Up to today, there is no comprehensive international regime for migrants. Rather, a set of
different declarations and legal instrument deal with migration directly and indirectly. These
include the Refugee Convention, the lesser-known International Convention on the Protection
of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families as well as references to
migrants in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the protection of minorities and
treaties and agreements on specific themes such as trafficking. As such, references to
migration are rather minimal and currently the regime consists of a range of disconnected
international law. In the first part, this paper thus sets out to map the existing international
agreements and to examine their specific contribution to the protection of migrants. This will
help to provide an overview of the fragmented set of relevant treaties.
Based on this analysis, the second half of the paper will focus on explaining why there is no
international migration regime and assess the creation of the Refugee Convention. Since
international law is still largely based around national sovereignty and migration is one of the
areas where countries have been adamant about maintaining national control, the state
remains the most powerful actor in deciding who it admits into its country on what basis and
how it governs migration. Even the Refugee Convention does not necessarily mean that
countries have to accept all refugees as can be seen right now. Similar to the other treaties, it
is not backed up by an effective accountability mechanism with options for retaliation in case
of non-compliance.
Despite this, the Refugee Convention still provides a normative framework. When trying to
understand why the Refugee Convention was ratified in contrast to an international protection
regime for all migrants, one has to understand the historical and political circumstances of
when it was created. This is the only area related to migration where countries have given up
some sovereignty. There are many arguments of why this is the case. Some say, that the need
to manage the number of refugees after the Second World War was one driver. Others argue
that the Refugee Convention was fully caught up in the Cold War and was used as a tool by
the US to delegitimize the USSR by accepting refugees that fled from political prosecution.
Another set of scholars argue that the refugee regime actually came at the expense of an
international migration regime, saying that governments had to let some migrants in but not
others and settled for refugees.
