Until recently, the human rights approach to the refugee definition appeared destined to become a permanent feature of international refugee law. Now, however, doubts have set in. The object of this article is to address the main criticisms that have been levelled and to seek to put them in a wider perspective, reflecting briefly on where the law on refugee status is heading now that the 1951 Refugee Convention has entered its eighth decade. To this end, this article commences with a description of the human rights approach and a brief summary of how and why it came to become the ‘dominant’ approach and its underlying justifications. It then turns to consider the major criticisms raised, breaking these down into three clusters. The first cluster seeks to argue that such an approach is not warranted by proper application of the rules of treaty interpretation enjoined by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The second cluster identifies a number of other conceptual concerns: that such an approach depends on extraneous standards that lack refugee specificity; that it substitutes one set of indeterminate terms for another (for example, torture as one form of persecution); that it is unduly complex and unwieldy; that it wrongly assumes an equivalency between international refugee law and international human rights norms; and that it promotes a ‘principle of surrogacy’ that lacks any clear foundation. A third cluster dwells on the deficiencies of the human rights approach as a paradigm when examined from an empirical and comparative perspective: its failure to have become entrenched at a global level; its ‘sheer variety’ and lack of any clear contents; and its failure to help with difficult questions of refugee law. The article seeks to rebut these criticisms one by one and, in the course of doing so, to highlight the ways in which, far from being in decline, the human rights approach is a rising sun rather than a falling star.

中文翻译：

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难民定义的人权方法：朝阳还是陨星？

直到最近，难民定义的人权方法似乎注定要成为国际难民法的一个永久特征。然而，现在疑点出现了。本文的目的是解决已经提出的主要批评，并试图将它们放在更广泛的角度，简要回顾一下难民地位法在 1951 年之后的发展方向难民公约已进入第八个十年。为此，本文首先描述了人权方法，并简要总结了它如何以及为何成为“主导”方法及其基本理由。然后转而考虑提出的主要批评，将其分为三组。第一组试图争辩说，正确应用 1969 年《维也纳条约法公约》所规定的条约解释规则并不能保证这种方法。第二组确定了许多其他概念性问题：这种方法依赖于缺乏难民特异性的无关标准；它将一组不确定的术语替换为另一组（例如，酷刑是一种迫害形式）；它过于复杂和笨拙；它错误地认为国际难民法和国际人权规范是对等的；并且它提倡缺乏任何明确基础的“代孕原则”。第三组从经验和比较的角度审视人权方法作为范式的缺陷：它未能在全球范围内根深蒂固；它的“种类繁多”，缺乏任何明确的内容；以及它未能帮助解决难民法的难题。本文力图一一反驳这些批评，并在此过程中强调人权方法远非衰落，而是朝阳而非落星。