CRS Seminar: Beyond the 1951 Convention: What are State responsibilities towards refugees according to the 1967 Protocol

Guest Speaker: Robert Barsky, Canada Research Chair: Law, Narrative and Border Crossing, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University
In this talk Prof. Barsky will discuss the letters, minutes of meetings, memos, and reports that pertain to the negotiations leading up to the 1967 Protocol. These documents show that the ambitions of the 19 legal experts who convened in Bellagio in 1965 were far more wide-ranging than simply removing the temporal (pre-1951) and geographical (Europe) limitations of the 1951 Convention. Rather, the documents reveal complex discussions about how to create a stand-alone treaty that would expand the Convention’s reach and render it more adaptable to new refugee situations, while not impeding any more expansive regional instruments that might come to be adopted.
Robert Barsky, Canada Research Chair, employs literary and artistic insights to study border-crossing. His recent book,Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law was shortlisted for the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize. His new research on the 1967 Protocol, and on the Great Tradition, are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.