Global warming is a current topic on the international agenda. The rise of temperature in the atmosphere threatens populations living on island, deltas and coastal areas, and people living nearby the Arctic and areas covered by permafrost are threatened. In turn this leads to the people in these areas being projected to be homeless or displaced due to climate change and the rising numbers of natural disasters. Those people are what you can label as climate refugees. According to IOM and Brown (2001) climate refugees are persons who for compelling reasons of change in the environment which change their living conditions have to escape their homes, either within their country or abroad.The United Nations Refugee Convention is the binding legislation followed by 147 (in 2008) of the UN member states. Either the UN Refugee Convention or any other international law recognizes climate refugees, and those people are due to that not granted any legal status. Who will protect these people when they have to escape their homes? This paper aims to explore what distinguish climate refugees from the refugees embraced by the UN Refugee Convention by a comparative literature review, for in this way be able to recognize the assumptions that make the United Nations to not classify climate refugees with refugee status. Both groups of refugees has in common that they live under the pressured decision they have to make as they flee their native homes to ensure their own and their families survival according to Grove (2006).In the long run both climate refugees and the UN Refugee Convention embraced refugees face the same traumatic experiences escaping their homes and have due to that the similar right to get the same mental help and be protected under international law. But populations facing the effects of global warming do not want to leave their land and believe it is an issue of human rights.

South Africa is seen as a major destination for refugees and asylum-seekers and is, according to the 2010 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world’s highest destination country for asylum-seekers, mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa. Following the 1994 democratic elections, there was a transformation in foreign policy, embracing the African Agenda, and South Africa became a major country of destination because of its relative prosperity in Africa. As a State Party to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention on the Status of Refugees, South Africa is under a legal obligation to protect refugees and grant them legal rights. At the same time, South African citizens, who had legitimate aspirations that the 1994 democratic government would address their development challenges, opposed the significant flow of refugees into the country by violent acts of xenophobia. The government, seen as a moral authority internationally with human rights being a key principle underpinning its foreign policy, found itself between the promotion of the African Agenda and its commitments to its own citizens. The refugee issue was addressed in the United Nations where the government made multilateral diplomacy a central platform of its foreign policy, a policy embedded in Africa and the South. South Africa is used as a case study to determine how it used multilateral diplomacy in the United Nations refugee regime through its coalition, the African Group, to address the migration issue. The study draws out the weaknesses of the international refugee regime by discussing the roles of two important diplomatic actors: the sovereign states in the United Nations General Assembly, and the international organization mandated to supervise the international refugee regime, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. South Africa’s foreign policy objective of promoting the African Agenda at times conflicts with the promotion of its national interest. Its progressive Constitution (1996) provides economic, social, and cultural rights to refugees, to the resentment of its own citizens, who view the refugees as beneficiaries of the United Nations. The study provides a critical analysis of South Africa’s multilateral diplomacy, and also provides the following recommendations where South Africa could use this mode more effectively to address the migration issue: Reform the international refugee regime; Allocate funds from the United Nations regularly assessed budget to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and, Develop an international normative regulatory framework for irregular migrants. / Dissertation (MDiplomatic Studies)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted