UNHCR official warns that the 1951 refugee convention is increasingly under threat

The U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday that governments around the world, especially in the Global North, which includes the United States and countries in Europe, are increasingly undermining the global convention on refugees and asylum-seekers – even threatening its very existence.

The stark warning by UNHCR came on the 75th anniversary of the U.N. Refugee Convention, a 1951 document that defines who refugees are and outlines the responsibilities of countries hosting them.

Countries have moved to suspend applications for asylum – requests for international protection by those who say they face war or persecution for their religion, race, nationality, sexuality or for their political beliefs if they were to return home.

“I am not exaggerating when I say that the institution of the asylum worldwide is under more threat now than it has ever been,” Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, assistant high commissioner for protection at UNHCR in Geneva, told reporters during an online briefing from the Swiss city.

The U.S. under the Trump administration and some European nations have increasingly restricted asylum and sought bilateral deals with third countries, especially in Africa, to deport migrants and, in some cases, attempt to transfer asylum responsibilities altogether.

“Some of those agreements are actually being concluded even as we speak,” she said, without giving details. “Asylum is under threat, but it is more under threat in the countries that are more capable of bearing that responsibility than in the countries which are actually hosting the largest number of refugees.”

Others, like Greece, which has seen a surge in refugees arriving to the island of Crete, including many Sudanese nationals, have temporarily suspended asylum processing.

“Those two pieces of paper have saved millions of lives in the past and will save millions of lives in the future,” she said, referring to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees adopted in the wake of World War II and the ensuing 1967 Protocol, which expanded protections to refugees worldwide.

A global funding crisis in the humanitarian sector has impacted more than 122 million people displaced from their homes, fleeing conflict or persecution, authorities say. A growing anti-asylum and anti-migration sentiment has added to their woes.

And though the arrivals of refugees in the Global North “dominate the headlines,” Menikdiwela said, some “75% of the world’s 43 million plus refugees are actually being hosted in low-income and middle-income countries.”

She cited the example of Chad, an East African nation that hosts 1.5 million refugees, the vast majority of them Sudanese who fled an ongoing civil war.

Menikdiwela, who recently visited a refugee camp in Chad, said that the agency’s programs there are vastly underfunded and unable to support the urgent needs of the arriving refugees.

“There are people – men, women and children – wandering around with bullet wounds and shrapnel wounds,” she said. Women and girls in particular have been subjected to unprecedented levels of sexual violence, Menikdiwela said, highlighting the case of an 80-year-old woman who reported being raped multiple times.

And yet, despite their dire situation, she said that the refugees who she met wouldn’t be alive, if Chad hadn’t respected the refugee convention and allowed them across its borders.

Menikdiwela urged leaders to step up donations and support, saying that many of the refugees in Chad would continue to move north through Libya and eventually Europe if their needs weren’t met in the East African nation.

She did, however, acknowledge abuse in asylum applications by migrants who have moved for economic or other reasons, not because they were fleeing war or persecution. The U.N. refugee agency has supported the concept of return hubs, a euphemism for deportation centers, which are increasingly gaining support in the U.S. and Europe.