The concept of State responsibility is as old as the human civilization. It has been the perennial responsibility of the State to protect the life and liberty of its citizenry. Today an individual has become central to the entire human rights discourse and is being regarded as a subject of International Law. Moreover, national boundaries are losing their meaning. Consequently a new world human order is being emplaced. The human rights of all individuals including that of refugees have become a polemical debate heralding a new premise whereat state concerns and individual rights are at loggerhead with each other. In this conspectus, it is incumbent upon the state to reconcile this paradox in an age of transnationalisation of human rights and civil liberties. Asylum countries are not as much responsible as country of origin. Thus, country of origin should squarely be held responsible for the refugees flows and it is the responsibility of the refugee generating state not to create problems of galling proportions for the other states as it is contrary to the notion of a civilized state. The responsibility of the country of origin is higher than the responsibility of state of reception under International Law.
Since its inception back in the 1920s refugee law has considerably and invariably been perceived as a special branch of international law addressed almost exclusively to potential asylum countries. In particular, the Geneva Convention of 1951 on the Status of Refugees sets forth an elaborate regime of legal rules that create duties for States Parties having received refugees or being faced with demands for admission. Pursuant to the principle of non-refoulement which may also have acquired the legal force of international customary law, these obligations go even so far as to prohibit States from expelling or returning (“refouler”) a refugee to a country where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
The conduct of state and its agencies, which is reflected in the programmes, policies and practices thereof, resulted in the refugee exoduses. Moreover, flows of refugees have their causes in human conduct outside the destinations to which the persons involved are heading. Under the Geneva Convention, a refugee is a person who, because of well-founded fear of political persecution, finds himself outside his State of nationality, unable to obtain the protection of that State. Thus, the country of origin, which has set in motion the tragic sequence of events, is an essential – and even the most important – actor in the complex triangular relationship whose other elements are the refugee and the receiving States. If it behaved in consonance with current human rights standards, the whole problem would simply disappear. Therefore, why should the burden be entirely on other States? Should it not in the last analysis fall back on the country of origin? This is the issue, which the present chapter will attempt to explore.
