Australia and the 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum: a case study of the making of international refugee and human rights law

This article analyses the drafting process of the 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum, with particular attention given to the internal deliberations of the Australian government, which, at the time and since, has been a key contributor to the formation of international refugee and human rights law. It demonstrates that the Australian government believed that by voting for the Declaration it would commit itself to responding to requests for asylum in accordance with the Declaration – not just because the Declaration could have been the stepping stone for a convention, but because it was not confident that ‘soft law’ would be treated as entirely non-binding. The article also shows that the existence of the Declaration influenced Australian government policies and practices in the immediate aftermath of its adoption, thus demonstrating that it exerted a compliance pull independently of its perceived legal status.