Asylum

Scenes of exodus are played out every day on European soil: refugees stream out of Albania, there are displaced populations in the Caucasus and in the former Yugoslavia.

Central and eastern Europe, once a land of emigration, has now become a region of both transit and refugee settlement.

States have a moral and political duty to accept refugees and give them asylum and should not succumb to the temptation to adopt national laws which undermine the fundamental principles of the 1951 Geneva Convention.

Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, a specialist in refugee law, appeals in the introduction for a more effective application of existing international laws and instruments on refugees.