (a frequent assertion in the travaux of the 1951 Convention).  They acknowledged that it would be good to do more, when possible, but they left the “more” in recommendations meant to inform ongoing policy decisions.

The dateline limitation in Article 1 of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees may be the clearest indication of this caution (treating as “refugees” only those who fled “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951” – hence a largely known and finite population already present in the West European countries leading the drafting effort).  But strong markers of the same attitude also appear in the exclusion from coverage of persons who had committed serious crimes, and especially the broadly worded exception to the nonrefoulement  protection of Article 33 when “there are reasonable grounds for regarding” a person “as a danger to the security of the country” of refuge. Commentary at the time, even pieces written by scholars of strong humanitarian instincts, generally accepted that Article 33 did not include non-rejection at the frontier.

Some have suggested that the 1967 Protocol, which eliminated the dateline, should be seen as global acceptance of a more purely protective stance.   This claim has to downplay the continuing exclusions from treaty coverage of serious criminals and national security threats. But there is an even stronger indication that the UN General Assembly, in adopting the text of the Protocol, was not propounding an absolute bar on interdiction or other barriers to arrival.  That same year the General Assembly adopted a formal Declaration on Territorial Asylum (GA Res. 2312 (XXII), 22 U.N.GAOR Supp. (No. 16), at 81).  Article 3 is widely quoted for its general provision that seems at first to bar “measures such as rejection at the frontier.”  But the very next clause, often omitted by the commentators, states: “Exception may be made to the foregoing principle only for overriding reasons of national security or in order to safeguard the population, as in the case of a mass influx of persons.”  The General Assembly clearly did not consider non-rejection at the frontier an absolute or nonderogable obligation for states. Governments still insisted on keeping in their hands certain tools to meter their obligations or keep them politically manageable, albeit at a higher protective level than in pre-treaty days. The Sale decision essentially recognized this tradeoff at the foundation of the legal obligations in the Protocol.  The Court, like the Convention’s drafters, acknowledged that going further toward protection would be desirable in many circumstances – but that is a task for policy, not treaty obligation (509 U.S. at 188).

The insufficiency of alternatives.

Second, supporters of expansive readings of nonrefoulement sometimes counter that non-entrée policies, which include maritime interdiction but perhaps also strict visa regimes, are not necessary to serve the state’s interests in migration control and in stopping crime, terrorism, or spying.  Instead those aims can be addressed in a far more precise and scientific way through careful application of the governing definition, which requires an asylum seeker to show a “well-founded fear of persecution” on account of five specified grounds, and which also excludes serious criminals and security threats.

This is an attractive claim, and it seems to accept that the treaties embody a more complex set of objects and purposes.  But government officials generally are not reassured that such reliance will sustain the needed balance, because of hard experience with adjudication systems.  In fact we still are not very good at accomplishing timely and accurate asylum decisions, with sufficient checks against fraud, even though intensive effort and millions of dollars have been devoted to improving adjudication since the surge in asylum applications in the 1980s.  Moreover, as government officials see it, the problem is not just insufficient progress in procedures.  The substantive standard also keeps expanding, now reaching far beyond fear of persecution or the five familiar grounds – especially under the ECHR jurisprudence.

YLS Sale Symposium: Sale’s Legacy– “Creative Legal Thinking” and Dynamic Interpretation of Refugee Law

[Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen is Research Director at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and author of Access to Asylum: International refugee law and the globalisation of migration control (CUP, 2011), which won the Idman Award for best monograph in public international law.] In 1992 President George HW Bush ordered the United States Coast Guard to stop all persons fleeing Haiti in international waters. When a majority of the United States Supreme Court upheld the legality of this interdiction program, it paved the way for more than 65,000 people being returned to Haiti with no assessment of any claims for political asylum. Beyond this, the Sale case could be argued to have two legacies – one political and one legal. US policy and Sale undoubtedly inspired many other countries to adopt similar interdiction schemes and perhaps a more general trend to speculate in circumventing obligations under international refugee law. Yet, Sale also prompted other courts and refugee advocates to pick up the torch, ensuring that international refugee law has developed dynamically in response to new patterns of migration control. High seas interdiction forms parts of a wider set of deterrence measures to administratively or physically prevent refugees from accessing asylum. From visa controls to biometric scans, migration control is no longer something performed only at the perimeter of a state’s sovereign territory, but rather forms a set of progressive mechanisms to check travellers at every step of their prospective journey. A common trait of many of these policies is that they are designed to carve out exceptions to, circumvent or shift obligations otherwise owed under international law, often through governance measures that could hardly have been foreseen when the 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted. The US interdiction program in the 1990s constitutes a prime example. By geographically shifting migration control to block Haitian refugees on the high seas, it was argued that neither US nor international law applied. The majority of the Supreme Court in Sale not only upheld the government’s claim, it set off a proliferation of extraterritorial migration control practices. High sea interdiction programmes have since been introduced both in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Migration control has further become a foreign policy issue, with bilateral and multilateral agreements paving the way for migration control within the territorial waters, airports or border zones of origin or transit states, or the enlisting of third country authorities to perform exit or entry control on behalf of sponsoring states. In parallel, responsibility for migration control has been delegated to corporate actors. From the initial imposition of carrier sanctions spreading through the 1980s, private security companies and other contractors are today increasingly taking on immigration controls both at the border and overseas. These practices all raise complex questions about the reach of international refugee and human rights obligations, attribution of conduct and the division of responsibility for human rights violations.

YLS Sale Symposium: A Salvage Operation–Refugee Rights Advocacy in the United States after Sale

[Bill Frelick is the director of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee Rights Program. See part one of his post here.] Since Sale v. Haitian Centers Council judgment in 1993 settled the issue of extraterritorial application of the principle of nonrefoulement in US domestic law, US-based refugee rights advocates after 1993 were left without recourse to US courts. But, writing for the Sale...

YLS Sale Symposium: Limiting the Damage–Global Refugee Rights Advocacy after Sale

[Bill Frelick is the director of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee Rights Program.] The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) rightfully characterized the US Supreme Court’s Sale v. Haitian Centers Council judgment in 1993 as a “setback to modern international refugee law,” and for the next two decades nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and UNHCR have been trying to limit the damage, pick up the pieces, and salvage what they could after that setback. Refugee advocates saw immediately that the central idea of the Sale decision, that the principle of nonrefoulement does not apply extra-territorially, would give a giant push to a movement among asylum-destination states that was already well underway at the time of the decision to divert refugee flows, particularly of boat migrants. What made Sale particularly damaging was not only the judgment per se, but the fact that it came from the United States, the erstwhile leader of the modern refugee regime. From Europe to Australia, but no less so among less developed states in Asia and Africa, the US example of interdicting and pushing back Haitian asylum seekers, now blessed by the Supreme Court, looked like a green light for erecting barriers not only to prevent entry, but to operate unbound by the principle of nonrefoulement, cornerstone of international refugee law, on the high seas and in other legally grey areas, such as no-man’s lands between border crossings, where territorial jurisdiction is not always clear. This essay will look at how NGOs and UNHCR, among others, worked to reiterate in international law fora the principle that the principle of nonrefoulement knows no territorial limits, to dissuade other jurisdictions from adopting the Sale interpretation, and to challenge other states that might try to follow the US lead in interdicting and summarily returning boat migrants. A companion essay looks specifically at NGO advocacy post Sale directed at the executive and legislative branches in the United States. IACHR: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) was an early battleground in this effort. A coalition of key Haitian-specific NGOs, including the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami, and the Washington Office on Haiti, joined with the Haitian Centre for Human Rights in Port-au-Prince to petition the IACHR to declare the US interdiction program a serious violation of internationally protected human rights. In 1997 in Haitian Centre for Human Rights et al. v. US, the IACHR found that US interdiction and summary return of Haitians contradicted the US’s nonrefoulement obligations under the Refugee Convention, which know “no geographical limitations” and that the US further breached article 27 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man by preventing interdicted Haitians from exercising their right to seek and receive asylum in a foreign country. UNHCR’s Executive Committee: In the years immediately following the Sale decision, another key battleground for refugee advocates was the UNHCR Executive Committee, where the United States had heretofore played a relatively progressive role with respect to articulating refugee rights principles. But in the post-Sale 1990s, the United States began to play a decidedly obstructive role on the interpretation of the nonrefoulment principle. (See here.) Previously, ExCom conclusions on nonrefoulement going back to 1977 routinely said that the principle of nonrefoulment applies both at the border and within the territory of states. In the ExCom conclusions of 1996 and 1997- ExCom Conclusions 79 and 82--the “at the border” language was dropped.  An early draft of ExCom 79 had reiterated the standard “at the border” language, but the US delegation to the June 1996 standing committee opposed that language, calling it an overstatement of existing international refugee law. UNHCR wrote a letter to the US mission to the UN in Geneva saying that “no other state has adopted as a matter of law the circumscribed view of nonrefoulement advocated by the United States.” US advocates, including this writer, met with and corresponded with US government officials to argue that the position the US was adopting at the ExCom went even further than Sale, which had addressed high seas interdiction, but had not suggested that the principle of refoulement does not apply at the US border. In fact, Justice Stevens had said, “The INA offers these statutory protections [referring to §243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act] only to aliens who reside in or who have arrived at a border of the United States.” A letter signed by 12 executives of NGOs, including the US Committee for Refugees, the International Rescue Committee, the US Catholic Conference, Church World Service, and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society wrote to Anthony Lake, assistant to the President on National Security Affairs, saying: “What standing will the US State Department representatives have next time we plead with West African nations not to push back Liberian boat refugees?... What signal is the US sending to countries like Turkey and Iran who have recently refused entry to Kurdish persons fleeing Saddam Hussein’s secret police?” The US NGOs were able to convince the State Department to include in its speech to the 1996 ExCom a “political statement” that referred to the principle of nonrefoulement as applying “from the border” of a state, but the State Department only consented to refer to this as a “humanitarian principle,” not a legal one. With the turn of the millennium and to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, UNHCR convened a series of Global Consultations on International Protection intended to clarify and fill protection gaps in the Convention. UNHCR commissioned scholarly analyses and convened expert roundtables geared toward maritime interdiction and the principle of nonrefoulement, all of which set the stage for ExCom Conclusion 97 of October 2003 on Safeguards in Interception Measures. Although ExCom Conclusion 97 did not explicitly use the term nonrefoulement, it said that:

“interception measures should not result in asylum-seekers and refugees being denied access to international protection, or result in those in need of international protection being returned, directly or indirectly, to the frontiers of territories where their life or freedom would be threatened on account of a Convention ground.”

YLS Sale Symposium: Spatial Practice as Evidence and Advocacy

[Bradley Samuels is a Partner at SITU Research. All work described here was undertaken within the scope of Forensic Architecture, a European Research Council funded project based out of Goldsmiths Center for Research Architecture.] Whether captured by citizen videos, orbiting satellites, or international monitoring agencies, violations of human rights are increasingly documented in visual and spatial registers. Consequently, architectural representations –...

YLS Sale Symposium: ‘Stopping the Boats’–Australia’s Appalling Example to the World

[Paul Power is Chief Executive Officer of the Refugee Council of Australia and a member of the Steering Committee of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network.] In January 2014, a ranger in West Java reported to the Indonesian navy that a mysterious orange vessel had landed on a remote coral reef and about 60 people had disembarked and disappeared. The naval...

YLS Sale Symposium: The Politics of Interdiction and Haitian Advocacy

[Jocelyn McCalla was the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights from 1998 to 2006.]

For the purposes of this discussion I will restrict my remarks to the impact of Sale on Haitian immigration and advocacy; I will not be so bold as to extend them to the impact overall on all immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers that the United States is dealing with. Secondly, I believe it is important to explore advocacy before Sale as well after Sale. One can't comprehend what happened after 1993 without an examination of the 20 years of advocacy on behalf of Haitians that  preceded the Supreme Court decision, as well as the changing relationship between Haiti and the United States.

Haitian asylum-seekers began fleeing to the United States by sailboats in 1972. From  the very beginning, advocacy on behalf of Haitians in the United States has never been uniquely about rights to due process or access to the asylum system. It always had a dual edge: promoting rights on the domestic front were associated with the promotion of democratic rights in Haiti. Advocates had urged the United States to disassociate itself from the brutal Duvalier dictatorship. They held that it was that regime which caused Haitians to flee: end your support of the regime, side with democracy and refugee flow would dry up… They looked  to the Courts for relief and to the Court of public opinion for support.

The United States tried all sorts of forceful measures to stem Haitian refugee flow but couldn’t. Finally President Ronald Reagan issued the interdiction order authorizing interception at sea and forcible return. Additionally should the asylum-seekers find themselves close to US shores they needed to be within 3 nautical miles of the shore to access legal help. Interdiction worked: of the 23,000 Haitian refugees intercepted at sea, only six were deemed to have prima facie valid asylum claims. All others were returned.

Things came to a head in 1991 following the violent ouster of democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide when a federal court judge in Miami triggered a scramble at the highest level of  the US government when it enjoined the US from returning refugees intercepted at sea. The high seas drama – interdiction, Guantanamo, injunction against interdiction -- that followed Aristide’s ouster generated sizeable support for Haitian refugees and the Aristide administration.

Campaigning in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to overturn the interdiction policy. Clinton changed his mind shortly before being sworn in. He offered a quid pro quo: more energetic support for Aristide’s return and democracy in Haiti in exchange for keeping the status quo on interdiction, asylum screening and quarantining HIV positive Haitian asylum seekers at GTMO.

YLS Sale Symposium: Haitian Democracy, the Sale Decision and Haitian Refugees

[Ira Kurzban was counsel for the government of Haiti between 1991 until 2004 and was counsel of record in HRC v. Baker and over 10 other class action lawsuits involving Haitian refugees in the United States. Mr. Kurzban continues to serve  as personal counsel for Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president.]

On September 30, 1991, the Haitian military, with the help of the Haitian elite, overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. President Aristide had won Haiti’s first free, fair and open election by 67% of the vote in a field of 17 candidates.

The violence of September 30, 1991 and its aftermath are well known. Estimates range from 1,000 to 3,000 military and paramilitary executions within the first 48 hours of the coup, many in front of the National Palace where supporters of Haitian democracy went to protest the overthrow of their President. Beyond the immediate executions were tens of thousands more over the next several years by DIA/CIA sponsored paramilitary organizations such as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). Many of this is documented in trials such as the Raboteau trial where human rights violators were tried in a court of law and brought to justice for the first time in Haitian history.

A second coup, again with the funds and organization of the elite, but also the  support of the United States, French, and Canadian governments, occurred on February 29, 2004 during the second democratically-elected term of Jean Bertrand Aristide.  By the second coup, the Haitian army had been demobilized. One might call this coup, documented in detail in such works as Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment  and Sprague, Paramilitarism and the Assault of Democracy in Haiti, as a slow-motion performance where a military wing went from town to town executing police and supporters of democracy while the elites simultaneously financially supported such executions while proclaimed their rights were being violated. The U.S., French and Canadian government contributed at a minimum to the finance and support of  gross disinformation campaigns, anti-democratic organizations, paramilitary groups and covert operations in the second coup.

The decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, a travesty of international and domestic law, and basic human decency, had a significant effect on how Haitian refugees fleeing these two coups were treated. Pre-Sale the U.S. government’s actions were hesitant, unsure, chaotic and erratic. Post-Sale they were ruthless.

In October, 1991, almost  immediately after the coup, Haitians who supported democracy and supported President Aristide began fleeing Haiti in fear of their lives. By mid-October, Haitians were aboard vessels trying to get out of Haiti. By December there were more than 5,000 Haitians who had fled Haiti. At one point in the crisis there were more than 10,000 Haitians in the Guantanamo camps.

The initial response of the U.S post-September 30, 1991 was to decline to return Haitians to the imminent danger they faced. They were taken aboard Coast Guard cutters. The U.S. held them in the cutters and sought to obtain clearance for their trip to the U.S. or their return home.  The U.S. had signed a 1981 interdiction treaty with Haiti that required our country to at least provide  facial compliance with international law by granting “ asylum interviews” aboard Coast Guard cutters prior to forcibly returning refugees to Haiti. The numbers of Haitians on the cutters began to build up. Given the public executions in front of Haiti’s national palace the foreign policy establishment in the U.S. was too embarrassed pre –Sale to immediately return Haitians fleeing the country. By November hundreds of Haitians were simply sitting on the decks of cutters in the Caribbean.  The numbers became too large and by November 18, 1991 the Bush Administration directed the Coast Guard to take the refugees back to Haiti and ignore our 1981 Accords.

The next day the Haitian Refugee Center filed an action for declaratory and injunctive relief in the United States District Court in the Southern District of Florida. They also filed an application for a  temporary restraining order that would prevent the Coast Guard and the U.S. government from removing Haitians on the high seas from being returned.