Refugees Magazine
 
Refugees Magazine Issue 132: (Protection) – Chronology: Protection through the ages

People have been forced to flee ever since they began forming communities centuries ago. Encouragingly, the tradition of offering sanctuary is almost as old as flight itself. Ancient religious texts often refer to asylum, a word of Greek origin meaning 'without capture' 'without violation' or 'without devastation.' Plato wrote: "The foreigner isolated from his fellow countrymen and his family should be the subject of greater love on the part of men and of the Gods."

Individual states or leaders carried the burden of helping uprooted people. Theseus, King of Athens, counseled Oedipus, the King of Thebes, "Like you, I well remember that I grew up in the house of others and in a foreign land. I faced deadly dangers. So that, whoever asks my hospitality, as you do now, I would not know how to turn away."

Nations began to develop an international conscience in the early 20th century and efforts to help refugees went global. The League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, in 1921 appointed famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen as the world's first High Commissioner for Refugees with a mandate to help some 800,000 mainly Russian refugees.

At the same time, a body of international refugee law began to take shape starting with the 1933 League of Nations Convention relating to the International Status of Refugees followed by the 1938 Convention concerning the Status of Refugees.

The League collapsed at the end of World War II. During the chaos and aftermath of that conflict, first the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration helped seven million refugees and other groups to repatriate to their homes, and then the International Refugee Organization (IRO) resettled more than one million refugees in new countries around the world.

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, followed a year later by the fourth of the Geneva Conventions covering the protection of civilians caught up in conflict.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency "of an entirely nonpolitical character" was created by the U.N. General Assembly in 1950, principally to help an estimated one million wartime refugees still milling around Europe. On July 28 of the following year, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the major legal foundation on which UNHCR's work is based, was formally adopted.

It was the first international agreement covering the most fundamental aspects of a refugee's life. It defined the term 'refugee', outlined a refugee's basic rights including such things as freedom of religion and movement, but also underscored a refugee's obligations to a host government. A key provision stipulated that refugees should not be returned or 'refouled' to a country where he/she faced persecution.

The original Convention was deliberately narrow in scope. It allowed states to limit their obligations to European refugees and did not cover people uprooted from their homes after 1 January 1951. But as the 'refugee problem' went global, it became obvious the Convention needed strengthening. In 1967 the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees which effectively removed time and geographical restrictions contained in the original 1951 document.

In 1969 the then Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted its own liberal refugee convention. For the first time, a legal document extended refugee recognition to people fleeing in large groups and escaping such things as external aggression, occupation or foreign domination. It included the now universally accepted principle of 'voluntary' repatriation. Other regional treaties followed, including the 1984 Cartagena Declaration signed by Latin American countries.

For the first four decades of its existence, UNHCR had always worked on the fringe of wars, helping uprooted peoples to try to restart their lives once they had reached safety in surrounding countries. However, the agency's operations changed dramatically in the early 1990s and responding to increasingly complex conflict situations, staff began working in the middle of wars in such places as northern Iraq and the Balkans.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington signalled a seismic shift in global political and military activity. They resulted in the American-led war on terrorism and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Millions of refugees were swept up in the fallout. More than two million civilians were able to return to their ancestral homes in Afghanistan following the installation of a new government there, but many others became entangled in tougher security and asylum restrictions introduced by many countries.

In what High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers called the most important meeting on refugees in a half century, Convention signatories (joined by other nations, non-governmental organizations and experts) met in Geneva in December 2001 and reaffirmed their "commitment to implement our obligations under the 1951 Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol fully and effectively" and promised to "address the causes of refugee movements as well as to prevent them."

The conference was part of an ongoing UNHCR process called Global Consultations on International Protection which resulted in the creation of an Agenda for Protection, effectively a series of guidelines for governments and humanitarian organizations to use in strengthening worldwide refugee protection.

In conjunction with the Agenda, Lubbers introduced several other initiatives to bolster areas of protection concern which had not been foreseen by the original drafters of the Convention, to try to eliminate the so-called 'gap' between refugee emergencies and long-term development for refugees and devastated communities and to promote, where applicable, local integration or resettlement of uprooted people.

At its peak in 1994, with conflict raging in the Balkans and millions displaced by the Rwandan genocide and other upheavals in Central Africa, UNHCR was assisting and protecting an estimated 27 million people. Today, the agency continues to help more than 20 million civilians. Since the 1950s, it has assisted between 50-60 million persons to restart their lives and in the process won two Nobel Peace Prizes for what UNHCR's first High Commissioner Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart called its attempts to create an environment "in which no people of any country, in fact no group of people of any kind, live in fear and need."

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 132: "The Changing Face of Protection" (September 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (620Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here