Introduction

The question whether a person has a well-founded fear of being persecuted is central to the refugee status determination procedure and is thus an issue on which there is a great deal of jurisprudence and scholarly comment. As explained in Chapter 2, since there is no definition of ‘persecution’ contained in the Refugee Convention, its meaning must be divined by a process of judicial interpretation. The need for some objective guidance has underpinned the development of the human rights approach to interpreting the Refugee Convention, which is now dominant in the common law world, and increasingly accepted in many civil law jurisdictions as well. This chapter explores the extent to which this approach does and can accommodate claims based on the deprivation of economic and social rights.

The notion that persecution may take an economic form is not a modern construct or radical notion; rather there is evidence that from the earliest days of its operation some types of socio-economic claims were considered to fall within the purview of the Refugee Convention definition.