Clamouring for legal protection: what the great books teach us about people fleeing from persecution

When it comes to examples of dramatic conflict between national and international legal orders, and between vulnerable humanity and the machinery of the state, there can be few topics to rival that of the treatment of people feeling persecution. The British government’s current policy of diverting refugees arriving on its shore in small boats into the Rwandan asylum system is at the very least in serious tension with the Refugee Convention: the subject of legal challenge from its very inception, the policy faces further challenge in the High Court in September 2022 on human rights grounds. In Italy, the government in apparent defiance of the international duty of rescue at sea, decreed in April 2020 that its ports were ‘unsafe’ for the disembarkation of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea due to the impact of COVID-19. In the United States, the Trump administration in March 2020 invoked ‘Title 42’ a public health measure that effectively closed the border to migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador including those fleeing persecution. The Biden administration’s attempt to lift Title 42 was thwarted in May 2022 by a Louisiana Federal Court, ensuring the continued removal of migrants crossing the United States’ southern border or arriving at ports of entry despite the Centers for Disease Control signalling that the measure is no longer necessary. Readers of arts and humanities contributions in this area are now used to scholars framing the relevant problem in terms of a refugee’s ‘right to have rights’ within an international legal order dominated by nation states (a framing typically