Around 42.5 million refugees worldwide have been forced to flee their own states and are unable to return because of severe threats to their lives, human rights, or basic needs. Having fled these threats, the vast majority have by no means found protection. Instead, most refugees live either in squalid refugee camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions close to their own states in the Global South. A small minority risk their lives on journeys to reach asylum in the Global North; many thousands lose them.
How should states in the Global North (the affluent liberal democracies including the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and European states) respond to this situation? Some philosophers argue these states should open their borders to accept as many refugees as possible until the point of societal collapse. Other philosophers argue states need not admit a single refugee. Some states have responded with expansive welcome schemes accepting over one million. Other states have erected concrete walls and barbed wire fences. Some citizens march the streets with signs reading “refugees welcome.” Other citizens try to burn down a hotel housing refugees.
We sorely need an understanding of what an ethical response to refugees would be, and one that could be widely accepted as well as possible in the here and now. For this, we must understand the obligations that states owe to refugees. Many philosophical treatments of this question adopt a state-centred methodology, where the starting point is the state as the primary site of normative analysis. One adopts the perspective of a particular state and asks: What obligations would this state have if faced with the presence of refugees seeking protection? This methodology naturally invites certain questions: What would refugee protection cost to the state, and are those costs acceptable to the state? How should responsibilities be distributed between states, such that no state is unfairly “overburdened”? How many should the state take in before it is has taken its fair share?
These are vital questions. Yet, I suggest that an alternative way to approach this question is to reorient our focus to adopt a refugee-centred methodology, where the starting point is to focus on the situation and experiences of refugees themselves as the primary site of normative analysis and theorise outwards from there about obligations towards them. This methodology naturally invites a different set of questions: What are the barriers that refugees face when seeking protection? What harms and injustices do refugees face in the causes of and during their displacement? What would be required to address those harms and injustices? These questions, I suggest, are just as vital to understanding obligations.
Adopting this methodology reveals the limitations of the dominant ethical framework to understanding obligations to refugees. That framework is The Duty of Rescue Approach, which holds that states in the Global North are mere innocent bystanders simply witnessing the harms that refugees are enduring and these states have duties to rescue (at least some) refugees, at least if they are able to do so at little cost to themselves. For instance, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier suggest that refugees are “ethically analogous to [a] drowning child. Like the bystander we have an unambiguous duty of rescue towards them”; Richard Dagger writes: “A refugee is like a drowning person. If we can rescue that person without endangering our own lives, it would be wrong to leave him to drown”; and for David Miller, “There is a parallel here with the duty of rescue born by individuals in emergencies.”
This Duty of Rescue Approach is an important foundation to understanding obligations to refugees. But a refugee-centred methodology reveals two important features of global refugee displacement that this dominant approach does not sufficiently engage with.
The first feature is that many states in the Global North adopt many policies and practices in response to refugees seeking protection on their territories, including border violence, detention, encampment, and containment, which may call into question whether these states truly are the mere innocent bystanders relative to the harms refugees are facing whilst they are displaced. Understanding this feature is crucial to understanding states’ negative obligations to refugees.
The second feature is that refugees endure extensive human rights violations both in the causes of their displacement in their own state and whilst they are displaced outside. These violations involve normatively significant harms and injustices including harms to refugees’ autonomy, dignity, moral worth, and status as right-holders. Understanding this feature is crucial to understanding states positive obligations to refugees.
Before analysing these two features in more depth, it is worth clarifying the terminology. Negative obligations (or duties) are an agent’s obligations not to harm or violate the rights of others, for instance not to torture persons or create conditions in which persons will be tortured. Positive obligations (or duties) are an agent’s obligations to assist or otherwise provide a benefit to others, for instance, helping a person escape from certain torture if one could easily do so. These obligations are based on core normative commitments: widely accepted principles such as not to harm innocent people and to help those in desperate need if one can do so, that are endorsed by all plausible normative ethical theories, the ethical tenets of all major religious doctrines, and the commitments of common morality across an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines.
Focusing on important features of the situation of refugees will then help us understand states’ negative and positive obligations towards them. And these obligations, based on core commitments, will then constitute the elements of an ethical response.
The first important feature is that many states the in the Global North respond to refugees seeking protection on their territories with a variety of policies and practices. These include border violence and “pushbacks” at European and U.S. borders, where border guards will harass, intimidate, and inflict severe beatings on refugees, and where, in the most extreme cases, refugees are beaten to death and shot. The practices also include the forced detention of refugees. For instance, in a 2017 E.U. arrangement with Libya, refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe are intercepted and returned to be placed into detention centres indefinitely in Libya, where they face overcrowding, disease, starvation, and death, as well as being tortured, raped, and traded as slaves. States also use encampment: the forcible enclosure of refugees into camps. For one example, as part of the 2016 E.U.-Turkey Deal, refugees from Syria and other places who had arrived into Greece via Turkey are forcibly enclosed into camps and “controlled access centres,” where thousands have faced squalid and unsanitary conditions and extensive human rights violations, including pervasive sexual violence. States also use containment. Containment policies are those that forcibly contain refugees in regions in the Global South, away from Northern territories, by shutting down migratory routes to seek protection. For example, the Libya arrangement blocks that main migratory route from North Africa to Europe and so contains refugees in regions in North Africa where they now cannot escape and so face extensive human rights violations. And the E.U.-Turkey Deal blocks that main migratory route via Turkey to Europe and so contains refugees in regions in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, where they now cannot escape from and so face extreme poverty and human rights violations in urban areas or camps.
These policies and practices, among others, result in immense physical and mental suffering and human rights violations, and they constitute doing harm to refugees. Indeed, containment, in denying refugees escape from severe harms, is the moral equivalent of blocking the fire escape of a burning building, ensuring those who could have otherwise escaped are trapped or of holding an innocent child at arm’s length in a pond where they may drown, preventing them swimming to safety onto your dry land. And though states may have a right to control their borders and immigration, this right cannot extend to justify causing such unnecessary, disproportionate harm against innocent people seeking to escape severe threats and exercising their human right to seek and enjoy asylum.
States that adopt these practices are therefore not mere innocent bystanders but are unjustifiably harming innocent refugees who are asking for protection and assistance. These states therefore have urgent negative obligations to desist from contemporary harmful practices. This is the first component of an ethical response.
The second important feature of global refugee displacement that requires close attention is that refugees endure human rights violations both in their home countries and whilst they are displaced. The vast majority (under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’s mandate) come from six countries: Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Sudan, and South Sudan. In those states, such refugees have been subjected to and/or are fleeing severe violations, as a result of war, repression, and generalised violence, including targeted attacks on civilians, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, persecution, rape, and gender-based violence, torture, enslavement, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and potential genocide.
Having fled these threats, most refugees (71%) end up in regions of the Global South without adequate state protection. There, as Serena Parekh’s analysis elucidates, refugees effectively face only three options. They can spend their life in squalid refugee camps enduring a passive, impoverished existence and extensive human rights violations for prolonged periods of time. Or, alternatively, they can face destitution in urban areas with a sub-citizen status and endure violence, exploitation, and homelessness without adequate protection from domestic authorities. Or, the final alternative, they can embark on a perilous journey to the Global North, where refugees face torture, rape, forced labour, and exploitation from traffickers, criminal gangs, state police and/or border officials, and where thousands die en route.
Most refugees, then, not only endure severe human-rights violations within their states of origin but also throughout their displacement, whether in camps, urban areas, or on perilous journeys. As a result, these refugees do not merely endure physical harm but also additional morally significant harms and injustices. One of these is a violation of autonomy: Refugees are subjected to extensive abuses, possess few opportunities, and their control and authorship over their own lives is severely deprived. Second, refugees also endure a violation of dignity: They are subjected to treatment and conditions below acceptable standards for a dignified existence. Third, refugees endure a violation of their moral worth (or humanity): They are viewed and treated not as equal human beings but as something less—as morally inferior. And, last and importantly, refugees also face what Hannah Arendt identified as rightlessness: Though refugees supposedly have human rights in principle or on paper, they are subjected to extensive violence and abuses regardless, and so, their human rights have apparently vanished. More formally: Refugees lack substantive human rights insofar as they lack the capabilities to enjoy the content of those rights, which is phenomenologically equivalent to the lack of human rights simpliciter.
Recognising these harms and injustices is crucial to understanding positive obligations towards refugees. It is often assumed that refugees are only physically suffering and have only physical or biological needs. This is what Sarah Fine identified as the assumption of safety: that safety understood as basic security and subsistence is all that refugees need or are entitled to, and providing safety alone is a sufficient fulfilment of obligations towards them. This assumption ostensibly “justifies” inadequate and oftentimes harmful practices: forcibly containing refugees in regions deemed “safe” enough for them, forcibly relocating refugees against their will to other “safe” states, housing them in “safe” camps indefinitely, and forcibly returning them to “safe” regions within the states they fled in the first place. The assumption is also dehumanising in treating refugees as passive receptacles for subsistence aid, as things that simply need to be fed, watered, sheltered, and kept alive rather than as human agents with far more morally important interests, needs, desires, and rights, beyond mere physical wellbeing.
Recognising the harms and injustices refugees face allows us to move beyond the assumption of safety. It shows refugees are far worse off than commonly assumed and have that much more urgent claims to protection, with correspondingly stronger positive obligations on the part of states to provide it. And, crucially, it shows the positive obligations must be specified to address the normatively relevant harms and injustices that refugees endure. The obligations must therefore not only provide for physical needs but also address the harms to autonomy, dignity, and moral worth as well as secure human rights protection to address rightlessness.
These positive obligations therefore rule out certain responses as inadequate. For one example, housing refugees in camps may provide for subsistence needs in the short term. But camps do not address the harm to autonomy by securing an autonomous existence. Rather, as free movement and right to work are denied, refugees are restricted to a passive, dependent existence in “limbo” for prolonged periods, precluded from opportunities to rebuild and author their lives according to their own wishes. Camps do not address the harm to dignity by securing a dignified existence. Rather, the conditions are often squalid and unsanitary, and the passive and dependent existence can itself be degrading and damaging to a sense of self-worth. Camps do not address the harm to moral worth. Rather, placing refugees in camps treats them as undesirable elements, to be herded away into camps far from inclusion in Northern states. And camps do not secure human rights. Instead, as Serena Parekh again has analysed, as refugees are being excluded from full membership in the political community, their rights are exceptionally vulnerable, and human rights violations are endemic in all camp settings globally.
By contrast, the positive obligations rule in alternative responses as required such as permanent settlement with pathways to citizenship (either through granting asylum or active resettlement) within political communities. For instance, less than one percent of the world’s refugees are actively resettled by Northern states. The positive obligations require a significant expansion of this. Such settlement would enable autonomy because, with the ability to set and pursue long-term life plans, to settle in a secure place to live with one’s family, to have a stable livelihood, build relationships, and participate in society, the economy and political community, refugees could meaningfully exercise control over and rebuild their lives. Settlement also provides conditions for a dignified existence, where refugees can have a decent, stable, standard of living, have the opportunities to support themselves and their families, and live free from fear. Settlement also respects and affirms the moral worth of refugees as equal human beings worthy of inclusion. And settlement secures human rights, allowing refugees who’ve endured the harms and injustices of displacement to, at last, have the capabilities to enjoy those rights. These positive obligations to protect refugees in ways that address the harms and injustices they have been subjected to form the second component of an ethical response.
Taken together, the obligations of states towards refugees revealed by a refugee-centred methodology are negative obligations not to harm or violate the rights of innocent refugees and positive obligations to protect refugees to alleviate not only physical harms but also harms to their autonomy, dignity, and moral worth, and to secure their human rights. These obligations, based on core commitments, represent the basic components of what an ethical response to refugees would be.
Adhering to an ethical response would require desisting from harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment, among others, and instead, securing pathways to settlement and integration for refugees by respecting the right to asylum, providing safe and regular routes as an alternative to dangerous irregular journeys, expanding resettlement, and increasing financial assistance to support the protection and social, economic, and political integration of refugees in regions closer to their own states.
This may sound like a naïve wishlist. It isn’t. In fact, it’s already a reality, at least for many Ukrainian refugees. Consider: though there have been some concerning gaps in protection, there are no Ukrainian refugees being beaten up at Northern state borders, drowning en route, being abused in detention centres, enclosed into camps, or forcibly contained. Instead, at the outset of the Ukrainian displacement crisis, Northern states provided immediate protection to millions, with safe and regular routes, humanitarian visas, immediate access to education, employment, social services, and healthcare, and released billions in funding to support integration.
An ethical response, demonstrated to be possible towards Ukrainian refugees in 2022, can and ought to be expanded to all.
Bradley Hillier-Smith
Bradley Hillier-Smith is an associate lecturer in moral, political, and legal philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His research specialises in applied political ethics, global justice, and human rights, with a specific focus on migration ethics and obligations to refugees. He is the author of The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees (Routledge, 2024).
