Right to asylum and protection of the refugees' human rights

Throughout history, people have sought asylum in other places in order to escape the threat to them when their opportunities for survival and their lives are in danger. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has declared that people have the right to seek and enjoy asylum in other countries under persecution in Article 14/1. The Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951, which was revised by the Protocol of 1967, was adopted as the most basic document providing tools for the concrete evaluation of the application of refugees for individuals seeking international protection. The international terrorism observed in the 2000s has negatively affected the policies regarding the increasing and sudden-mass refugee movements. With the structure specific to the dynamics of the period it was prepared, the Convention could not provide the necessary solutions to these negative developments. Thus, restrictive and coercive policies, which contradict with the Convention, were adopted. Especially, the main reasons for this inadequacy were focusing on individual status assessment, excluding important threat situations such as natural disasters and war, not proposing solutions to new problems such as rescue at sea, not including clear regulations on responsibility sharing-supervision and not providing clear definitions of concepts related to refugee criteria. This inadequacy paved the way for an increasing rate of adoption of exclusionary accelerated assessment and new alternative protection practices to refugee protection by states. At that time, not only the rights recognized by the Convention, but also human rights of refugees have faced the threat of violations. This study, which aims to prove the inadequacy of the Convention within the framework of these problems it deals with, examined the important concepts within the framework of "asylum" - "migration" and "the right to asylum" - "human rights" in its first two chapters, historical process of refugee in the third chapter, the procedures for obtaining refugee status and the rights granted by status in the fourth chapter and mechanisms and problems encountered in the protection of the rights of refugees in fifth Chapter. This study has made suggestions claiming that asylum is related to human rights and refuge is related to the sovereignty field of states in its concluding section. As a result, this study suggested that a new binding document should be written in order to distinguish between the concepts of "asylum" and "refuge" and treat asylum and refugee status as separate status and clearly demonstrates the responsibilities of states on the basis of human rights.