Refugee

• 1. Introduction

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  Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety elsewhere, unable to return because of feared persecution for who they are, what they believe, or because of armed conflict and serious public disorder. The word itself carries centuries of weight. It traces back through Old French to the Latin fugere, meaning "to flee", and refugium, a place to flee back to. In English, the term first attached to French Protestant Huguenots who fled Catholic persecution after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1540. But the modern understanding of who counts as a refugee, what rights they hold, and who bears responsibility for them is far younger. How did the world come to recognize refugees as a distinct legal category? What machinery was built to protect them? And why, despite that machinery, do tens of millions of people still live in displacement today?

• 2. Language and Law

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  The Huguenots gave the English language its word. When French Protestants fled to Britain in large numbers after the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the protections of the 1598 Edict of Nantes, and after the 1687 Declaration of Indulgence in England and Scotland, the word refugee entered common English use meaning "one seeking asylum". That meaning held for more than two centuries. Around 1916 it shifted, now referring to "one fleeing home", applied to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in World War I.

  The first modern international definition came when the League of Nations established its Commission for Refugees in 1921. The legal framework that most of the world now relies on arrived three decades later. Following World War II and in response to large numbers of people fleeing Eastern Europe, the United Nations passed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Article 1.A.2 defined a refugee as any person with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, who is outside their country and cannot or will not return to it. The 1967 Protocol largely confirmed this definition.

  Yet that definition proved too narrow for many crises. The Organization of African Unity adopted a broader standard in 1969 through the Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, covering people compelled to flee because of external aggression, occupation, or events seriously disturbing public order. The 1984 Cartagena Declaration, a regional non-binding instrument for Latin America, went further still, covering those whose lives, safety, or freedom were threatened by generalized violence, internal conflicts, or massive violations of human rights. As of 2011, the UNHCR itself recognized as refugees people facing serious and indiscriminate threats to life or physical integrity from generalized violence. A displaced person otherwise entitled to refugee status may never apply for asylum and thus may never hold that official designation.

• 3. The Nansen Years

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  Fridtjof Nansen was appointed head of the League of Nations' High Commission for Refugees in 1921, tasked with helping approximately 1,500,000 people who had fled the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war. Most were aristocrats escaping the Communist government. About 800,000 of them became stateless when Lenin revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921.

  By 1923, the commission's mandate expanded to cover more than one million Armenians who left Turkish Asia Minor in 1915 and 1923 during the events now known as the Armenian genocide. Over subsequent years, the mandate grew again to include Assyrians and Turkish refugees. The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey involved about two million people, around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece, most forcibly repatriated from homelands spanning centuries or millennia under the Treaty of Lausanne.

  The Nansen Office's most enduring practical achievement was the Nansen passport, a travel document for stateless refugees, for which the office was awarded the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. That same year, both the Nansen Office and the associated High Commission were dissolved. They had managed to lead fourteen nations to ratify the 1933 Refugee Convention, an early human rights charter, and had assisted around one million refugees worldwide. The office faced persistent problems of financing, growing refugee numbers, and uneven cooperation from member states.

• 4. World War II and Its Aftermath

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  Between 1933 and 1939, about 200,000 Jews fleeing Nazism found refuge in France. At least 55,000 Jews reached Palestine before British authorities closed that destination in 1939. Jews in Germany had been stripped of citizenship by the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, and on the 4th of July 1936 an agreement under League auspices defined a refugee from Germany as any settled person who did not enjoy the protection of the Reich government.

  By the end of the war, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, created in 1943, returned over seven million displaced persons to their countries of origin. Another one million who refused repatriation were housed in displaced persons camps. Even two years after the war's end, some 850,000 people still lived in those camps across Western Europe.

  The post-war population transfers added enormously to the scale. In the last months of the war, about five million German civilians from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia fled the advance of the Red Army. The Potsdam Agreement of the 2nd of August 1945 ordered the transfer of remaining German populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary westward. In all, 15 million Germans were affected, and more than two million perished during the expulsions. Between the war's end and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, more than 563,700 refugees from East Germany traveled west for asylum. The International Refugee Organization, founded on the 20th of April 1946, was dissolved in 1952 after resettling about one million refugees. By 1953, over 250,000 refugees remained in Europe, most of them old, infirm, or disabled.

• 5. Institutions and Mandates

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  The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on the 14th of December 1950 and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It protects refugees at the request of a government or the United Nations and works toward durable solutions including return, integration, or resettlement. Its mandate covers all refugees except Palestinian refugees, who fled the current state of Israel between 1947 and 1949 as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Those roughly 700,000 Palestinian refugees fall under the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA.

  UNRWA was set up as a temporary agency but has outlasted its original scope. In 1965 it changed eligibility to include third-generation descendants; in 1982 it extended eligibility again to include all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, regardless of citizenship elsewhere. By the time of the source, the original 700,000 had grown to at least 5 million registered refugees. UNRWA has placed over 700 schools serving more than 500,000 students, established 140 health centers, opened 113 women's community centers, and awarded over 475,000 loans. Its funding depends on voluntary donations, and fluctuations in those donations limit how fully it can carry out its mandate.

  The UNHCR tracks three durable solutions for refugees beyond temporary protection. Local integration can lead to permanent residency and citizenship: Tanzania granted citizenship to 162,000 refugees from Burundi in 2014 and 32,000 Rwandan refugees in 1982. Mexico naturalized 6,200 Guatemalan refugees in 2001. Voluntary return has brought 120,000 Congolese refugees back from the Republic of Congo to the DRC, and tens of thousands of Angolans home from the DRC and Botswana. Third country resettlement, which the UNHCR has traditionally viewed as the least preferable option, gained new weight in April 2000 when then High Commissioner Sadako Ogata stated that resettlement can no longer be seen as the least-preferred solution and is in many cases the only one available.

• 6. Non-Refoulement

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  Non-refoulement is the right not to be returned to a place of persecution and is considered the foundation of international refugee law. It is grounded in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Article 3 of the Convention against Torture, and Articles 6, 7, and 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The prohibition against returning a person to a place where they risk torture, persecution, or serious harm is absolute. States cannot invoke national security or public order as justification for violating it.

  The principle covers not just direct returns but also indirect or chain refoulement, where a state transfers a person to a second country from which they may be sent to a third country where they face danger. States are prohibited from disembarking a refugee in another jurisdiction unless they can ensure that refugee will be protected from onward transfer and treated in accordance with international human rights standards. The African Refugee Convention addresses non-refoulement explicitly, stating that no person shall be subjected to measures compelling them to return to a territory where their life, physical integrity, or liberty would be threatened.

  Political philosopher Andy Lamey proposed a portable procedural model that emphasizes non-refoulement by guaranteeing refugees three procedural rights: a verbal hearing, access to legal counsel, and judicial review of detention decisions. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that collectively expelling migrants who are prevented from requesting asylum violates their right to protection from inhuman or degrading treatment. The EU-Turkey deal has attracted criticism over concerns that Turkey may not be a safe third country, and reports indicate some Syrian asylum-seekers have been forcibly returned to Turkey without access to asylum procedures despite Greek courts blocking those returns.

• 7. Health and Exploitation

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  Refugees typically report poorer health than other immigrants and non-immigrant populations. Post-traumatic stress disorder is among the most documented conditions. A meta-study by the psychiatry department of Oxford University at Warneford Hospital analyzed twenty surveys covering 6,743 adult refugees from seven countries; in the larger studies, 9% were diagnosed with PTSD and 5% with major depression. Five surveys of 260 refugee children from three countries found an 11% prevalence of PTSD. Refugees resettled in Western countries may be about ten times more likely to have PTSD than age-matched general populations in those countries.

  PTSD was diagnosed in 34.1% of Palestinian children, most of whom were refugees, males, and working. The participants were 1,000 children aged 12 to 16 from governmental, private, and UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. A study of Bosnian refugee women in Sweden found that 28.3% had symptoms of PTSD three or four years after arrival. Their odds ratio for depression was 9.50 compared with Swedish-born women. A study by the Department of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine found that twenty percent of Sudanese refugee minors in the United States had a PTSD diagnosis.

  Malaria compounds the health burden. Refugee camps are densely populated with poor sanitary conditions; removal of vegetation drives mosquitoes closer to humans. In the 1970s, Afghan refugees relocated to Pakistan moved from a country with effective malaria control to one with a less effective system, and camps built near rivers or irrigation sites had higher malaria prevalence. Children aged 1-15 were most susceptible, and malaria caused 16% of deaths in refugee children younger than five.

  Exploitation is documented across multiple settings. In refugee camps in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, young girls, most between 13 and 18, were found exchanging sex for money, food, or a bar of soap as recently as 2001. Parents often did not intervene because sexual exploitation had become a mechanism of survival. The 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis brought renewed warnings: European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson stated that there were indications that online demand for Ukrainian women for sexual purposes had gone up.

• 8. Security, Crime, and Perception

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  Little empirical evidence supports the claim that refugees commit crimes at higher rates than host-country nationals; some evidence suggests rates may be lower. Of 800,000 refugees vetted through the United States resettlement program between 2001 and 2016, only five were subsequently arrested on terrorism charges. Of 600,000 Iraqis and Syrians who arrived in Germany in 2015, only 17 were investigated for terrorism. One study found that over 90% of European jihadists were residents of a European country and 60% held European citizenship, suggesting that the Islamist refugee Trojan Horse narrative is highly exaggerated.

  Since 1975, the risk of dying in a terror attack carried out by a refugee in the United States is 1 in 3.6 billion per year. For context, the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash are 1 in 113. Despite these statistics, a PEW Research Center survey of ten European countries released on the 11th of July 2016 found that majorities ranging from 52% to 76% of respondents in eight of those countries believed refugees increase the likelihood of terrorism.

  A more empirically grounded concern runs in the opposite direction. According to a 2018 study in the Journal of Peace Research, states often resort to anti-refugee violence in response to terrorist attacks or security crises, and the repression of refugees is more consistent with a scapegoating mechanism than with actual links to terrorism. When Sweden received over 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015, the influx was accompanied by 50 attacks against asylum-seekers, more than four times the number of attacks in the previous four years combined. The 2011 Utoya, Norway attack by Breivik, which killed dozens, illustrated the threat from domestic ethno-nationalist extremism directed at perceived immigration threats rather than from refugees themselves.