196
Blackmun, J., dissenting
Yet no one seriously contends that the treaty's protections depend on the number of refugees who are fleeing persecution. Allowing a state to disavow "any obligations" in the case of mass migrations or attempted mass migrations would eviscerate Article 33, leaving it applicable only to "small" migrations and "small" attempted migrations.
There is strong evidence as well that the Conference rejected the right to close land borders where to do so would trap refugees in the persecutors' territory.6 Indeed, the majority agrees that the Convention does apply to refugees who have reached the border. Ante, at 181-182. The majority thus cannot maintain that Van Boetzelaer's interpretation prevailed.
6 In proceedings prior to that at which Van Boetzelaer made his remarks, the Ad Hoc Committee delegates from France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom had made clear that the principle of non-refoulement, which existed only in France and Belgium, did proscribe the rejection of refugees at a country's frontier. Ad Hoc Committee on Statelessness and Related Problems, Summary Record of the Twenty-First Meeting, U. N. Doc. E/AC.32/SR.21, pp. 4-5 (1950). Consistent with the United States' historically strong support of nonreturn, the United States delegate to the Committee, Louis Henkin, confirmed this:
"Whether it was a question of closing the frontier to a refugee who asked admittance, or of turning him back after he had crossed the frontier, or even of expelling him after he had been admitted to residence in the territory, the problem was more or less the same.
"Whatever the case might be . . . he must not be turned back to a country where his life or freedom could be threatened. No consideration of public order should be allowed to overrule that guarantee, for if the State concerned wished to get rid of the refugee at all costs, it could send him to another country or place him in an internment camp." Ad Hoc Committee on Statelessness and Related Problems, Summary Record of the Twentieth Meeting, U. N. Doc. E/AC.32/SR.20, ¶¶ 54 and 55, pp. 11- 12 (1950).
Speaking next, the Israeli delegate to the Ad Hoc Committee concluded: "The Committee had already settled the humanitarian question of sending any refugee . . . back to a territory where his life or liberty might be in danger." Id., ¶ 61, at 13.
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