Many oppressed people wish to seek permanent refuge within the borders of affluent Western liberal democratic states such as Canada and Australia. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the International refugee regime has established a global legal migration framework for contracting states such as Canada and Australia to grant admission to asylum seekers into each respective political community while retaining effective border control measures to maintain public safety. This thesis argues that the international refugee regime has suffered a gradual decline during the last two decades, especially during the post-9/11 era, primarily due to the dominance of the notions of national sovereignty and security in Canada and Australia. The author recognizes the importance of realpolitik and pays tribute to the concept of national sovereignty. However, he contends that the predominance and prevalence of the securitization phenomenon in recent years in both Canada and Australia, has given rise to a culture of suspicion which primarily perceives and publicly portrays asylum seekers as entities with ulterior motives. Such views have subsequently culminated in the normalization of national refugee determination policies which inherently favor the implementation of human containment measures such as arbitrary and indefinite detention and Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs); restrictive measures which inherently violate some of the core legal principles of the international refugee regime. The author recommends a return by both Ottawa and Canberra to a more balanced refugee determination system which is aligned with the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol and further explores several alternative solutions that may be employed by Canada and Australia to effectively manage asylum seeker populations in each country. / Graduate / gheshmat@uvic.ca

It is common by states to deny asylum for asylum-seekers with the argument that the applicant could find protection within their own country of residence instead of receiving international protection. This is called internal protection alternative (IPA). This research is a comparative case study and aims to explore and compare two neighbouring countries, Sweden and Norway, on how their immigration authorities differ in their assessment on both the security situation and IPA in Afghanistan. Furthermore, this thesis aims to compare the Swedish and Norwegian immigration authorities with international laws, agreements and guidelines which, therefore, is the conceptional framework for this research. This study concludes that IPA is not mentioned in the 1951 Refugee Convention and that there are no clear directives on how to apply it. States tend to interpret the already existing laws and guidelines in their own way. The result of this is that there are differences between states practice and the consequence could be that asylum-seekers could receive different assessments and decisions from different countries. This research is, therefore, highly relevant from a humanitarian- and academia perspective as it highlights differences in national practice which is crucial since these differences will affect the refugee situation of individuals and the possibility of obtaining asylum.