The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (229 page)

The 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (as amended by a Protocol, 1967) defines a refugee as any person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his or her nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him- or herself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
Originating during the
Cold War
at a time when Europe was the main theatre of refugees, and drafted by the West, the UN definition has come to be seen as increasingly outdated and overly restrictive. The majority of involuntary migrations have arisen in the
Third World
, as the result of war, civil war, or general civil disorder, and attempts by government to dramatically restructure society, often leading to an indiscriminate deprivation of basic
human rights
and economic destruction. Most broader definitions still distinguish in principle between refugees and the displaced persons who remain in their country of origin, economic migrants looking for a better standard of living, and the new concept of environmental refugees fleeing some natural catastrophe.
Refugees fleeing persecution and who seek political asylum should not be forcibly repatriated, according to the UN Convention. At the outset of the 1990s around half of the world's refugees (estimated at around fifteen million people within the competence of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) were reckoned to be children, the majority of adults being women.
PBI 

 
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A system of government or administration. The most common use of this promiscuous term in recent years has been in the phrase ‘military regime’. So while any government may be termed a regime, be it monarchical, aristocratic, republican, or tyrannical, the term unavoidably conjures up recent memories of tanks in the streets in many newly democratized states in Latin America and Eastern Europe. This is to be regretted, since it has two more technical senses in which it may not easily be replaced. First, when governments come and go with bewildering frequency, as in nineteenth-century Spain or post-1945 Italy, there may still be an absence of fundamental or revolutionary change. In these circumstances it is possible to speak of regime continuity. Alternatively, and more rarely, a change of regime (from constitutional monarchy to tyranny, or from dispersed to centralized government) may be achieved without a change in government, as in the move from parliamentary to personal rule by Charles I of England, or under Margaret Thatcher . Secondly, in international relations the difficulty of accommodating the rise of non-state actors within state-centric realist models of explanation has led to use of the term ‘regime’ to cover norm-bound interactions relating to issues such as the global environment or human rights, in which of states, international organizations, transnational corporations, individuals, and worldwide pressure groups like Greenpeace or Amnesty International all take part.
CJ 

 
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The practice of or belief in regional government. Regionalism may be distinguished from
federalism
, in which the lower tier of government has a protected sphere where the upper tier cannot intervene; and from
devolution
, in which the upper tier devolves to the lower tier powers that are then difficult to take back (such as the power of internal self-government that the government of the United Kingdom gave to Northern Ireland between 1920 and 1972). The term regionalism is therefore better applied to regimes in which there are, or might be, regions, but where regions are a creation of central government which may be as easily destroyed as created. Two examples are France, which has a regional tier of government, and the United Kingdom, where there is regional government (short of devolution) in Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland, but not for England or for its regions. England is divided into standard regions which are widely used for statistical and administrative purposes but have no political representation. In 1993 the
European Union
established a Committee on the Regions on which elected local officials serve. In the United Kingdom this was achieved through a cross-party revolt against a government proposal to nominate its own appointees to the committee.

 
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Taxation system which levies a proportionately higher rate on those with lower incomes. Taxes levied at a constant percentage on expenditure, such as VAT, and flat-rate taxes, such as the UK
poll tax
or the TV licence fee, are regressive in effect.

 
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In its specialized political sense, the control of privately owned monopoly by government rules. Regulation dawned in Britain with the Regulation of Railways Act 1844. Because railways were a natural monopoly—it is always cheaper for an established network to serve a new client than it would be for a rival network to start—Parliament attempted (unsuccessfully) to regulate prices and (more successfully) to regulate safety. Regulation was exported to the United States during the Progressive era from 1880 to 1920, and re-exported to the United Kingdom after
privatization
of nationalized industries began in 1979. The theory of regulation has lagged behind the practice, so that the aim of regulation has sometimes been unclear. Some writers accuse industries of ‘capturing’ their regulators: that is, of bargaining with them for a pattern of regulation which the industry and the regulator can live with, but which fails to protect the public in the way the legislation intended.
‘Regulation’ is also used more broadly to cover any publicly imposed rules governing a firm or industry, especially safety and environmental rules.