|
UNHCR Home | 1951 Convention |
|
|
| A 'Timeless' Treaty Under Attack: Developing Protection
People have fled persecution from the moment in earliest history when they began forming communities. A tradition of offering asylum began at almost the same time; and when nations began to develop an international conscience in the early 20th century, efforts to help refugees also went global. Fridtjof Nansen was appointed in 1921 as the first refugee High Commissioner of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) assisted seven million people during and after the Second World War and a third group, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), created in 1946, resettled more than one million displaced Europeans around the world and helped 73,000 civilians to return to their former homes. A body of refugee law also began to take root. The 1933 League of Nations’ Convention relating to the International Status of Refugees and the 1938 Convention concerning the Status of Refugees coming from Germany provided limited protection for uprooted peoples. The 1933 instrument, for instance, had introduced the notion that signatory states were obligated not to expel authorized refugees from their territories and to avoid “non-admittance [of refugees] at the frontier.” But that Convention lacked teeth: only eight countries ratified it, several of them after imposing substantial limitations on their obligations.
But none of these early refugee organizations were totally successful, legal protection remained rudimentary and leading members of the newly created United Nations, formed to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, determined that a stronger refugee regime was necessary. With nearly one million refugees still milling hopelessly around Europe long after the end of the war, UNHCR was created in 1950 and the following year the Refugee Convention, the major legal foundation on which UNHCR’s work is based, was adopted. The 26 participating countries were heavily western or liberal in orientation, though they were joined by other states such as Iraq, Egypt and Colombia. Conspicuously absent, with the exception of Yugoslavia, was the Soviet-dominated communist bloc. For three weeks, in the United Nations European Office overlooking Lake Geneva, delegates hammered out a refugee bill of rights. It involved long and hard bargaining, interminable legal wrangling and a constant eye cocked to protect the rights of sovereign states. “The modern system of refugee rights was… conceived out of enlightened self-interest,” James C. Hathaway, professor of law and director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan has written.
One heated debate was sparked over the refusal of some delegates to commit themselves to open-ended legal obligations. In elaborating one of the Convention’s core definitions—who could be considered a refugee—some countries favored a general description covering all future refugees. Others wanted to limit the definition to then existing categories of refugees. In the end, inevitably, there was a compromise. A general definition emerged, based on a “well-founded fear of persecution” and limited to those who had become refugees “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951.” This temporal limitation—and the option to impose a geographical limitation by interpreting the word ‘events’ to mean either ‘events occurring in Europe’ or ‘events occurring in Europe or elsewhere’— was incorporated because the drafters felt “it would be difficult for governments to sign a blank check and to undertake obligations towards future refugees, the origin and number of which would be unknown.”
|
||||||||
