The Refugee Convention was designed for a crisis like the invasion of Ukraine
"But it was cleverly and thoughtfully constructed to be of wider use as well. The convention is intended to meet the basic needs of refugees but also recognises the desire of nation states to control their borders.
Origins of the Refugee Convention
There have been refugees as long as there have been war, famine and cruelty, but international refugee law first emerged after the First World War. Millions of refugees fled from revolution, persecution then famine in Soviet Russia. With the entrenchment of the nation state model in Europe, it was no longer possible for them to simply leave one country and settle in another as refugees always had in the past.
In 1921 a League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was appointed. This was the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who, by lending his name to the ‘Nansen passport’, was to become eponymous with refugee protection in the interwar years. There were hundreds of thousands of Russians destitute on the streets of Europe and beyond and their plight was worsened by Soviet legislation that stripped them of their citizenship. They were soon joined by Armenians then, in the 1930s, by Jews.
The first attempt at a protective treaty was the Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees in 1933. Only a handful of states signed up to it and it was insufficiently flexible or robust to offer protection to the many refugees by then fleeing Nazi persecution. Another ineffective convention was agreed in 1938 and this was followed by a further abortive effort at the Evian Conference in 1938. Governments were unwilling to agree to binding commitments. Like the present government of the United Kingdom, they preferring to offer what we might call “bespoke” schemes over which they could exercise full control but which assisted very limited numbers.
Many died as a consequence. The Kindertransport are sometimes feted, for example. But those children were orphaned because their parents were refused entry.
After the war, the international community tried again. Tens of millions had been displaced before and during the war: what is now sometimes called a ‘mass influx’ situation was very much in everyone’s minds. This time there were two outcomes: the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Refugee Convention itself. The new convention included binding commitments. But they were moderate ones which carefully balanced the humanitarian and human needs of refugees with the sovereign right of nation states to control their own borders.
No right to asylum, only to non-return
The Refugee Convention did not then and does not today include a right to enter a country in order to claim or get asylum. This is despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, agreed in 1948, stating that everyone “has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (Article 14). But not to enter as such, you may note, nor to get asylum.
Instead, the new convention included two articles which were intended to protect refugees fleeing persecution.
The most important is Article 33, the right of non-return or “non-refoulement”"
Continue in the original article. https://www.freemovement.org.uk/the-refugee-convention-was-designed-for-a-crisis-like-the-invasion-of-ukraine/?mc_cid=4d24f9bc0d&mc_eid=b72b4a153ahttps://www.freemovement.org.uk/the-refugee-convention-was-designed-for-a-crisis-like-the-invasion-of-ukraine/?mc_cid=4d24f9bc0d&mc_eid=b72b4a153a
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