Gabon, a country of immigration since the colonial time, has started to receive refugees since 1968 with the arrival of Biafran children from Nigeria. Gabon has then received refugee populations originating in majority from Africa. In 2002, the country had 24 different nationalities of refugees on its territory. But Congolese refugees constitute the largest quota and also represent the most important flow of refugees Gabon has ever received. Those ones arrived in Gabon essentially at the end of the 1990's following the successive wars in Republic of Congo. Congolese refugees' presence in Gabon is a geographical (Gabon and Congo share a frontier of 1903km) and ethnic proximity refuge (we find the same ethnic groups on the both sides of the frontier namely Punu, Nzèbi, Vili, Téké etc). Those countries were also part of the FEA (French Equatorial Africa). If in the international law, the refugee is not authorized to go back home without a repatriation process, this study questions the enforcement of that international law in a context of geographical and ethnic proximity. Analyses conducted in this work show that the rapprochement of the frontier influences the mobilities of the Congolese refugees on the border area, they travel between the two countries. That situation calls into question the definition of the type of refugee as stated by the international law in so far as in that case, refugees use both territories (guest country and country of departure) for their integration. The use by Congolese refugees of both sides territories bounded by the state frontier allows to understand that the escape, which is originally constraint, takes the a shape of an "economic migration"
