[On December 14th, 1950, the United Nations adopted its Statute on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75th anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and crucial issue in 2025.]
On two
prior iterations of a global refugee organization, and how the UNHCR has built
on them but gone much further.
Not surprisingly,
the first global organization dedicated to assisting refugees was created by
the first truly global organization period: the League of Nations, which in
1921 appointed
a High Commissioner for Refugees, naming the Norwegian explorer and
scientist Fridtjof
Nansen to the role. Nansen had plenty to do in the continuing aftermath of WWI,
including his longtime advocacy for Germany
becoming part of the League in order to allow for aid to its internally
displaced refugees (he finally achieved that goal in 1926). But his organization
and role really came to the fore in response to a pair of 1920s European
conflicts: the Greco-Turkish
War of 1919-22, which created hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees in particular;
and the Armenian Genocide,
which had been ongoing and worsening for nearly a decade and about the effects
of which Nansen wrote in his 1923 book Armenia
and the Near East and two follow-up
volumes. From what I can tell, this first international refugee
organization was in many ways a one-man show, but Nansen was clearly a good
choice for that role.
Nansen
passed away in 1930, and like the League of Nations itself his organization
became increasingly powerless across the subsequent decade. The Second World
War which concluded that decade created an even more global and dire refugee
crisis than the first one had, however, and not long after that war’s resolution
a new global refugee organization was thus created: the International
Refugee Organization (IRO), founded in April 1946 and gradually folded into
the operations of the new United Nations. But the IRO was immediately and
significantly hamstrung by two aspects of its
Constitution (which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1946):
it could only work in areas outside of the Soviet bloc and/or controlled by
Western armies of occupation; and it would not concern itself with “persons of German ethnic origin”
(which in practice meant both German war refugees and many Jewish refugees of
the Holocaust). The IRO’s two Directors-General, William
Hallam Tuck and J.
Donald Kingsley, did what they could within those parameters, but by 1952
the organization had ceased operations—and that was a year or so after it had
for all practical purposes been replaced by the UNHCR.
The UNHCR was
initially established with a December 1950 statue, the anniversary of which
this week’s blog series is commemorating, but it was with the July
1951 United Nations Geneva Convention, also known as the Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees, that the organization’s sweeping mandate was
truly defined. That Convention in turn built on an important prior UN document,
the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had recognized the right of
persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. Together, this pair
of UN actions made clear that this new international refugee organization wasn’t
going to depend on the efforts of heroic individuals, nor that its purview
would be in any way limited by geography or politics or time period. While the
UNHCR did focus much of its early efforts on European refugees, by the end of
the 1950s it had done significant work with Chinese
refugees in Hong Kong and Algerian
refugees from the revolution in that North African nation, among other
communities. And in 1967 the UN
Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees reaffirmed that this organization
could continue to evolve as world history did, could address “new refugee
situations that have arisen since the Convention was adopted and the refugees
concerned that may therefore not fall within the scope of the Convention.” For
75 years now, this vital global entity has done just that.
Next story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment