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UNHCR Home | 1951 Convention |
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| A 'Timeless' Treaty Under Attack: Making Protection Work
Balancing the interests of governments with the needs of refugees is difficult but essential. “We share states’ concerns about the costs and misuse of the asylum system, the disproportionate and protracted burden some nations have to bear, the unavailability of timely and appropriate solutions to refugees’ problems,” says Feller. “Of course, burden-sharing can never be a precondition for meeting responsibilities. These do, though, need to be rationalized. We have to get together and figure out how to make protection work, and how to keep the Convention central to our work.” UNHCR recently launched its global consultations with governments, legal scholars, non-governmental organizations and refugees themselves, to do just that. The discussions are designed to reaffirm the commitment of governments to the Convention, at the same time examining key protection concerns not explicitly addressed in the 1951 instrument. “The objectives of the consultations are to promote a common understanding of protection dilemmas, improve cooperation in dealing with them, and generate new approaches tailored to changed demands and circumstances,” said Feller. The meetings will extend into 2002 and are organized along three so-called ‘tracks’. The ‘first-track’ discussions will be held at an unprecedented meeting of states parties to the Convention in Geneva in December. Ministerial-level participants at the meeting, convened jointly by UNHCR and the government of Switzerland, will adopt a declaration intended to commit signatories to the full and effective implementation of the Convention and its Protocol.
Discussions concerning the interpretation of various provisions of the Convention will be organized in a series of round tables involving government experts, NGO representatives, scholars and representatives of UNHCR. These ‘second-track’ talks will focus on issues like exclusion and cessation, non-refoulement, family unity, refugee definition and the question of illegal entry into an asylum state. ‘Third-track’ discussions will be held within the framework of UNHCR’s Executive Committee at specially organized sessions. They will examine such themes as protection of refugees in mass influx situations, protection of refugees in individual asylum systems, protection-based solutions to the problems of refugees, and protection of refugee women and children. The intended outcome of these discussions varies, from achieving a clearer consensus on how to approach some of these problems to setting international standards. Much has changed over the past 50 years. The world is more complex than it was in 1951; people are more mobile; shades of gray elude categorization where once black-and-white fitted neatly into hardwon definitions. Humanitarianism has seemingly been replaced by hard-nosed pragmatism, empathy by suspicion. But one thing has not changed: people still flee persecution, war and human rights violations and have to seek refuge in other countries. For refugees, now as half a century ago, the 1951 Convention is the one truly universal, humanitarian treaty that offers some guarantee their rights as human beings will be safeguarded.
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