Law Commons^™

Persecution In The Fog Of War: The House Of Lords' Decision In Adan, Michael Kagan, William P. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

International law requires that a person have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group in order to be recognized as a refugee. That is, under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, there must be a nexus between the danger faced by the refugee and one of the five Convention-recognized reasons for persecution. However, in a 1998 decision of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords concluded that a man fleeing clan warfare in Somalia could not meet the nexus …