Protection is Not an Act of Goodwill, But a Shared Obligation
Protection is Not an Act of Goodwill, But a Shared Obligation
Kristijan Mihajlovski, Visiting Lecturer from the Department of International Refugee Law and Migration Law of the International Institute for Humanitarian Law
Seventy-five years after the adoption of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the world continues to face record numbers of people forced to flee their homes by war, persecution and violence. In such circumstances, the preservation of the international refugee protection system and its consistent implementation remain of crucial importance.
On the occasion of this significant anniversary, we spoke with Kristijan Mihajlovski, Visiting Lecturer from the Department of International Refugee Law and Migration Law of the International Institute for Humanitarian Law, one of the leading international institutions for training and capacity building in the field of international refugee law.
How would you explain mixed movements to readers unfamiliar with the topic, and why is it important to identify refugees and asylum-seekers within these movements?
Imagine a hospital emergency room on a busy night. Everyone arrives through the same doors and can look much the same — yet some have a minor complaint while others are in life-threatening danger. The staff's task is to find those who cannot afford to wait, because treating everyone alike would put the most vulnerable at risk.
"Mixed movements" work similarly: people travelling together, along the same routes and often in the same boats or vehicles, but for very different reasons. In one group you might find someone fleeing war or persecution, someone leaving poverty to look for work, a family hoping to reunite with relatives, and someone deceived or forced into the journey by others who mean to exploit them. They move together, but their needs — and their rights — are not the same.
This is why identifying refugees and asylum-seekers matters. Some cannot safely return home, and international law protects them from being sent back — but only if we can recognise who they are. When everyone is treated as a single, undifferentiated "flow," those most in need can be overlooked. Fair identification isn't bureaucracy; it ensures the right person receives the right protection at the right moment.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Why does the Convention remain essential today, and what does its continued relevance mean for the protection of refugees and asylum-seekers in practice?
The 1951 Convention was written after a war that had driven millions from their homes. But it put into legal form a far older idea. The instinct to shelter those fleeing danger — to offer sanctuary, and not turn away a stranger in need — runs through cultures, religions and traditions across the world and throughout history.
Seventy-five years on, that promise has not aged, because the reasons people flee — war, persecution, violence — have not disappeared. The rights it protects are not special privileges reserved for refugees; they are the universal rights we all hold, tailored to those who have lost their own country's protection.
What keeps it essential is that it turns protection from an act of goodwill into a shared commitment — a common rulebook, so that a person's safety does not depend on which border they happen to reach. That commitment is remarkably widely held: today 149 countries, more than three-quarters of the world, defer to these principles.
In practice, this is what lets someone arriving at a frontier have their situation genuinely examined rather than being turned away, and what stands behind a family's right not to be returned to the danger they fled.
How can international refugee law and protection standards be translated into practical action by professionals working directly with refugees and asylum-seekers?
International law can look abstract, but for someone who has fled it has to be real not in principle, but in a single encounter: the conversation at a border, the interview that decides whether their protection is recognized. That is where standards either come to life or fall away.
This is why training matters. It turns a principle into a skill — how to conduct an interview with care, how to recognize someone who may need protection within a wider group on the move, how to treat a person with dignity even when time and resources are short. Much of our work at the Sanremo Institute is exactly this. A shared rulebook only protects if the people using it apply it the same way — otherwise safety comes down to who is on the other side of the desk.
Standards also work best when refugees have a genuine say in how they are applied; no one understands the realities better than those who have lived them. That is no longer a fringe idea, and I am proud that at the Institute we work with people with lived experience of displacement or statelessness to engage in advocacy at every level.
What is the key message you would like the public to understand about refugees and the shared responsibility to provide protection?
There is a quote we very often use to close the Institute’s courses on refugee protection: the way we treat refugees is not really a reflection of who they are; it is a reflection of who we are. A society is measured by how it treats people at their most vulnerable — and offering safety to someone who has lost everything is one of the oldest and most human things we can do for one another.
This article was produced with the financial support of the Migration Multi-Partner Trust Fund. Its contents are the sole responsibility of UNHCR in Serbia and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Fund.
