Refugee roulette: Fences, deflected responsibilities and the politics of excision

This article seeks to contextualise Australia’s asylum and refugee policies within international normative frameworks, focusing on jurisdictions in the European Union and the United States by way of comparison. The article finds that the convergence of asylum policies with securitisation and border control produces outcomes inimical to human rights and that the decreasing commitment to asylum seekers is not unique to Australia. The article concludes that new conceptualisations of migrant and asylum policies, consistent with a transnational ethic of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship and burden sharing, are required if the protections offered under the Refugee Convention are to have meaning in the contemporary world.