Recognizing Socio-Economic Refugees in South Africa: a Principled and Rights-Based Approach to Section 3(b) of the Refugees Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Section 3(b) of South Africa's Refugees Act, which substantially reproduces the expanded refugee definition from the Organisation of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (OAU Convention), accepts the refugee status of a person who, owing to ‘events seriously disturbing public order in either a part or the whole of his or her country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his or her place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his or her country of origin or nationality’. This article argues that socio-economic factors should be taken into account in assessing such refugee claims, in relation to the ‘events seriously disturbing public order’ and the compulsion to leave. The argument is based upon a consideration of South Africa's constitutional and international human rights commitments, its post-apartheid role within the international community and its legitimate policy concerns, as well as conceptual objections to the traditional dichotomy between refugees and economic migrants. In light of these considerations, the article then proposes an analytical framework for assessing this type of s. 3(b) refugee claim. Finally, this proposed framework is tested against fictional case studies set in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. These case studies further undermine the traditional refugee/migrant dichotomy and suggest that the proposed framework is manageable, rights-regarding and restricted on principled grounds. It is hoped that the proposed analytical framework can provide a coherent and practical way forward in South African refugee law that recognizes the universality and indivisibility of fundamental human rights. Further, given the growing international consensus regarding the indivisibility of civil-political and socio-economic rights, this article may inform debates about the treatment of socio-economic rights deprivations in refugee law beyond South Africa and the OAU Convention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".