There is increasing impatience with the duty simply to honor the rights of persons who are Convention refugees. The focus of much contemporary discourse is instead on the importance of defining and pursuing so-called “durable solutions” to refugee flight. The main goal of a refugee protection regime oriented towards durable solutions is effectively to find a way to bring refugee status to an end – whether by means of return to the country of origin, resettlement elsewhere, or naturalization in the host country. Indeed, those who focus on achieving durable solutions increasingly regard respect for refugee rights as little more than a “second best” option, to be pursued only until a durable solution can be implemented. UNHCR's Executive Committee, for example, has recently endorsed a conclusion

In contrast to this emphasis on the pursuit of durable solutions, the Refugee Convention gives priority to allowing refugees to make their own decisions about how best to respond to their predicament. As a non-governmental advocate astutely observed, one of the strengths of the refugee rights regime is that it eschews “the false notion of ‘durable solutions’ to refugee problems, especially as refugees [may] have no idea as to how long they are likely to stay in a particular country.”