Refugee Policy

Defining a Refugee

Political, legal, social, historical, and geographical factors have an impact on the manner in which refugee policy implementation is approached, however. An appreciation of refugee policy can be best understood by tracing the historic, political, and social context underlying the development of the term refugee. The term can be traced as far back as the 1920s, when the League of Nations, a predecessor to the United Nations, appointed Fridtjot Nansen, a Norwegian, as High Commissioner for Refugees, with a limited mandate to manage assistance to displaced Russian people following World War I. Nansen campaigned and developed ideas that significantly contributed to the understanding of refugees by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and this subsequently led to the founding of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) after World War II. Political and historic situations encountered by a range of players in defining a refugee and addressing needs have shaped the development of refugee policy.

According to the UN 1951 Convention, a refugee is any person who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself to the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual resident as a result of such events and is unable, or owing to such fear, unwilling to return to it.” The provisions within the Refugee Convention stipulate the obligations of host states to the refugees under their protection.

In addition, under the provisions of the convention, refugees can exercise certain rights, including employment and freedom to travel freely. Perhaps most importantly, signatories to the convention commit to “non-refoulement clause” that works against sending refugees to countries where they would face persecution. This interpretation was rigorous enough to deal with specific problems faced by forced migrants from Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and also Europeans fleeing from the Eastern Communist Bloc in the cold war period.

In the aftermath of World War II, the immediate preoccupation of Western states was to address the needs of displaced persons from Europe, some of whom were [Page 563]subsequently resettled in Australia and Canada. However, there was another group of displaced persons after World War II who fled to the West due to ideological conflict between the West and Eastern Communist Bloc. On the significantly few occasions when persons from the Eastern Bloc defected, granting of their refugee status was, in some cases, meant to be a statement by the West regarding the supremacy of democratic values over communism. Thus, defectors from the Eastern Bloc provided the refugee hosts with a propaganda weapon against what was considered the “inferior,” undemocratic Communist Bloc. This perhaps explains reasons behind the suspicion that the Soviet Union and other countries with communist ideology had toward the UN Refugee Convention.

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