Voting Rights of Refugees

Voting Rights of Refugees develops a novel legal argument about the voting rights of refugees recognised in the 1951 Geneva Convention. The main normative contention is that such refugees should have the right to vote in the political community where they reside, assuming that this community is a democracy and that its citizens have the right to vote. The book argues that recognised refugees are a special category of non-citizen residents: they are unable to participate in elections of their state of origin, do not enjoy its diplomatic protection and consular assistance abroad, and are unable or unwilling, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution, to return to it. Refugees deserve to have a place in the world, in the Arendtian sense, where their opinions are significant and their actions are effective. Their state of asylum is the only community in which there is any prospect of political participation on their part.

Foreword Guy S. Goodwin-Gill; Acknowledgements; Table of cases; Table of statutes; Table of treaties and other international instruments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Status and Rights of Recognised 1951 Convention Refugees in International Law: 1. Recognised CSR1951 refugees in context; 2. Rights of CSR1951 refugees and citizenship voting qualifications; Part II. Interrelations between Voting and State Citizenship: 3. Perspectives on the meaning and purposes of voting eligibility; 4. Perspectives on the meaning and purposes of state citizenship; 5. Citizenship voting qualifications - normative appraisals; Part III. Political Predicament and Remedies: 6. Out-of-country voting - the recognised CSR1951 refugee context; 7. Protecting recognised CSR1951 refugees outside their states of asylum; 8. Enfranchisement of recognised CSR1951 refugees in elections of their states of asylum; Bibliography; Index.

Ruvi Ziegler is a tenured Lecturer in Law at the University of Reading, where he is Director of the LLM Programmes in International Law, Human Rights, and Advanced Legal Studies. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Working Paper Series, Refugee Law Initiative, University of London; Academic Fellow of the Inner Temple; Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford; and the Civil Liberties and Human Rights Section Convenor of the UK Society of Legal Scholars. Dr Ziegler is also a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, analysing questions of immigration, asylum, and citizenship as part of the 'Democratic Principles' project.