Modernising Grounds for Refugeehood in the Twenty-First Century: Post-1951 Lessons from the Cartagena Declaration and Latin America

Abstract

The seventy-three-year-old Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees serves as the primary basis for claiming asylum in 2025. While the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees removed the geographic and temporal constraints of the 1951 Convention, it nevertheless failed to address reasons for persecution other than race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. This article examines grounds for refugeehood emanating from the Global South. Bases for asylum formulated in the 1969 OAU Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration consider reasons for international protection overlooked by Western, non-colonised nations in the post-World War II environment. While these documents have remained largely theoretical, this article analyses the case of over 60,000 Venezuelans who recently obtained asylum in Brazil and Mexico via language found in the Cartagena Declaration. With this background, the article examines the commonalities and differences in the Brazilian and Mexican governments’ asylum responses to the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis. The article concludes by elucidating the circumstances in which advocates can attempt to utilise broader regional bases of asylum to more fully account for twenty-first-century understandings of persecution and harm.