At the time the Refugee Convention was negotiated and agreed, international human rights law was in its infancy. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been agreed in 1948 and included in Article 14 a right to seek (but not necessarily be granted) asylum: everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. The Refugee Convention embodies that right, although as is discussed in Chapter 7, it falls short of providing a right of entry for the purpose of seeking asylum. In turn, the Refugee Convention cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the Charter of the United Nations. International human rights law has expanded and evolved considerably since 1951 and the Refugee Convention now sits alongside a developing, sometimes overlapping, system of protection. It has even been argued that human rights law, with its centralized institutions and enforcement mechanisms, has become ‘the primary source of refugee protection’, with the Refugee Convention playing ‘a complementary and secondary role’. Others retort that the decentralized regime of refugee law has led the way in protection from refoulement and has ‘its own progressive dynamic which leads human rights law just as much, if not more, than it follows human rights law’. The situation of specific groups like trafficking victims and stateless persons has been addressed with new international agreements, a right of non-refoulement has been recognized in human rights law, regional legal instruments addressing the situation of refugees have been adopted and various states have either or both incorporated a constitutional right to asylum or passed their own laws delineating access to and the content of refugee status.
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