This chapter develops a critique of the “safe third country” concept, its legality, and its implications for understanding the nature and purpose of international refugee law. It does so, in part, on a different plane of analysis than has predominated the literature thus far. While most scholars have criticized the safe third country concept as undermining individual rights protection, this author argues that it is implicated in a preceding and more foundational harm: It deforms the possibility of democratic responsibility. We would do well to see the violations of refugee rights in question as more than privatized harms inflicted on an individual. They are relational and structural wrongs that concern the objective relationships guaranteed by domestic constitutional and administrative law. Perceiving this harm illuminates not only how the safe third country concept has corrupted international refugee law, but also why international human rights should be understood, more broadly, to protect the political agency of democratic citizens. This conclusion yields an important analytic shift, in which we see commitments to international human rights and humanitarian ideals to align, constructively and in new form, with the public integrity of democratic states.