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This paper addresses the question of how to protect refugees in a political context of rising suspicion and increasing policy measures aimed at controlling and countering the presence of 'illegal immigrants'. I will in particular look at the shifts that have taken place in the understanding and framing of human smuggling and how that has affected the way refugees are perceived and treated. Human smuggling is by no means a new phenomenon; there have always been people who for all sorts of reasons were not in the position to travel via ordinary routes. However, it is only fairly recently that human smuggling has undergone a process of criminalization. Since the beginning of the 1990s human smuggling entered the penal code of different European countries. In the year 2000 a Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea came into being. This Protocol was part of the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime what marked the beginning of framing human smuggling as a 'global criminal business' where huge amounts of profits are made. Despite the fact that the majority of refugees are smuggled into Europe and this situation is acknowledged in article 31 of the 1951 Geneva Convention, refugees who enter countries with the help from smugglers are nowadays often perceived a 'threat' to society. In this paper I argue that state's current static and criminal view of what human smuggling is may easily lead to the violation of article 31 of the Geneva Convention. Moreover this particular security lens has huge effects for how states (and the public) nowadays perceive asylum seekers and refugees.

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