“Safe Countries” in a burning world: climate-induced displacement and legal denial in the Senegalese case

Resumen

As the planet continues to burn, the European Union fortifies its borders. Despite the climate crisis being one of the principal drivers of global instability and forced displacement, it remains conspicuously absent from the legal criteria by which claims for international protection are assessed. In the face of a transforming world, European asylum frameworks remain anchored in a twentieth-century paradigm of human mobility, based on the rigid dichotomy between “economic migrants” and “political refugees” (KUNZ, 1973). This binary, established by the 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 Protocol, is proving increasingly unsuitable to interpret the complexity of contemporary migratory dynamics, which escape traditional categorizations and develop within hybrid constellations of economic, environmental, social, and political drivers. This “juridical myopia” manifests in the systematic rejection of applications, exclusions from the asylum system and the forced repatriation of individuals whose displacement is clearly linked to ecological crises. Reforming asylum law must go beyond a mere revision of definitional boundaries. It requires the recognition that environmental crises - no less than armed conflicts or political persecution - create conditions of vulnerability, dispossess communities and forces millions of people to flee. The continued absence of legal recognition for so-called “environmental refugees” is not merely a normative gap: it reveals a deeper political unwillingness to treat the ecological crisis as a collective and shared responsibility.