The Ethics of Limiting Refugee Protection

The UK has introduced a drastic change to its system of refugee protection. Under the previous system, refugees granted asylum received five years of full protection (definite leave to remain). They could apply to be joined by their family who they’d been separated from, and, after the five years, could apply for permanent settlement (indefinite leave to remain) and then eventual full citizenship.

As of the 2^nd March 2026, refugees granted asylum are provided only 30 months protection, during which they cannot apply for their family to join them. At 30 months, their status will be reviewed and potentially renewed, but if their home state is deemed safe enough for them by the government, those refugees face forcible removal. This review will occur every 30 months for a period of up to 20 years at which point, refugees may apply for permanent settlement and then eventual citizenship.

Why this drastic change? The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, provides the following justifications:

1. The previous system was more attractive than other European States’ systems, supposedly incentivising refugees to travel through Europe, ‘illegally’ cross the channel on dangerous journeys, and fuel trafficking and smuggling operations. The new system will reduce refugee arrivals and dangerous journeys.

2. Restoring ‘order and control at our borders’ will appease (supporters of) more right-wing parties, prevent them from taking power and enacting (even more) harmful policies including mass deportations.

3. The reforms are in fact more in keeping with the true purpose and obligations of refugee protection, which is only meant as ‘a temporary sanctuary […] a safe haven until a return home is possible’ such that if ‘their home country is safe, they will return home’.

Do these justifications succeed? I will briefly provide reasons to be sceptical of the first two but will mostly focus on the third as the most philosophically substantive. 

Will It Reduce Arrivals?

There is little evidence that refugees seek protection in the UK primarily because of its protection system (even according to the UK government’s own analysis). The vast majority of the world’s refugees (71%) are hosted in low- and middle-income countries in the Global South. Only a small minority embark on journeys to the Global North. And among those, fewer refugees seek asylum in the UK (in absolute numbers and per capita) compared to most European states. So, a policy of limiting protections will likely have no effect on reducing arrivals or dangerous journeys.

Indeed, policies and practices designed to prevent and deter refugee arrivals tend not to just fail on their own terms but serve only to harm innocent refugees. The closure of safe and regular routes for refugees, the building of concrete walls and barbed wire fences, the funding of riot police who beat and harass refugees in Calais, the placing of refugees into prison boats, the threats of deportation to Rwanda, and the penalisation of refugees who arrive via irregular means, among others, are all policies and practices enacted by the UK.

Each failed, and only resulted in forcing refugees to take even more dangerous routes, fuelling smuggling and trafficking operations, and causing immense suffering, rights violations, and death for innocent refugees looking for protection. This latest policy will also likely fail its own aims and succeed only in increasing human misery.

Appeasement

Whether this change will appease (supporters of) right-wing groups is an empirical question that I don’t know the answer to. But the policies and practices in the last paragraph haven’t. Instead each escalation has corresponded with a surge in anti-refugee sentiment and popularity for right-wing parties, so why expect this (rather technical) policy will be the one that bucks that trend and finally placates the far-right?

It’s more plausible that, in adopting such reforms, the government is (wrongfully, in my view) endorsing and publicly expressing the view that it is in fact acceptable to erode protections for refugees and override their human rights. This, if anything, legitimises the rallying cries of more right-wing parties and establishes a precedent with an official governmental stamp of approval that paves the way for even further erosions.

The Situation of Refugees

What about the third consideration: does the 30-month limit reflect and fulfil the obligations and purpose of refugee protection? Answering this requires understanding the obligations that states owe to refugees. And, as I’ve suggested in previous research, understanding these obligations requires understanding the situation of refugees themselves.

Refugees have been forcibly displaced (that is: forced to flee) from their own states of origin and are unable to return to it due to severe threats to their lives, human rights, and/or basic needs. The vast majority  (under the UNHCR’s mandate) come from six countries: Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Sudan, and South Sudan. In those states, such refugees have been subjected and/or are fleeing severe human rights violations, as a result of war, repression, and generalised violence, including attacks on civilian populations, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, persecution, rape and gender-based violence, torture, enslavement, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and potential genocide.

Having fled these threats, most refugees have by no means found adequate protection. The vast majority (71%) end up in a situation without adequate state protection in developing states in the Global South close to their states of origin. There, as Serena Parekh’s analysis identifies, refugees effectively face three options:

1. A life in squalid refugee camps enduring a passive, impoverished existence and extensive human rights violations including pervasive sexual violence.

2. A life of sub-citizen status and destitution in urban areas enduring violence, discrimination, restricted labour market access, exploitation, and homelessness without adequate protection from domestic authorities. 

3. A perilous journey to the Global North, where refugees face torture, rape, forced labour, and exploitation from traffickers, criminal gangs, state police and/or border officials, and thousands die en route. 

Most refugees then not only endure severe human rights violations within their states of origin, but throughout their displacement whether in camps, urban areas, or on perilous journeys.

The Harms and Injustices Faced by Refugees

Beyond the physical suffering involved in the human rights violations they face through their displacement, refugees also endure a violation of their autonomy: their control over their own lives and life-prospects is severely deprived. Refugees also endure a violation of their dignity: subjected to treatment by others as well as conditions below acceptable standards for a dignified existence. Refugees also endure a violation of their moral worth (or humanity) insofar as they are viewed and treated not as equal human beings but as something less - as morally inferior.

Refugees also face what Hannah Arendt identified as ‘rightlessness’. Though refugees have human rights in principle and on paper, they are subjected to extensive abuses regardless so may as well not have them at all. More formally: refugees lack substantive human rights insofar as they lack the capabilities to enjoy the content of those rights, which is phenomenologically equivalent to the lack of human rights simpliciter. 

Recognising these harms and injustices is crucial to understanding obligations towards refugees. It is often assumed that refugees are only physically suffering and have only physical or biological needs. This is what Sarah Fine identified as the assumption of safety: that safety understood as basic security and subsistence is all that refugees need or are entitled to, and providing safety alone is a sufficient understanding and fulfilment of obligations towards them.

This assumption ostensibly ‘justifies’ a range of inadequate and oftentimes harmful practices: forcibly containing refugees in regions deemed safe enough for them, forcibly relocating refugees against their will to other supposedly safe states, housing refugees in camps indefinitely because those camps are safe enough, and forcibly returning refugees to supposedly safe regions within the states they fled in the first place. The assumption is also dehumanising in treating refugees as passive receptacles for subsistence aid, as things that simply need to be sheltered, fed, watered, and kept alive rather than as human agents with far more complicated and morally important interests, needs, desires, and rights, beyond mere physical wellbeing. 

Obligations Towards Refugees

Understanding the full range of harms and injustices refugees face allows us to move beyond this assumption of safety. It shows refugees are worse off than commonly assumed and have that much more urgent claims to protection with correspondingly stronger obligations on the part of states to provide it. And, crucially, the obligations must be specified to address the relevant harms and injustices.

Accordingly, obligations must not only provide for refugees’ physical needs. Obligations must also address the harms to autonomy, dignity, and moral worth, and must secure full human rights protection to address rightlessness.

Equipped with this understanding, the inadequacies of the 30-month protection limit become more exposed. The limit falls for the assumption of safety and fails to recognise let alone address the range of relevant harms and injustices refugees endure and require protection from.

The limit does not respond to the harm to autonomy. Living autonomously requires being able to set and pursue long-term life-plans such as building and maintaining relationships, having a stable livelihood and contributing to the economy, settling in a secure place with one’s family, integrating into society and participating in one’s local community. All these goods are undermined with the threat of deportation constantly hanging over refugees’ heads.

Refugees will instead live in a condition of enforced perpetual limbo, instability, uncertainty, and lack of control without any meaningful ability to author and live their own lives according to their wishes. And the deportation itself would involve refugees (and their families) being physically apprehended and forced to leave against their will as soon as the state decides for them it’s best to do so, with their own hopes and wishes overruled.

The limit does not address the harm to dignity. Restrictions on participation and integration in society, the economy, and the political community create a precarious and marginalised second-class existence for refugees, which will be degrading and damaging to a sense of self-worth. And the constant threat of deportation creates a life of permanent anxiety and fear, conditions that fall far short of those required for a secure and decent standard living.

The limit fails to address the harm to moral worth. Instead of treating refugees as human beings worthy of inclusion as equals, it treats them as inferior in expressing them as undesirable elements to be quarantined away from full inclusion in society, confined to a permanent subclass on borrowed time, and exported away when the state deems fit.

The limit also fails to secure human rights. As Rebecca Buxton argues, a pathway to citizenship is required for refugees’ to have secure rights. The 30-month limit will entail that refugees will not be included within the political community as equals and so the enjoyment of their rights will instead be acutely vulnerable, dependent on the whims and charity of the state who can (and indeed threatens to) take them away.

This puts refugees in a situation of ‘structural vulnerability’ in contrast to full citizens, where refugees’ human rights are not rights as they ought to be in the proper sense - robust protections against certain treatment – but temporary favours, subject to withdrawal when the state deems fit and deems those refugees deportable.

An understanding of the obligations towards refugees therefore reveals that not only does the 30-month limit fail to address the profound harms and injustices of refugees’ displacement, but risks sustaining them. This limit then, contrary to the Home Secretary’s claims, is an abject failure to recognise and fulfil the obligations and purpose of refugee protection.

Ethical Refugee Protection

An ethical response would be one in which the obligations to refugees were recognised and fulfilled. This would require, at least, permanent settlement and pathways to citizenship for refugees granted asylum:

Settlement would enable autonomy because, with the ability to put down roots, form relationships, participate in society, and form long-term life-plans, refugees could meaningfully exercise control over and rebuild their lives.

Settlement also provides conditions for a dignified existence, where refugees can obtain a decent, stable, and secure standard of living, have the foundation to support themselves and their families, and live free from needless fear.

Settlement also respects and affirms the moral worth of refugees as equal human beings worthy of inclusion and recognises and adequately responds to their complex interests and the harms and injustices they’ve been subjected to.

And settlement provides secure human rights protection that cannot be arbitrarily snatched away, allowing refugees who’ve endured the harms and injustices of displacement to, at last, have the capabilities to enjoy their human rights.

Dr Bradley Hillier-Smith is Associate Lecturer in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His research specialises in global justice and human rights and, in particular, on migration ethics and obligations towards refugees. He is the author of The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees and is also a charity worker and political campaigner advocating for the rights and settlement of refugees in the UK.

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