Exclusion and Refoulement
Description
After the Second World War, human rights law became entrenched in legal discourse as demonstrated by a proliferation of human rights treaties. While the right of asylum was recognized as a fundamental right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it has never been an absolute right but instead has been restricted in various ways - most significantly, that asylum should not be conferred on criminals and that refugees with a criminal background could be removed from the country of refuge.
Exclusion and Refoulement: Criminality in International and Domestic Refugee Law examines the legislative instruments at the international and domestic levels as well as the extensive jurisprudence emanating from these instruments, which has attempted to balance the right of asylum for an individual versus the state of refuge to restrict this right in situations of criminality.
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Person
Joseph Rikhof has received a BCL from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands; an LLB from McGill University; a Diploma in Air and Space Law from McGill University; and a PhD from the Irish Centre for Human Rights. He teaches international criminal law as an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa. He was senior counsel, Manager of the Law, with the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Section of the Department of Justice, Canada. He was special counsel and a policy advisor to the Modern War Crimes Section of the Department of Citizenship & Immigration between 1998 and 2002 and a visiting professional with the International Criminal Court in 2005 and served with the Department of Justice from 2002 until his retirement in 2017. He was also a member of the editorial board of the Philippe Kirsch Global Justice Journal between 2017 and 2022, where he regularly posted short commentaries on recent developments in international criminal justice.
His area of expertise is in law related to organized crime, terrorism, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially in the context of immigration and refugee law. He has published over sixty articles, as well the books International and Transnational Criminal Law, 3d ed (with co-author Robert J. Currie, 2020), and A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes (with co-author Terje Einarsen, 2018), exploring these research interests, and has lectured on the same topics in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand.