Financial Crimes as ‘Serious Non-Political Crimes’: Consequences for the Concepts of Seriousness and Unworthiness in Exclusion Law

Abstract

Financial crimes were recently recognized by the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme administrative court, as ‘serious non-political crimes’ for the purposes of exclusion under article 1F(b) of the Refugee Convention. Such an extension of the scope of article 1F(b) raises questions regarding the seriousness threshold of article 1F(b) and its link to bodily harm. A first approach would be to establish the indirect relationship between financial crimes and bodily harm. Another approach would be to discard the concept of bodily harm as being pivotal in understanding the scope of the exclusion clauses. This second solution would have crucial implications for the theoretical underpinnings of the exclusion clauses of article 1F of the Refugee Convention, namely on the concept of unworthiness. In this regard, the recognition of financial crimes as rendering an asylum seeker unworthy of protection highlights the link between exclusion and moral and societal concerns.