Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Is the Geneva Refugee Convention living up to the times?
As the UN document turns 70 years old, experts say there is a lack of political will to implement the rights of refugees under the agreement. Countries in Africa are already moving beyond it.
Defending human rights is Hamado Dipama's passion. It's something he's been committed to every day since he fled politically motivated violence in his home country, Burkina Faso.
Twenty years ago, as a young student, Dipama joined protests against the dictatorship of Blaise Compaore, who ruled Bukina Faso with an iron fist for 27 years until he was swept from power following a popular uprising in 2014.
Dipama eventually ended up in Munich, the regional capital of Bavaria in southern Germany.
"When I was fleeing, I wasn't aware of the Geneva Refugee Convention," Dipama told DW in an interview. "It's not something that's talked about in the Global South; people there have little information about it."
'Why don't I receive protection?'
But when he arrived in Europe, Dipama was confronted with the realities of the convention and how it provided refuge for some — but not others.
"Why do certain people get protection and I don't, even though I could demonstrate everything about my situation in Burkina Faso?" said Dipama, who held a "tolerated stay" permit for his first nine years in Germany.
This barred him from regular employment, moving freely within the country and accessing most welfare programs.
Refugees receive rights
The Geneva Refugee Convention (formally known as the "Convention and protocol relating to the status of refugees") is an indispensable foundation of international refugee protection.
It defines who is a refugee and what rights — and obligations — they have. People are entitled to refugee status if they have left their country because of a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion," according to the original wording.
In the aftermath of World War II and in the face of growing political tensions between East and West, the United Nations adopted the convention in Geneva in 1951.
Initially, it was limited to protecting mainly European refugees immediately after World War II. To reflect the changing situation worldwide, a 1967 protocol expanded the convention's scope.
Some 149 states have signed one or both of the conventions.
Key treaty
The Refugee Convention still plays an important role today: it is the only document that obligates states to provide protection to refugees, said Susan Fratzke, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Brussels.
Today, however, people are forced to leave their homes for different reasons than in the Cold War situation, she said: governments are failing, rival groups are fighting for power, economies in home countries are collapsing, and they can't feed their families.
"None of that is included in the [convention]. But that doesn't mean it has become useless. We have to think further and become more creative to meet people's needs," Fratzke
told DW.
Even 30 years ago, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signaled awareness that people had new motivations for fleeing, such as the harsh economic situation in their home region.
"These are not people fleeing persecution but in the hope of a better life," Douglas Stafford, then deputy high commissioner, said in a 1991 DW interview. "We have to be very careful in the future about how we address the problems of economic migrants."
But 30 years on, leaving home for economic reasons still isn't a criteria under the convention.
Host countries in Africa lack resources
Today, almost every African country has signed the Refugee Convention and for decades, several African countries have played host to some of the largest numbers of refugees in the world.
Many African states went "a step further," explained Fratzke, by adopting the Refugee Convention of the Organization of African Unity — the predecessor organization to the African Union. In doing so, signatories give refugees legal rights that aren't covered in the Geneva Refugee Convention.
Abiy Ashenafi, who heads the Migration Unit at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, also thinks the OAU agreement has addressed some of the shortcomings of the overly narrow definition of "refugee" in the Geneva Convention.
Both experts, however, see a problem with implementation: Many of the African countries housing refugees lack resources and are themselves fragile nations with economic difficulties.
Little political will
The Geneva Refugee Convention falls short of its potential. One problem is the lack of binding obligations, says migration expert Abiy Ashenafi, who believes the convention could be reformed to include this.
It also fails to provide for a complaints mechanism for refugees against host states, he wrote in an email to DW.
Another issue, according to Fratzke, is that the convention isn't an executive body. Each signatory must enshrine its commitment to the convention through appropriate asylum laws in the home country.
The problem, she says, is that many states are "unwilling or unable" to do so.
"As a result, it's hard for refugees to get protection, even though they have a right to it under the convention."
Respect and renew current convention
Back in Munich, Hamado Dipama from Burkina Faso criticizes how host nations deal with refugees, which often deviates from the convention.
Deportation is questionable, for example when well-integrated refugees are sent back to volatile home countries, said Dipama, who has been a spokesperson for the Bavarian Refugee Council since 2007.
Dipama personally experienced the fear of deportation from his time living as a "tolerated" refugee. In 2014, he eventually received a "settlement permit" that gave him more rights.
A month ago, Dipama applied for German citizenship — which wasn't an easy step, he said, because it means relinquishing his Burkinabe passport.
As for what a future refugee convention could look like?
"We don't have a big ask." Dipama said. "States should just do what they signed up to in the convention, and amend the document so that refugees from today's problem countries receive more protection."
And they say it doesn't take much ― a brief handshake or pat on the back may be enough.
The findings are the centerpiece of an ARD documentary called "Doping Top Secret ― Guilty."
The reporting team, lead by Hajo Seppelt, was first approached in 2016 about the possibility of doping through skin contact.
They started investigating and eventually set up an experiment in cooperation with the German Sport University in Cologne and the Institute for Forensic Medicine at University Hospital Cologne.
Twelve men between the ages of 18 and 40 had a small amount of different anabolic steroids applied to hands, necks and arms. In the weeks that followed, the trial participants supplied the lab with various urine samples.
'I wouldn't have expected this'
The results: All 12 men tested positive. Their samples indicated that they had used illegal substances ― even though they never actively ingested anything.
"When we were first approached about this, I thought 'Sure, maybe it could work here and there,'" Seppelt told DW from Tokyo, where he is covering the Olympics. "But when all of them were positive, that was a surprise. The clarity of it all really
made me think."
The banned substances could still be traced in some of the urine samples that trial participants handed in up to two weeks after the doping agents were applied to their skin. Even experts were shocked by the experiment's results.
"I wouldn't have expected it this way, especially the fact that the traces were visible for that long," said Dr. Martin Jübner, a forensic toxicologist at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at University Hospital Cologne, in an interview with DW.
Avoiding the wrong kind of inspiration
None of the people involved in the experiment want to share too many details at this time.
The study is still going through a long, scientific peerreview process and it will be months, Jübner says, before the results can be published.
But the experts also don't
want to give anyone ideas ― they don't want to see their work misused as an instruction manual for how to dope an unsuspecting athlete.
That's why there is no exact information on what kind of doping agents were applied to trial participants' skin. They have only said that it was anabolic steroids.
Their caution may be warranted. There have been several high-publicity cases of athletes who had medals revoked or careers ruined because of positive doping results that they said stemmed from someone slipping them banned substances without their knowledge. And that was when people thought the doping agents had to be mixed into someone's food, water or toothpaste. Now it looks like an inconspicuous handshake is all it takes.
A strict principle of liability
Experts suggest that the findings may lead to changes in how doping allegations are handled by sports courts.
As things stand, the system used with doping allegations is not, as in criminal law, "innocent until proven guilty," but exactly the opposite.
In sports, there's a strict liability principle that says when an athlete tests positive for banned substances, it is first presumed they did in fact dope to have an unfair sporting advantage. And if the athlete claims that they did not dope, it is on them to prove they are innocent.
Strict liability, as WADA explains on its website, "means that each athlete is strictly liable for the substances found in his or her bodily specimen, and that an anti-doping rule violation occurs whenever a prohibited substance… is found in bodily specimen, whether or not the athlete intentionally or unintentionally used a prohibited substance or was negligent or otherwise at fault."
So, they are basically saying a doped athlete is a doped athlete and whether they wanted to or not, they got an unfair advantage. Proving that they didn't dope on purpose may later only spare them the public shame of being banned from their sport. But in WADA's eyes the race was still run unfairly.
Does sports need a whole new system?
If it's this simple to produce
a positive test in an athlete, how could they still be asked to prove their innocence? Pinpointing that one crucial physical contact that might have been responsible for the doping agent in your body would be all but impossible.
Jübner says there may be ways to prove it, though. People have tried to look how doping agents are processed by an athlete's metabolism to "determine how a substance made it into the body. That's one thing we really have to look at."
The ARD's TV documentary may lead to more public scrutiny and pressure WADA and international sports courts to re-examine their systems.
But then it may just as well do nothing.
In 2020, when a team of Italian scientists published a study that also revealed that skinapplication of a doping agent could induce a positive test, nothing much happened as a result.
and 1994.
One of their targets was Semliki Forest virus, which was detected in 1942 in Uganda where it infected rodents.
The first clinical trials with mRNA vaccines and humans were done in 2002 and 2003. Those trials targeted cancer cells.
In the ten years after those initial studies, researchers tended to keep their focus on cancer vaccines.
What diseases could mRNA vaccines help us fight?
There's a whole list of diseases that researchers are targeting with proposed mRNA vaccines.
Those illnesses and viruses include HIV, rabies, zika, chikungunya fever, influenza, and dengue fever.
Researchers hope now to achieve quick results, especially since mRNA vaccines have been shown to be effective against COVID-19.
Cancer is one of the most widely studied areas in mRNA vaccine research.
In June, BioNTech started a Phase 2 trial with a mRNA vaccine against a type of skin cancer.
But it's clear that researchers won't be able to transfer the experience gathered through mRNA vaccines and COVID-19 to cancer "one-to-one". Cancers are much more than just viruses, and the immune response is very different.
When it comes to research into malaria vaccines, there are similar questions. Malaria is a single cell pathogen. And we've seen over the years just how difficult it is to fight them.
Scientists think a key to success with cancers and malaria will be to identify proteins that are central to the functioning of those pathogens, and which will produce the strongest immune response.
In both cases, the human immune system will have to kill off all the bad cells, while leaving all the good or healthy cells intact and untouched.
Will mRNA technology revolutionize medicine?
It's too early to say whether mRNA technology will revolutionize medicine. But it's clear that researchers hope it will do that. If all we achieve for a start is mRNA vaccines against the common flu, we would have gained a lot.
If researchers find they can use mRNA to mobilize the immune system and target specific pathogens to destroy them, that would indeed be a breakthrough. That would enable the technology to be used in other areas, previously overlooked or untested.
It may even be revolutionary enough if mRNA enabled vaccines to grow as a first line of defense, rather than our relying on medicinal treatments once an infection has taken hold. Vaccination is cheaper for both people and national health systems.
boosted immunity. Saarland University professor Sester said she was looking forward to seeing more research done on combining different types of vaccines and how they interact. "We believe that if other research teams reach conclusions similar to ours, the combination of vector- and mRNA vaccines should be seriously considered," she said.
This article was last updated on July 27, 2021, to re ect that the results from the Saarland University trial have been published in a peerreviewed journal.