Introduction

The world has witnessed the mass influx of people due to war, disease, or disaster throughout history. The increased destructive force of wars has led to uncertainty and inefficacy of national protection, causing people to leave their country of origin and seek refuge. This ushered in a period where global human rights rules and standards were discussed, and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was established in 1951. The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is considered as the guarantee for those people with well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion not to be forcibly returned to a territory where their life and freedom would be threatened. The practical limitations of the convention were resolved in 1967 through the New York Protocol, and efforts to create freedom, security, and grounds for justice in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties—accepted as legal proof of the improvement of the status of international asylum seeking individuals and their right to expect humane treatment and a significant level of human rights protection.

In December 2010, civil conflict started in Tunisia and spread throughout the Middle East in a short span of time: first to Egypt, then to Libya, and eventually to Syria, The Syrian crisis, where many dynamics of a civil war can be observed concretely, resulted in mass of people migrating to four neighboring countries (Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan) because of insecurity, fear of oppression, limitations to freedoms, and intense violence. In the fifth year of the crisis, it is hard to describe the situation in the Middle East, and stability in the region does seem unlikely to be attained in the near future. This is the first time that the world has witnessed a huge displacement of populations where the expected norms of human rights protection were rendered ineffective. The number of displaced persons around the world exceeded 50 million for the first time since World War II, and has reached 68.5 million (UNHCR, 2017). The number of displacements gave rise to the need to revise existing common norms and practices of human rights with the essential aim of protecting disadvantaged groups (UNHCR, 2015).