Summary Conclusions
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) organized an expert meeting on Complementarities between International Refugee Law, International Criminal Law and International Human Rights Law, which was held in Arusha, Tanzania, from 11 to 13 April 2011.
The discussion was informed by a number of research papers. Participants included 34 experts from 24 countries, drawn from governments, NGOs, academia and international organizations. Among those attending were delegates from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights. The roundtable is one in a series of events organized to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
The following Summary Conclusions do not necessarily represent the individual views of participants, of UNHCR or of ICTR, but reflect broadly the themes, issues and understandings emerging from the discussion.
Fragmentation of international law and the rise of specific international legal regimes
International refugee law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights law should be interpreted in light of general rules of international law.
There is no hierarchical relationship between these strands of international law. They are, however, interconnected.
The simultaneous application of different legal regimes has raised particular issues in terms of fragmentation and specialization, but situations of normative conflict should not be exaggerated. Normative differences not only exist between distinct international legal regimes but also within each of these regimes.
Harmonization is not an objective in and of itself; the overriding concern should be clarity on the ordinary meaning …
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