“Ospiti indesiderati”: il diritto d’asilo a 70 anni dalla Convenzione ONU sui rifugiat
"Unwanted Guests": The Right to Asylum 70 Years After the UN Convention on Refugees

Summary/Abstract: For many, in seventy years, the Geneva Convention of July 28th, 1951 and the New York Protocol of December 31st, 1967 have made the difference between death and life, between danger and safety, between despair and hope. Seventy years later, the right of asylum seems to have followed a downward trend which, after a phase of great expansion and convergence between the States adhering to the Convention, united by the desire to protect European refugees produced by the Second World War, today show its progressive decline and debasement. A factual confirmation of this downward trend today is found in the growing resistance to the reception of refugees from Syria or from the African continent, which has made asylum one of the most controversial issues in the decision making process within the European Union. Asylum policies are now characterized by systematic doubts about asylum seekers’ credibility. The launch of Frontex in 2004 and its subsequent developments, under the banner of the official mission to combat “irregular immigration”, have in fact contributed to further limiting the arrivals of refugees, who generally do not have alternative channels of entry to those used by the so called “economic migrants”, and the strengthened “rhetoric of abuse”. Starting from the results of the recent research project “The future of the Geneva Convention on refugee status 70 years after its establishment”, carried out in 2021 by the authors in the framework of the collaboration between “S. Pio” Institute – IDOS, this contribution will try to analyze the substantial change that has taken place in the image of asylum seekers and refugees, on a cultural and political level, which from subjects deserving of protection, as had happened at the time of the promulgation of the Geneva Convention, has seen them decay to unauthorized international migrants, in other words to “undesired guests”.

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