21.
person who:
It also provided a legal definition of a refugee as a
"owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of
a particular social group or political opinion, is
outside the country of his nationality and is unable
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself.
of the protection of that country; or who, not having
a nationality and being outside the country of his
former habitual residence as a result of such events,
is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return
to it."
This definition has its limitations.
I hesitate to
describe it as being the apocryphal camel the horse designed
by a committee but its inadequacies are of that order.
The Convention embodied in it the principle of
non-refoulment, forbidding a contracting State from expelling or
returning a refugee against his will. For those who would argue
that the boat people arriving in Darwin should be sent back willy
nilly, I should say that a decision to abrogate our responsibility
by returning people against their will represents a decision that
no government could take lightly, to say nothing of how it would be
actually achieved. The heavy responsibility to establish that any
individual's human rights will be respected by the authorities in
his homeland would frequently go beyond responsible decision making.
The essence of the protection of human rights in these circumstances
is the overriding importance of giving the individual the benefit of
the doubt.
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