In Chapter 7, I analyse cases in which decision-makers have to determine whether a person can seek refuge in an internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp. This occurs in what is known as an ‘internal protection alternative’ inquiry. In some cases, asylum seekers have pleaded that if they returned to their homeland and relocated, they would have no option but to live in an IDP camp. Initially, in such cases decision-makers set a broad scope for adequate refuge and approached decisions with an ethic of international cooperation. But subsequently, there has been a transition in which decision-makers produce rudimentary notions of refuge. They give it a narrow scope – limiting it to bare survival rights – and there is a shift from understanding that refuge involves a nation-state bestowing protection to positioning refuge as something an individual can forge themselves. The understanding that refuge is an act of international solidarity has dissipated from the jurisprudence. Protection from life in an IDP camp will only be granted if the asylum seeker can establish that they are exceptionally vulnerable. A feminist analysis highlights that decision-makers’ notional approaches to the interactions between gender and vulnerability have resulted in problematic outcomes for both male and female refugees.

In Chapter 6, I examine protection from refuge claims made by Palestinian refugees. Some Palestinian refugees leave an UNRWA area of operation (Jordon, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem or the West Bank) and seek refugee protection elsewhere. In making these journeys, they confront article 1D of the Refugee Convention, which provides that Palestinian refugees are excluded from protection under the Refugee Convention unless their UN protection or assistance has ceased for any reason. When decision-makers reflect on the nature of Palestinian refugeehood and expand their juridical borders, they come close to setting a broad scope of refuge for Palestinian refugees and characterising refuge as a right, duty and act of international solidarity. However, most decision-makers determine these claims in a way that truncates the scope of refuge, positions refuge not as a right but as an act of benevolence and entrenches article 1D as a containment mechanism. This inhibits Palestinian refugees’ ability to find a place of refuge outside the UNRWA region unless their circumstances are deemed exceptional in some way. A feminist analysis of the case law indicates that the approach to exceptionality in article 1D jurisprudence creates additional barriers for female Palestinian refugees.