India: Refugees and the U.N. Refugee Convention, 1951

  • Mukund R
  • Show Author Details
  • Mukund R

    Student at CUSAT, India.

  • img Download Full Paper

Abstract

This paper critically analyses the most general, sceptic and imprecise issues of the position of the refugees in India and the inside outs of the reasons why India has not ratified the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, which has 140 signatories, an overwhelming majority of the world’s 190-odd nations. The reasons for it are geopolitical concerns which are both intramural and extramural to the Republic of India. However, India continued to host a large population of refugees who were treated well. What is the requirement of ratifying a law when you are already fulfilling your duty was the question behind India’s objection, whereas some experts in the field of South Asian Relations are of the opinion that India, in any case, is bound by this principle because it is contained in the 1984 Convention against torture, to which India is a signatory. India is home to diverse groups of refugees, ranging from Buddhist-Chakmas from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh to Bhutanese from Nepal, Muslim-Rohingyas from Myanmar, large populations of Tibetans and Sri Lankan Tamils and small populations from Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and other Sub Saharan-African countries. According to the UNHCR factsheet, there were 209,234 refugees, asylum seekers and “others of concern” in India in 2016. The UNHCR financially assisted only 31,600 of them. But there is a sudden shift in the situations with the upcoming implementation of the NRC Bill. The paper also explains the impacts of the NRC Bill and after-effects of the same in the context of the lives of the refugees after the NRC Bill. Internal security, change in demographic status, overpopulation and its direct impacts on the GDP are some of the minor areas briefed by the paper.

Type

Research Paper

Information

International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 1, Page 1849 - 1856

DOI: https://doij.org/10.10000/IJLMH.112575

Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © IJLMH 2021