Arctic Asylum

Abstract

This article examines the regulation and rights of refugees and other foreigners in independent, overseas and other not fully sovereign territories. It analyses two Nordic cases, Greenland and Svalbard. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and Svalbard an unincorporated area subject to Norwegian sovereignty through the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty. Unlike their parent states, both territories remain outside the Schengen Area. As this article highlights, both territories are subject to distinct regulatory frameworks in respect to asylum-seekers and refugees. While the number of asylum-seekers or refugees in each place is so far very limited, the regulatory differences nonetheless raise principled questions both from a rights-based perspective and at the more theoretical level. As this article argues, Greenland and Svalbard both exemplify how international law and late sovereign constructions may themselves provide for an unmooring of asylum and refugee rights within the ordinary statist framework. The effects in each case are multi-directional. On the one hand, the legal frameworks pertaining to these arctic territories provide for significantly more liberal rules in terms of access to asylum and immigration control. On the other hand, these legal bifurcations serve to upend the ordinary Nordic social contract and welfare rights owed to refugees and other aliens.