Kaldor Centre Director Daniel Ghezelbash says the Refugee Convention remains legally sound at its 75-year mark, but its future is under threat as States challenge its authority.
The greatest threat to the global refugee protection system is no longer quiet non-compliance, but governments’ emerging willingness to openly challenge the 1951 Refugee Convention itself, Kaldor Centre Director Daniel Ghezelbash told an audience at the University of Oslo’s Domus Bibliotheca on Monday.
In a keynote titled ‘The Refugee Convention at 75: Still Sound, Still Relevant, Sabotaged in Practice’, Professor Ghezelbash argued that the treaty remains a robust and adaptable cornerstone of international law, enabling millions of people to rebuild their lives in safety while delivering predictability for governments. Yet the Convention’s effectiveness has eroded over decades as States found ways to evade their obligations.
This was a threat to the Convention, but a largely covert one. There was a calculation that the public cared about being seen as good global citizens, even as they wanted asylum restricted. So, Ghezelbash said, ‘States sabotaged it in practice while professing fidelity to it in principle.’
But political defiance of the international protection framework was visibly hardening amid a new calculus.
‘Some politicians have concluded that a growing part of the public no longer values compliance with international law – and that there is now active political reward for attacking it openly.’
Now ‘strategic evasion’ is giving way to a more direct contest over the Convention’s legitimacy.
‘The argument has shifted — from “we comply” to “the treaty itself is the problem”.’
Ghezelbash called this shift ‘something more dangerous’.
It is also deeply ironic, he noted.
‘The failures now invoked to justify reform are not failures of the Convention. They are, in large part, the product of deliberate evasion: of States hollowing out protection in practice, then pointing to the resulting failures as evidence that the framework itself is broken and eroding public trust in the Convention itself.’
UNHCR’s latest Global Trends report records that more than 117 million people remain forced from their homes, including over 41 million refugees.
Ghezelbash described the forms of sabotage to the system designed to protect refugees – hyper-legalistic interpretations of their obligations, obfuscation that shields conduct from scrutiny and frustrates accountability, and a race to the bottom that fuels the spread of restrictive policies around the world.
‘And now those same states are citing the resulting failures as the justification for reforming or weakening the Convention,’ he said.
Ghezelbash urged the audience – a mix of members of the public and academics attending the international conference, The Refugee Convention at 75: Perspectives Within and Beyond – to reject that move.
‘Defending the Convention in this moment is not head-in-the-sand wishful thinking. It is an act of leadership these times demand,’ he said. ‘And it rests on a clear-eyed accounting of where the failures actually lie – not in the Convention, but in the choice of states not to implement it in good faith.’
To learn more, visit the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.