European Criminal Law has developed into a complex, jagged subject matter, which at the same time has become increasingly important for everyday criminal law practice. On the one hand, this work aims to do comprehensive justice to the complexity of the matter without sacrificing readability. In order to achieve this, the book’s structure enables legal scholars and experienced practitioners to access the information relevant to them in a targeted manner and, at the same time, enables less-oriented readers to gain access to European Criminal Law. Thus, the volume both answers basic questions and offers discussion in more specialised areas. Written by experts in the field, the book offers discussions that are both of the highest academic standards and accessibly readable.

The concluding chapter argues that the scope of refugee protection forms a complex picture of instability. Due to the refugee definition’s double rationale – Convention grounds and persecution – and the consequent conundrum of whether to focus on persecutor or persecuted, the scope of protection is subject to a variety of tensions and ambiguities which overlap and intersect in significant and complex ways. For example, human rights standards can be used as a benchmark when it comes to deciding both, which identities and which actions, fall within or outside of the scope of protection. And although ‘discretion’ reasoning is created at the level of the Convention ground, it moves around and is often debated in other elements of the refugee definition. These complex connections make everything unstable – not only ‘discretion’ itself but also its rejection. ‘Discretion’ functions as a patch for all these instabilities that emerge from the refugee definition. The book shows both the breadth and the depth of the ‘discretion’ logics: it is an unresolvable issue at the core of the refugee concept that surfaces at different layers, in different locations and in different ways – if it is put down in one place and form it will resurface in another place and in another form.

The starting point for the analysis is the debate that accrued from the 2010 United Kingdom Supreme Court judgment in HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) and an article that refugee law scholars James Hathaway and Jason Pobjoy wrote in response to it. The UK Supreme Court had rejected the previously common requirement that claimants act ‘discreetly’ in their country of origin in order to avoid persecution. Hathaway and Pobjoy criticised the judgment for being too broad and failing to distinguish protected from unprotected conduct. The chapter argues that the controversy that was triggered following the publication of the article crystallises the broader dispute concerning the claimant’s future behaviour and the question of what is protected under refugee law. The question arises out of the observation that claimants have at least notionally some control over the disclosure of the persecuted characteristic. The chapter reviews case law and literature that has dealt with these questions and suggests that the debate is shaped by two principles in refugee law that are shared by the community, although they are in tension: the notion that to require the claimant to hide the persecuted characteristic undermines the raison d’être of refugee law, and the notion that the purpose of refugee law is not to provide for the full range of available rights and freedoms.