In the aftermath of the First World War, the international community, faced with the problem posed by the mass of refugees fleeing civil wars, dictatorships and persecution, attempted to find solutions. These solutions, inspired in part by humanitarian concerns to protect refugees, were largely dependent on state interests, which tended to keep these undesirables at bay.
A century later, the situation has not fundamentally changed: despite the adoption of the Geneva Convention in 1951, and despite all the solemn proclamations about the "sacred" nature of the right to asylum, it increasingly appears to be an empty shell. While the number of refugees in the world has risen dramatically - twenty-four million in 2016, sixty-five million if we include internally displaced persons - Western states, concerned solely with "controlling migratory flows", are doing everything they can to prevent these refugees from gaining access to their territory, where they could find protection. Through a series of legal devices, they try to circumvent the non-refoulement obligation and other binding obligations of international conventions, to the point of emptying them of their substance - when they don't violate them openly and head-on.
