Refugees

Religion and Forced Migration

Religious nonconformity has always been the prime reason for persecution and exile. The premodern history of the Jewish Diaspora since the destruction of the Second Temple is archetypical for the plight of religious refugees. Expelled from England (1290) and Spain (1492), Jews were, next to heretics, a particularly vulnerable group in the “persecuting society” of medieval Christian Europe. What distinguishes modern religious persecution from its medieval predecessors is its intricate relationship with the sovereign power of territorial states. Emerging out of the European Wars of Religion, early-modern territorial states attempted to ensure confessional conformity among their populations. For instance, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced hundreds of thousands of Huguenots to flee France in what at the time was known as Le Grand Refuge. Throughout Europe, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Methodists, Quakers, and many other dissenting Protestant minorities were denied freedom of religion, and they emigrated to neighboring states or to the British colonies in North America. With the upswing of nationalism in the 19th century, religious nonconformity gave way to ethnic distinctiveness as a major motif of state persecution. However, as a marker of ethnic or national identity, religion continued to be a ground for persecution as shown by the massacres of Armenians during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and, of course, the genocide of Jews.

The varieties of religious, or ethnoreligious, persecution at first received only scant attention when in response to forced migrations after the two World Wars the international refugee protection regime was founded. The United Nations’ (UN) Geneva Convention (1951) had the rather circumscribed purpose of protecting and assisting refugees who had fled the Holocaust. The millions of Muslims and Hindus who had to cross borders between West Pakistan, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and India after the partition of the subcontinent as well as many other forced population movements resulting from postcolonial nation building in the South were included under the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) only in 1967 with the First Optional Protocol to the Geneva Convention. During the period of the Cold War, when socialist states widely pursued antireligious policies, there was little interpretative guidance as to when fear of persecution for reasons of religion was a well-founded ground to claim refugee status. In 2004, in light of rising global religious fundamentalism, the UNHCR adopted the “Guidelines on International Protection: Religion-Based Refugee Claims Under Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and/or Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” (HCR/CIP/04/06). Embracing a broad definition of religion that covers belief, identity, and ways of life, the “Guidelines” name restriction of religious freedom, discrimination, forced conversion, or forced compliance as major forms of religious persecution, either by states or by nonstate agents where states fail to provide effective protection. They also call on states to assist religious refugees and prevent religious persecution by respecting the human rights of minorities.

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