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UNHCR Home | 1951 Convention |
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| A 'Timeless' Treaty Under Attack: A New Phase
The original framers had not expected refugee issues to be a major international problem for very long. UNHCR had been given a limited three-year mandate to help the post-World War II refugees and then, it was hoped, go out of business. Instead, the refugee crisis spread, from Europe in the 1950s to Africa in the 1960s and then to Asia and by the 1990s back to Europe. The Convention obviously needed strengthening to remain relevant for these new waves of exiles. In 1967 the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, which effectively removed the earlier 1951 deadline and the geographical restrictions while retaining other main provisions of the instrument. This was only one response as refugee problems became more complex in the following decades, as the number of people seeking safety swelled from less than one million to a high of more than 27 million in 1995, and as new categories of exiles, such as so-called internally displaced people, were created. In one innovative and relatively benign approach, some countries resorted to home-grown ‘temporary protection’ arrangements to accommodate large-scale influxes of asylum seekers, such as the hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled Bosnia and, later, Kosovo during the 1990s.
These schemes had both benefits and drawbacks. They allowed civilians to enter a country speedily and with a minimum of red tape, but since there were no binding universal standards that apply to temporary protection, the rights accorded to asylum seekers were often fewer in number and less generous in scope than those provided for under the Convention. In addition, beneficiaries were usually granted only ‘temporary’ residence, as the term implies, and governments could end their protection arrangements at their own discretion. Thus temporary protection may be a practical complement to the Convention, but according to UNHCR, it is not, and should not be used as, a substitute for the treaty. There were also many negative developments. Countries which earlier had welcomed limited numbers of refugees or had accepted large groups for political as well as humanitarian considerations (people fleeing to the West from European communist countries, for instance) began to close their doors. The term ‘Fortress Europe’ was coined.
Inevitably, the Convention came under closer scrutiny and convoluted legal arguments were formulated to try to stem the flow of asylum seekers when politically expedient. Because the 1951 instrument does not define the term ‘persecution’ the definition itself has been subject to wildly differing —and increasingly restrictive— interpretations. Some capitals argued that the nature of persecution has changed over the past 50 years, and that people who flee civil war, generalized violence or a range of human rights abuses in their home countries, and who usually do so in large numbers, are not fleeing persecution per se. UNHCR says that war and violence have been used increasingly as instruments of persecution according to the Convention. In conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the Great Lakes region of Africa and Kosovo, for instance, violence was deliberately used to persecute specific communities; ethnic or religious ‘cleansing’ was the ultimate goal of those conflicts.
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