This paper examines the ambivalent influence of the UN Security Council’s practice on the development of international refugee protection since the early 1990s. While the international refugee protection regime did not originally foresee a role for the Security Council, the increasingly complex security challenges in the post-Cold War era have led to its de facto inclusion in the institutional framework of protection. After having used its wide discretionary powers under the UN Charter to link refugee flows with its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, the Security Council thus began to strengthen different aspects of international refugee protection. Mariano Garcia Rubio Prize 2009 for the best Master’s Thesis in International Law. A revised version of Part 3 of this ePaper was published as C. Ahlborn, ‘The Normative Erosion of International Refugee Protection through UN Security Council Practice’, (2011) 24 Leiden Journal of International Law, pp 1009-1027. The views reflected in this paper are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.