The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection

Alexander Betts, Gil Loescher, James Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136509070
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This revised and expanded second edition of The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) continues to offer a concise and comprehensive introduction to both the world of refugees and the organizations that protect and assist them. This updated edition also includes:

• up to date coverage of the UNHCR's most recent history and policy developments
• evaluation of new thinking on issues such as working in UN integrated operations and within the UN peacebuilding commission
• assessment of the UNHCR's record of working for IDP's (internally displaced persons)
• discussion of the politics of protection and its implications for the work of the UNHCR
• outline of the new challenges for the agency including environmental refugees, victims of natural disasters and survival migrants.

Written by experts in the field, this is one of the very few books to trace the relationship between state interests, global politics, and the work of the UNHCR. This book will appeal to students, scholars, practitioners, and readers with an interest in international relations.

1 The origins of international concern for refugees

• Refugees and the two world wars

• The origins of UNHCR and the 1951 Convention

While the presence of refugees is one of the hallmarks of contemporary society, refugee flows date back to pre-modern times. In fact, human history is replete with stories of forced migration and exodus, and the importance of sanctuary and the obligation to protect the persecuted are part of all great religious traditions and texts. Throughout early history across Europe and the Middle East, sites of worship were recognized as places of sanctuary and protection, offering refuge to people fleeing wars, political upheavals, and religious strife in near and distant lands.

Refugees only became a significant international issue, however, after the formation of the modern state system in the seventeenth century. With the emergence of centralized states in Europe, local monarchs tried to impose territorial unity on their states and targeted religious minorities and others whose practices deviated from the national norm. In this context, refugees became a more prominent matter of inter-state concern. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, for example, identified refugees as people who had lost the protection of their own state and recognized the importance of offering asylum to at least some of the world’s refugees.¹ For the first time, European sovereigns affirmed a basic right to emigration for those wishing to leave their home countries because their religion differed from that of their monarch.

During this time, however, grants of asylum to refugees were largely ad hoc and based on feelings of some kind of religious or political affinity for those seeking refuge. For example, Protestants expelled from France (the Huguenots) following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 were accepted as religious confreres by Protestant Britain and a number of other neighboring European states. The Huguenots, however, were also attractive migrants as they brought with them considerable financial assets and commercial, industrial and military expertise that could be put to good use in their new countries. Shortly after the Huguenot immigration, far less endowed Protestants from Germany (the Palatines) were viewed with hostility and soon rejected. Thus, not all refugees were offered a warm welcome during this era.

Forced migration occurred more frequently during the period of European state consolidation in the nineteenth century, and Britain and the United States, in particular, responded by offering asylum for those fleeing persecution and repression. Following the French Revolution and the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, for example, Britain offered a haven for thousands of émigrés. Throughout this period, the United States also had an open immigration policy and acted as the safety valve for many of Europe’s refugees and migrants. As the number of refugees rose, refugees became the subject of increased bilateral negotiations between states by the beginning of the twentieth century, and some elements of modern refugee law began to be formulated in response. Much of this activity, however, remained ad hoc and there was no international mechanism of assistance for refugees.

While refugees have been present throughout history, a global refugee regime, comprising a formal international organization for refugees, legal conventions, and an international structure to care for the displaced, only began to emerge in the aftermath of the First World War. The creation of a regime regulating states’ responses to refugees became increasingly necessary as states began to introduce immigration laws on the basis of race, national passports, and other legal and administrative barriers to entry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely in response to the rise of nationalism and the assertion of national sovereignty over their borders. Individuals forced to flee their homelands were subsequently unable to obtain citizenship or legal residence in another country without the required legal documentation, and were therefore in need of international protection. In order to meet this challenge, states began to create an institutional framework that would facilitate multilateral cooperation to meet the needs of the displaced. This chapter therefore explains how the wider political context of the two world wars and the emergence of the Cold War shaped the early global refugee regime, which subsequently led to the creation of UNHCR in 1950.

Refugees and the two world wars

State controls on entry greatly exacerbated the massive refugee crises generated by the First World War and the subsequent break-up of Europe’s multinational empires. Millions of people uprooted by the war and rendered stateless by their former empires, without national passports or identification and consequently without the protection of their home state, moved from country to country in search of refuge. In addition, European governments feared huge flows of displaced persons and rushed to erect protective barriers, close borders and expel thousands of individuals across national frontiers. Such government reactions contributed to huge refugee populations at the start of the 1920s, which threatened regional security in Europe and strained the limited resources of private and public international agencies and individual European governments.

To reduce this source of inter-state tension and to fill the gap in protection, Western governments established the first multilateral coordinating mechanism for refugees in 1921.² At the urging of non-governmental organizations, led by the Red Cross movement, the League of Nations created the Office of High Commissioner for Refugees and empowered it with specific responsibilities for protecting particular groups of refugees. Initially, the Office had responsibility for refugees fleeing revolution and civil war in Russia, but this responsibility was later extended to Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Armenian refugees. The major European governments reached international agreements to protect refugees fleeing from the disintegrating Russian and Ottoman Empires and adopted a number of minority treaties to guarantee the rights of ethnic minorities. In later years, these governments extended the agreements to include those fleeing Germany and Austria. The first High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, proved to be a highly innovative and successful advocate for refugees. In particular, Nansen developed mechanisms to ensure the legal protection of refugees, internationally recognized documentation to facilitate their travel (the “Nansen Passport”), and cooperated with other international agencies to find solutions for refugees.

Although under the aegis of the League of Nations, the international response to refugees prior to the Second World War did not constitute an effective or an enduring regime. Fearing pressure from a super-governmental authority to recognize political dissidents of any state, governments refrained from adopting a universal definition of “refugee.” Instead, Western governments designated only specific national groups as refugees, providing them with only minimal legal rights, and limited the efforts of the High Commissioner by keeping his mandate deliberately narrow and providing him with only a meager budget. As the overall political effectiveness and credibility of the League of Nations declined, particularly after the withdrawal of Germany, Japan, and Italy from its membership, and after its failure to solve the Manchurian and Ethiopian conflicts during the 1930s, its competence to deal with refugee problems also decreased.

The crucial impediments to genuine international cooperation regarding refugees, however, were the lack of any consistent or coherent international commitment to resolving refugee problems and the existence of an anti-immigration bias in most countries. During the years of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s, almost every Western nation believed that tight fiscal constraints and high unemployment levels at home should limit any humanitarian initiatives on behalf of refugees from abroad. They also believed that no particular foreign policy benefits would accrue from either putting political and moral pressure on refugee-generating countries or from accepting their unwanted dissidents and minority groups. Thus, despite pleas from public and private refugee organizations for additional resettlement locations for the world’s persecuted following the First World War, governments responded with more restrictive responses to the needs of refugees. Most significantly, early efforts at establishing a refugee regime proved to be totally ineffective in responding to refugee and human rights crises facing the international community in the inter-war years, especially the persecution of European Jews. Despite these failures, however, initial international cooperative efforts on behalf of refugees and the establishment of the world’s first international refugee agencies provided an important foundation for the global refugee regime, which was established in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The Second World War displaced tens of millions of people, both in Europe and elsewhere. At first, international efforts to solve the postwar refugee problem followed the pattern set in the inter-war period, that is, to set up temporary measures to resolve an emergency situation. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) perceived the displaced as a problem of huge proportion and a risk to the social and political order in Europe. SHAEF consequently focused its efforts on coordinating the return to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union of hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons. However, SHAEF soon ran into controversy when it ignored the wishes of many people who did not wish to return home because they feared persecution at the hands of Communist authorities. In late 1943, the Allied Powers established an intergovernmental body, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), whose principal function was to take over from SHAEF and to oversee the repatriation of the millions of displaced people under Allied control. But UNRRA was in no sense a refugee organization. Although it was authorized to give temporary relief to those under its care, it was not empowered to arrange for the resettlement of refugees and displaced persons to third countries. Moreover, in accordance with the terms of the February 1945 Yalta Agreements and in response to Soviet pressure, UNRRA played an active part in the controversial forcible repatriation of large numbers of people in Europe.

Several dramatic suicides in the displaced persons camps and bloody confrontations between Western military officials and refugees resisting forced repatriation finally convinced the US military command that the fears of future persecution at the hands of their countries’ Communist authorities of many of those remaining in their custody were genuine. As Western powers became increasingly reluctant to return displaced persons to areas under Communist control, the mass repatriations slowed and finally came to halt at the end of 1946.

Overshadowed by the emerging East–West conflict, the issue of repatriation became one of the most contentious issues debated within the early sessions of the newly formed United Nations (UN). Repatriation touched on the fundamental ideological conflicts dividing East and West. The core of the conflict concerned the rights of people to choose where they wanted to live, to flee from oppression, and to express their own opinions. The West and the Soviet-dominated bloc differed fundamentally on these issues. The Communist countries were concerned that if the refugees remained in the West, they would embarrass and discredit their newly established regimes. They therefore rejected outright the idea that their citizens could have any valid reason for opposing return and maintained that those who resisted repatriation were war criminals or traitors. The West insisted that displaced persons should have the freedom to choose whether to return home or not. Repatriation as a possible solution to refugee problems consequently became entirely discredited in the eyes of Western governments.

The origins of UNHCR and the 1951 Convention

The contemporary international approach to refugee problems only emerged fully after UNRRA was abolished in 1947 and was replaced by the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The United States, which provided over 70 percent of UNRAA funds and whose nationals occupied most senior management positions, was deeply critical of its repatriation policies and decided to terminate the organization. In its place, and in the face of adamant opposition from the Soviet Union, the United States worked to create the IRO which focused on resettling the remaining refugees and displaced persons created by the war and its aftermath. With the establishment of the IRO, states recognized the right of refugees not to be repatriated against their will. The international community also adopted, for the first time, a universal definition of refugee based on individualized “persecution or fear of persecution” on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. In so doing, Western powers made refugee eligibility dependent upon the circumstances of the individual rather than membership in a group, and accepted the individual’s right to flee from political persecution.

This change constituted a fundamental shift in the approach of international refugee protection. Previously, international organizations had dealt only with specific groups of refugees, and refugee status was therefore dependent on belonging to that group, rather than the specific experience of an individual. In fact, the international community had never attempted to formulate a definition of the term “refugee” and had not tied the concept of refugee to fear of persecution. The experience of persecution during the Second World War and the emergence of human rights and justice as central themes of post-war institutions, however, had a significant impact on the response of states to victims of persecution. Reflecting the spirit of the age, Article 14(1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided that “everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” While this right to seek asylum was not enshrined in future agreements, the shift from group to individual protection and the new emphasis on human rights proved significant for the future direction of international refugee protection.

Western powers hoped that the IRO would achieve two goals: first, to resolve longstanding refugee situations with the potential to destabilize European economies still recovering from the ruins of war, and second, to “internationalize” the refugee problem by distributing refugees and refugee costs among a number of North and South American, Western European, Australasian and African countries. The IRO also served the interests of occupied Germany and Western European countries who were concerned about the economic costs of hosting refugee populations. As the principal architect of the post-war refugee regime, the United States not only underwrote over two-thirds of the organization’s costs, but also used the IRO to its advantage by maintaining almost exclusive control over the organization’s leadership.

In the first year of its existence, the IRO resettled the majority of the refugee caseload it had inherited from UNRRA. It was able to accomplish this because many states saw recruiting from the displaced persons camps in Europe as one way of addressing their domestic labor shortages following the Second World War and the subsequent period of economic growth. Despite the resettlement achievements of the IRO, however, there remained several hundred thousand displaced persons in camps across Europe at the end of the 1940s who failed to meet the selective admissions policies of several of the resettlement countries. Moreover, with the onset of the Cold War in Europe, refugee problems showed few signs of disappearing as new groups of refugees from Eastern Europe began to make their way westward. At the same time, cataclysmic events in India, Korea, China, and Palestine during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as along the perimeter of the Iron Curtain, had all created new refugees by the millions. Given the resulting rise in global refugee numbers, the widespread perception that there were limits to the numbers of refugees resettlement countries would accept, and the belief that the IRO had been an extremely expensive operation, Western officials came to the position that there was an urgent need for a new UN refugee agency.

Despite the scale of the global refugee crisis, however, the United States was unwilling to pledge unlimited support to refugees and actively opposed the international community committing itself to unspecified and future responsibilities. Instead, the United States had turned decisively to the direct economic assistance of the European countries through the Marshall Plan, a strategy that Washington believed would make it easier for European governments to absorb refugees. This policy shift assumed that the need for exceptional or urgent relief and resettlement measures for European refugees had passed and that the problems that remained were temporary and could be dealt with by a small successor agency to the IRO. From 1943 to 1950, the United States had been the leading financial and political supporter of international cooperation on refugees. By 1950, however, US refugee policy was reoriented towards exposing the inadequacies of the Soviet Union and its allies, and to exploit unrest behind the Iron Curtain. With accentuation of these Cold War themes, American perceptions of international organizations dedicated to resolving refugee problems underwent a fundamental shift. International refugee relief operations were curtailed, unilateral initiatives were encouraged, and international organizations unwilling to subordinate themselves to US foreign policy objectives were denied American aid.

Against this background, discussions took place within the UN from 1948 to 1950 regarding the termination of the IRO and the creation of a new international refugee organization: UNHCR.³ While states recognized the need for a specialized international organization to protect refugees, governments differed on what they believed UNHCR’s scope and functions should be. The United States sought a temporary refugee agency with narrow authority and limited functions. In particular, the United States sought to deny UNHCR a relief role by depriving it of the independent authority and the funding to carry out relief assistance operations for refugees. American officials believed that the sole function of the proposed office should be international legal protection. In contrast, the principal Western European governments, such as France and the Benelux countries, were anxious to secure large-scale operational funds for the refugees they were assisting on their territories. Other states who were largely protected from large influxes of refugees by geographic factors, such as the UK, felt that refugees should be the responsibility of host states. Finally, India and Pakistan, who were in the throes of one of the largest population exchanges of modern times following partition in 1947, argued that UNHCR should be a strong permanent organization with global responsibilities and the ability to raise funds for relief assistance.

These competing interests played a central role in determining the functions of UNHCR, the definition of “refugee” it could employ, the autonomy of the Office, the scope of its activities, and the extent to which it would be financially supported as it carried out its work. The resulting Statute of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, adopted by the General Assembly through Resolution 428(V) on 14 December 1950, clearly reflects the interests of the more powerful states in the international system, most notably the United States and the UK. As the details of the Statute make clear, UNHCR was created to serve very specific functions within narrow parameters and with almost no institutional or material autonomy.

As specified by Chapter 1 of the Statute, UNHCR was established to act under the authority of the General Assembly to serve two specific functions: to protect refugees and to find permanent solutions to their plight, either through voluntary repatriation or through their assimilation within new national communities. In this way, the Statute details what continues to be UNHCR’s core mandate responsibilities: to provide international protection for refugees and to find durable solutions to their plight, through repatriation, local integration, or the resettlement of refugees to a third co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by the series editors
• Foreword by António Guterres
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The origins of international concern for refugees
• 2. UNHCR in the Cold War, 1950–91
• 3. UNHCR in the post-Cold War era
• 4. The politics and practice of UNHCR’s Mandate
• 5. UNHCR as a global institution
• 6. New challenges
• 7. Conclusion: Towards the future
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index