Joe Middleton on recent exclusions under the Refugee Convention
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The Refugee Convention (the Covention) recognises that those who are guilty of very serious misconduct should not be entitled to surrogate protection, even if they have a genuine fear of persecution in their home countries.
Article 1(F) provides that the Convention does not apply if there are serious reasons for considering that a person has committed a crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity (1F(a)), a serious nonpolitical crime (1F(b)) or acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations (1F((c)). Moreover, Art 33 provides that the prohibition of refoulement, which is at the heart of states' obligations under the Convention, does not apply if the person in question constitutes a danger to the community of the host country having been convicted of a particularly serious crime.
Exclusion from the scope of the Convention does not, of course, imply that the UK will remove a person to a place where they face the risk of persecution. If the risk is sufficiently
