A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a
displaced person
Forced displacement (also forced migration) is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, g ...
who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution.
[FAQ: Who is a refugee?](_blank)
''www.unhcr.org'', accessed 22 June 2021 Such a person may be called an
asylum seeker
An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that other country. An asylum seeker is an immigrant who has been forcibly displaced and mi ...
until granted
refugee status
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. by the contracting state or the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integrati ...
(UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for
asylum
Asylum may refer to:
Types of asylum
* Asylum (antiquity), places of refuge in ancient Greece and Rome
* Benevolent Asylum, a 19th-century Australian institution for housing the destitute
* Cities of Refuge, places of refuge in ancient Judea
* ...
.
The lead international agency coordinating refugee protection is the United Nations Office of the UNHCR. The United Nations has a second office for refugees, the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 ...
(UNRWA), which is solely responsible for supporting the large majority of
Palestinian refugees
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–49 Palestine war (1948 Palestinian exodus) and the Six-Day War (1967 Palestinian exodu ...
.
Etymology and usage
Similar terms in other languages have described an event marking
migration
Migration, migratory, or migrate may refer to: Human migration
* Human migration, physical movement by humans from one region to another
** International migration, when peoples cross state boundaries and stay in the host state for some minimum le ...
of a specific population from a place of origin, such as the
biblical
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
account of
Israelites
The Israelites (; , , ) were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan.
The earliest recorded evidence of a people by the name of Israel appears in the Merneptah Stele o ...
fleeing from
Assyrian
Assyrian may refer to:
* Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia.
* Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire.
** Early Assyrian Period
** Old Assyrian Period
** Middle Assyrian Empire
** Neo-Assyrian Empire
* Assyrian ...
conquest (), or the
asylum
Asylum may refer to:
Types of asylum
* Asylum (antiquity), places of refuge in ancient Greece and Rome
* Benevolent Asylum, a 19th-century Australian institution for housing the destitute
* Cities of Refuge, places of refuge in ancient Judea
* ...
found by the prophet
Muhammad
Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 Common Era, CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Muhammad in Islam, Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet Divine inspiration, di ...
and his
emigrant companions with
helpers in
Yathrib
Medina,, ', "the radiant city"; or , ', (), "the city" officially Al Madinah Al Munawwarah (, , Turkish: Medine-i Münevvere) and also commonly simplified as Madīnah or Madinah (, ), is the Holiest sites in Islam, second-holiest city in Islam, ...
(later Medina) after they
fled
''Fled'' is a 1996 American buddy action comedy film directed by Kevin Hooks. It stars Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin as two prisoners chained together who flee during an escape attempt gone bad.
Plot
An interrogator prepares a man to ...
from persecution in
Mecca
Mecca (; officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, commonly shortened to Makkah ()) is a city and administrative center of the Mecca Province of Saudi Arabia, and the Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. It is inland from Jeddah on the Red ...
. In English, the term ''refugee'' derives from the root word ''refuge'', from
Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...
''refuge'', meaning "hiding place". It refers to "shelter or protection from danger or distress", from
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
''fugere'', "to flee", and ''refugium'', "a taking
frefuge, place to flee back to". In Western history, the term was first applied to French Protestant
Huguenots
The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a Religious denomination, religious group of French people, French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss politica ...
looking for a safe place against Catholic persecution after the
first Edict of Fontainebleau in 1540. The word appeared in the English language when French Huguenots fled to Britain in large numbers after the 1685
Edict of Fontainebleau
The Edict of Fontainebleau (22 October 1685) was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to practice their religion without s ...
(the revocation of the 1598
Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes () was signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was in essence completely Catholic. In the edict, Henry aimed pr ...
) in France and the 1687
Declaration of Indulgence
The Declaration of Indulgence, also called Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, was a pair of proclamations made by James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland in 1687. The Indulgence was first issued for Scotland on 12 February and t ...
in England and Scotland. The word meant "one seeking asylum", until around 1916, when it evolved to mean "one fleeing home", applied in this instance to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
.
Definitions
![Darfur refugee camp in Chad](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Darfur_refugee_camp_in_Chad.jpg)
The first modern definition of international refugee status came about under the
League of Nations
The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ...
in 1921 from the Commission for Refugees. Following
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, and in response to the large numbers of people fleeing Eastern Europe, the
UN 1951 Refugee Convention
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals ...
defined "refugee" (in Article 1.A.2) as any person who:
owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group Particular social group (PSG) is one of five categories that may be used to claim refugee status according to two key United Nations documents: the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Re ...
or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
In 1967, the definition was basically confirmed by the
UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees
The Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees is a key treaty in international refugee law. It entered into force on 4 October 1967, and 146 countries are parties.
The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees restric ...
.
The
expanded the 1951 definition, which the
Organization of African Unity
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU; french: Organisation de l'unité africaine, OUA) was an intergovernmental organization established on 25 May 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with 32 signatory governments. One of the main heads for OAU's ...
adopted in 1969:
Every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.
The 1984 regional, non-binding Latin-American
Cartagena Declaration on Refugees
The Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, or just Cartagena Declaration, is a non-binding regional, i.e. Latin-American, instrument for the protection of refugees and was adopted in 1984 by delegates from 10 Latin-American countries: Belize, Colombia ...
includes:
persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.
, the UNHCR itself, in addition to the 1951 definition, recognizes persons as refugees:
who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence and unable to return there owing to serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order.
European Union's minimum standards definition of refugee, underlined by Art. 2 (c) of Directive No. 2004/83/EC, essentially reproduces the narrow definition of refugee offered by the UN 1951 Convention; nevertheless, by virtue of articles 2 (e) and 15 of the same Directive, persons who have fled a war-caused generalized violence are, at certain conditions, eligible for a complementary form of protection, called
subsidiary protection Subsidiary protection is international protection for persons seeking asylum who do not qualify as refugees. In European law, Directive 2004/83/EC defines the minimum standards for qualifying for subsidiary protection status. The Directive was late ...
. The same form of protection is foreseen for displaced people who, without being refugees, are nevertheless exposed, if returned to their countries of origin, to death penalty, torture or other inhuman or degrading treatments.
Related terms
Refugee resettlement
Third country resettlement or refugee resettlement is, according to the UNHCR, one of three Refugee#Durable solutions, durable solutions (voluntary return, voluntary repatriation and local integration being the other two) for refugees who fled thei ...
is defined as "an organized process of selection, transfer and arrival of individuals to another country. This definition is restrictive, as it does not account for the increasing prevalence of unmanaged migration processes."
The term refugee relocation refers to "a non‐organized process of individual transfer to another country."
Refugee settlement refers to "the process of basic adjustment to life ‒ often in the early stages of transition to the new country ‒ including securing access to housing, education, healthcare, documentation and legal rights
ndemployment is sometimes included in this process, but the focus is generally on short‐term survival needs rather than long‐term career planning."
Refugee integration means "a dynamic, long‐term process in which a newcomer becomes a full and equal participant in the receiving society... Compared to the general construct of settlement, refugee integration has a greater focus on social, cultural and structural dimensions. This process includes the acquisition of legal rights, mastering the language and culture, reaching safety and stability, developing social connections and establishing the means and markers of integration, such as employment, housing and health."
Refugee workforce integration is understood to be "a process in which refugees engage in economic activities (employment or self‐employment) which are commensurate with individuals' professional goals and previous qualifications and experience, and provide adequate economic security and prospects for career advancement."
History
![Hercegovački begunci, Uroš Predić](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Hercegova%C4%8Dki_begunci%2C_Uro%C5%A1_Predi%C4%87.jpg)
The idea that a person who sought sanctuary in a holy place could not be harmed without inviting divine retribution was familiar to the
ancient Greeks
Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cultu ...
and
ancient Egyptians. However, the
right to seek asylum in a church or other holy place was first codified in law by King
Æthelberht of Kent
Æthelberht (; also Æthelbert, Aethelberht, Aethelbert or Ethelbert; ang, Æðelberht ; 550 – 24 February 616) was King of Kent from about 589 until his death. The eighth-century monk Bede, in his ''Ecclesiastical History of the Engli ...
in about AD 600. Similar laws were implemented throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
. The related concept of political
exile
Exile is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons and peoples suf ...
also has a long history:
Ovid
Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...
was sent to
Tomis;
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his ...
was sent to England. By the 1648
Peace of Westphalia
The Peace of Westphalia (german: Westfälischer Friede, ) is the collective name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. They ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and brought pea ...
, nations recognized each other's
sovereignty
Sovereignty is the defining authority within individual consciousness, social construct, or territory. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the perso ...
. However, it was not until the advent of
romantic nationalism
Romantic nationalism (also national romanticism, organic nationalism, identity nationalism) is the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes ...
in late 18th-century Europe that
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...
gained sufficient prevalence for the phrase ''country of nationality'' to become practically meaningful, and for border crossing to require that people provide identification.
![Armenian woman and her children from Geghi, 1899](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Armenian_woman_and_her_children_from_Geghi%2C_1899.jpg)
The term "refugee" sometimes applies to people who might fit the definition outlined by the 1951 Convention, were it applied retroactively. There are many candidates. For example, after the
Edict of Fontainebleau
The Edict of Fontainebleau (22 October 1685) was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to practice their religion without s ...
in 1685 outlawed
Protestantism
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
in France, hundreds of thousands of
Huguenot
The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Be ...
s fled to England, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...
, Germany and
Prussia
Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an em ...
. The repeated waves of
pogrom
A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russia ...
s that swept Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries prompted mass Jewish emigration (more than 2 million
Russian Jews
The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest pop ...
emigrated in the period 1881–1920). Beginning in the 19th century, Muslim people emigrated to Turkey from Europe. The
Balkan Wars
The Balkan Wars refers to a series of two conflicts that took place in the Balkan States in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, the four Balkan States of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defe ...
of 1912–1913 caused 800,000 people to leave their homes. Various groups of people were officially designated refugees beginning in World War I. However, when the First World War began, there were no rules in international law specifically dealing with the situation of refugees.
League of Nations
![Spanish War Children001](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Spanish_War_Children001.jpg)
The first international co-ordination of refugee affairs came with the creation by the
League of Nations
The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ...
in 1921 of the High Commission for Refugees and the appointment of
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen (; 10 October 186113 May 1930) was a Norwegian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gained prominence at various points in his life as an explorer, scientist, diplomat, and humanitarian. He led the team t ...
as its head. Nansen and the commission were charged with assisting the approximately 1,500,000 people who fled the
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire which began during the First World War. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government ...
and the subsequent
civil war
A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).
The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
(1917–1921), most of them aristocrats fleeing the Communist government. It is estimated that about 800,000 Russian refugees became stateless when
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...
revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921.
In 1923, the mandate of the commission was expanded to include the more than one million
Armenians
Armenians ( hy, հայեր, ''hayer'' ) are an ethnic group native to the Armenian highlands of Western Asia. Armenians constitute the main population of Armenia and the ''de facto'' independent Artsakh. There is a wide-ranging diaspora ...
who left
Turkish
Turkish may refer to:
*a Turkic language spoken by the Turks
* of or about Turkey
** Turkish language
*** Turkish alphabet
** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation
*** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey
*** Turkish communities and mi ...
Asia Minor
Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The re ...
in 1915 and 1923 due to a series of events now known as the
Armenian genocide
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was ...
. Over the next several years, the mandate was expanded further to cover
Assyrians and Turkish refugees. In all of these cases, a refugee was defined as a person in a group for which the League of Nations had approved a mandate, as opposed to a person to whom a general definition applied.
The 1923
population exchange between Greece and Turkey
The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey ( el, Ἡ Ἀνταλλαγή, I Antallagí, ota, مبادله, Mübâdele, tr, Mübadele) stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at ...
involved about two million people (around 1.5 million
Anatolian Greeks
The Anatolian Greeks, also known as Asiatic Greeks or Asia Minor Greeks, make up the ethnic Greek populations who lived in Anatolia from 1200s BCE as a result of Greek colonization until the forceful population exchange between Greece and Turkey ...
and 500,000 Muslims in Greece) most of whom were forcibly repatriated and denaturalized from homelands of centuries or millennia (and guaranteed the nationality of the destination country) by a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the
Treaty of Lausanne (1923)
The Treaty of Lausanne (french: Traité de Lausanne) was a peace treaty negotiated during the Lausanne Conference of 1922–23 and signed in the Palais de Rumine, Lausanne, Switzerland, on 24 July 1923. The treaty officially settled the conflic ...
.
The U.S. Congress passed the
Emergency Quota Act
__NOTOC__
The Emergency Quota Act, also known as the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, the Per Centum Law, and the Johnson Quota Act (ch. 8, of May 19, 1921), was formulated mainly in response to the larg ...
in 1921, followed by the
Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act (), was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern ...
. The Immigration Act of 1924 was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially
Jews
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
, Italians and
Slavs
Slavs are the largest European ethnolinguistic group. They speak the various Slavic languages, belonging to the larger Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout northern Eurasia, main ...
, who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. Most European refugees (principally Jews and Slavs) fleeing the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
and the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
were barred from going to the United States until after World War II.
In 1930, the
Nansen International Office for Refugees
The Nansen International Office for Refugees (''french: Office International Nansen pour les Réfugiés'') was an organization established in 1930 by the League of Nations and named after Fridtjof Nansen, soon after his death, which was internati ...
(Nansen Office) was established as a successor agency to the commission. Its most notable achievement was the
Nansen passport
Nansen passports, originally and officially stateless persons passports, were internationally recognized refugee travel documents from 1922 to 1938, first issued by the League of Nations's Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees to stateles ...
, a
refugee travel document
A refugee travel document (also called a 1951 Convention travel document or Geneva passport) is a travel document issued to a refugee by the state in which they normally reside in allowing them to travel outside that state and to return there. Re ...
, for which it was awarded the 1938
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments (military weapons and equipment) manufacturer Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Chemi ...
. The Nansen Office was plagued by problems of financing, an increase in refugee numbers, and a lack of co-operation from some member states, which led to mixed success overall.
However, the Nansen Office managed to lead fourteen nations to ratify the 1933 Refugee Convention, an early, and relatively modest, attempt at a
human rights
Human rights are Morality, moral principles or Social norm, normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for ce ...
charter, and in general assisted around one million refugees worldwide.
1933 (rise of Nazism) to 1944
![Czech refugees from the Sudetenland 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Czech_refugees_from_the_Sudetenland_1.gif)
The rise of
Nazism
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
led to such a very large increase in the number of refugees from Germany that in 1933 the League created a high commission for refugees coming from Germany. Besides other measures by the Nazis which created fear and flight, Jews were stripped of German citizenship by the
Reich Citizenship Law
The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of ...
of 1935. On 4 July 1936 an agreement was signed under League auspices that defined a refugee coming from Germany as "any person who was settled in that country, who does not possess any nationality other than German nationality, and in respect of whom it is established that in law or in fact he or she does not enjoy the protection of the Government of the Reich" (article 1).
The mandate of the High Commission was subsequently expanded to include persons from Austria and
Sudetenland
The Sudetenland ( , ; Czech and sk, Sudety) is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the ...
, which Germany annexed after 1 October 1938 in accordance with the
Munich Agreement
The Munich Agreement ( cs, Mnichovská dohoda; sk, Mníchovská dohoda; german: Münchner Abkommen) was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, Germany, the United Kingdom, French Third Republic, France, and Fa ...
. According to the Institute for Refugee Assistance, the actual count of refugees from
Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי,
, common_name = Czechoslovakia
, life_span = 1918–19391945–1992
, p1 = Austria-Hungary
, image_p1 ...
on 1 March 1939 stood at almost 150,000. Between 1933 and 1939, about 200,000 Jews fleeing Nazism were able to find refuge in France, while at least 55,000 Jews were able to find refuge in Palestine before the British authorities closed that destination in 1939.
![Bundesarchiv Bild 183-J19568, Bei Stalingrad, russische Flüchtlinge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J19568%2C_Bei_Stalingrad%2C_russische_Fl%C3%BCchtlinge.jpg)
On 31 December 1938, both the Nansen Office and High Commission were dissolved and replaced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees under the Protection of the League. This coincided with the flight of several hundred thousand Spanish Republicans to France after their defeat by the Nationalists in 1939 in the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
.
The conflict and political instability during World War II led to massive numbers of refugees (see
World War II evacuation and expulsion
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by ...
). In 1943, the
Allies
An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...
created the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was an international relief agency, largely dominated by the United States but representing 44 nations. Founded in November 1943, it was dissolved in September 1948. it became part o ...
(UNRRA) to provide aid to areas liberated from
Axis powers
The Axis powers, ; it, Potenze dell'Asse ; ja, 枢軸国 ''Sūjikukoku'', group=nb originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis, was a military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies. Its principal members were ...
, including parts of Europe and China. By the end of the War, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. UNRRA was involved in returning over seven million refugees, then commonly referred to as
displaced person
Forced displacement (also forced migration) is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, g ...
s or DPs, to their country of origin and setting up
displaced persons camp
A refugee camp is a temporary Human settlement, settlement built to receive refugees and people in refugee-like situations. Refugee camps usually accommodate displaced people who have fled their home country, but camps are also made for interna ...
s for one million refugees who refused to be repatriated. Even two years after the end of War, some 850,000 people still lived in DP camps across Western Europe. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Israel accepted more than 650,000 refugees by 1950. By 1953, over 250,000 refugees were still in Europe, most of them old, infirm, crippled, or otherwise disabled.
Post-World War II population transfers
After the Soviet armed forces captured eastern Poland from the Germans in 1944, the Soviets unilaterally declared a new frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland approximately at the
Curzon Line
The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. It was first proposed by George Curzon, 1st Marque ...
, despite the protestations from the Polish government-in-exile in London and the western Allies at the
Teheran Conference
The Tehran Conference (codenamed Eureka) was a strategy meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from 28 November to 1 December 1943, after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. It was held in the Soviet Union's embassy ...
and the
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...
of February 1945. After the
German surrender
The German Instrument of Surrender (german: Bedingungslose Kapitulation der Wehrmacht, lit=Unconditional Capitulation of the "Wehrmacht"; russian: Акт о капитуляции Германии, Akt o kapitulyatsii Germanii, lit=Act of capit ...
on 7 May 1945, the Allies occupied the remainder of Germany, and the
Berlin declaration of 5 June 1945 confirmed the unfortunate division of
Allied-occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France ...
according to the Yalta Conference, which stipulated the continued existence of the German Reich as a whole, which would include its
eastern territories as of 31 December 1937. This did not impact on Poland's eastern border, and Stalin refused to be removed from these
eastern Polish territories.
In the last months of World War II, about five million German civilians from the German provinces of
East Prussia
East Prussia ; german: Ostpreißen, label=Low Prussian; pl, Prusy Wschodnie; lt, Rytų Prūsija was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 187 ...
,
Pomerania
Pomerania ( pl, Pomorze; german: Pommern; Kashubian: ''Pòmòrskô''; sv, Pommern) is a historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, split between Poland and Germany. The western part of Pomerania belongs to ...
and
Silesia
Silesia (, also , ) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at around 8,000,000. Silesia is split ...
fled the advance of the Red Army from the east and became refugees in
Mecklenburg
Mecklenburg (; nds, label=Low German, Mękel(n)borg ) is a historical region in northern Germany comprising the western and larger part of the federal-state Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The largest cities of the region are Rostock, Schwerin ...
,
Brandenburg
Brandenburg (; nds, Brannenborg; dsb, Bramborska ) is a states of Germany, state in the northeast of Germany bordering the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony, as well as the country of Poland. With an ar ...
and
Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
. Since the spring of 1945, the Poles had been forcefully expelling the remaining German population in these provinces. When the Allies met in Potsdam on 17 July 1945 at the
Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference (german: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Pe ...
, a chaotic refugee situation faced the occupying powers. The
Potsdam Agreement
The Potsdam Agreement (german: Potsdamer Abkommen) was the agreement between three of the Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union on 1 August 1945. A product of the Potsdam Conference, it concerned th ...
, signed on 2 August 1945, defined the Polish western border as that of 1937, (Article VIII
Agreements of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conferenceplacing one fourth of Germany's territory under the
Provisional Polish administration. Article XII ordered that the remaining German populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary be transferred west in an "orderly and humane" manner
Agreements of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference(See
Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50)
Flight or flying is the process by which an object moves through a space without contacting any planetary surface, either within an atmosphere (i.e. air flight or aviation) or through the vacuum of outer space (i.e. spaceflight). This can be ...
.)
![Bundesarchiv Bild 175-S00-00326, Flüchtlinge aus Ostpreußen auf Pferdewagen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Bundesarchiv_Bild_175-S00-00326%2C_Fl%C3%BCchtlinge_aus_Ostpreu%C3%9Fen_auf_Pferdewagen.jpg)
Although not approved by Allies at Potsdam, hundreds of thousands of
ethnic German
, native_name_lang = de
, region1 =
, pop1 = 72,650,269
, region2 =
, pop2 = 534,000
, region3 =
, pop3 = 157,000
3,322,405
, region4 =
, pop4 = ...
s living in Yugoslavia and Romania were deported to slave labour in the Soviet Union, to
Allied-occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France ...
, and subsequently to the
German Democratic Republic
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
(
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
), Austria and the
Federal Republic of Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
(
West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
). This entailed the largest
population transfer
Population transfer or resettlement is a type of mass migration, often imposed by state policy or international authority and most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion but also due to economic development. Banishment or exile is a ...
in history. In all 15 million Germans were affected, and more than two million perished during the
expulsions of the German population. (See
Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950)
During later stages of World War II and post-war period from 1944 to 1950, Germans fled and were expelled to Germany, present-day Germany from Eastern Europe, which led to de-Germanization there. The idea to expel the Germans from the annexed ...
.) Between the end of War and the erection of the
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
in 1961, more than 563,700 refugees from East Germany traveled to West Germany for asylum from the
Soviet occupation
During World War II, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed several countries effectively handed over by Nazi Germany in the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. These included the eastern regions of Poland (incorporated into two different ...
.
During the same period, millions of former Russian citizens were
forcefully repatriated against their will into the USSR. On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...
, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR. The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets regardless of their wishes. When the war ended in May 1945, British and United States civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union millions of former residents of the USSR, including many persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship decades before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947.
![PikiWiki Israel 7794 Cyprus deportation camps](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/PikiWiki_Israel_7794_Cyprus_deportation_camps.jpg)
At the end of World War II, there were more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union in
Western Europe
Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context.
The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...
. About 3 million had been
forced laborers
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of ex ...
(
Ostarbeiter
:
' (, "Eastern worker") was a Nazi German designation for foreign slave workers gathered from occupied Central and Eastern Europe to perform forced labor in Germany during World War II. The Germans started deporting civilians at the beginning ...
s) in Germany and occupied territories. The Soviet
POWs
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of war ...
and the
Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of
SMERSH
SMERSH (russian: СМЕРШ) was an umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Josep ...
(Death to Spies). Of the 5.7 million
Soviet prisoners of war The following articles deal with Soviet prisoners of war.
*Camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland (1919–24)
*Soviet prisoners of war in Finland during World War II (1939–45)
*Nazi crimes against Soviet prisoners of war during World ...
captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. The survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see
Order No. 270 Order No. 270, issued on 16 August 1941, by Joseph Stalin during the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, ordered Red Army personnel to "fight to the last," virtually banned commanders from surrendering, and set out severe penalties for senior office ...
). Over 1.5 million surviving
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...
soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis were sent to the
Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
.
Poland and
Soviet Ukraine
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
conducted population exchanges following the imposition of a new Poland-Soviet border at the
Curzon Line
The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. It was first proposed by George Curzon, 1st Marque ...
in 1944. About 2,100,000
Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, who share a common history, culture, the Polish language and are identified with the country of Poland in Ce ...
were expelled west of the new border (see
Repatriation of Poles), while about 450,000
Ukrainians
Ukrainians ( uk, Українці, Ukraintsi, ) are an East Slavs, East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine. They are the seventh-largest nation in Europe. The native language of the Ukrainians is Ukrainian language, Ukrainian. The majority ...
were expelled to the east of the new border. The
population transfer to Soviet Ukraine occurred from September 1944 to May 1946 (see
Repatriation of Ukrainians). A further 200,000 Ukrainians left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily between 1944 and 1945.
According to the report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees (1995), 10 to 15 percent of 7.5 million Azerbaijani population were refugees or displaced people. Most of them were 228,840 refugee people of Azerbaijan who fled from Armenia in 1988 as a result of deportation policy of Armenia against ethnic Azerbaijanis.
The
International Refugee Organization
The International Refugee Organization (IRO) was an intergovernmental organization founded on 20 April 1946 to deal with the massive refugee problem created by World War II. A Preparatory Commission began operations fourteen months previously. ...
(IRO) was founded on 20 April 1946, and took over the functions of the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was an international relief agency, largely dominated by the United States but representing 44 nations. Founded in November 1943, it was dissolved in September 1948. it became part o ...
, which was shut down in 1947. While the handover was originally planned to take place at the beginning of 1947, it did not occur until July 1947. The International Refugee Organization was a temporary organization of the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
(UN), which itself had been founded in 1945, with a mandate to largely finish the UNRRA's work of repatriating or resettling European refugees. It was dissolved in 1952 after resettling about one million refugees. The definition of a refugee at this time was an individual with either a
Nansen passport
Nansen passports, originally and officially stateless persons passports, were internationally recognized refugee travel documents from 1922 to 1938, first issued by the League of Nations's Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees to stateles ...
or a "
certificate of identity
A certificate of identity, sometimes called an alien's passport, is a travel document issued by a country to non-citizens (also called aliens) residing within their borders who are stateless persons or otherwise unable to obtain a passport fro ...
" issued by the International Refugee Organization.
The Constitution of the International Refugee Organization, adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; french: link=no, Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the UN. Curr ...
on 15 December 1946, specified the agency's field of operations. Controversially, this defined "persons of German ethnic origin" who had been expelled, or were to be expelled from their countries of birth into the postwar Germany, as individuals who would "not be the concern of the Organization." This excluded from its purview a group that exceeded in number all the other European displaced persons put together. Also, because of disagreements between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, the IRO only worked in areas controlled by Western armies of occupation.
Refugee studies
With the occurrence of major instances of diaspora and
forced migration
Forced displacement (also forced migration) is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, g ...
, the study of their causes and implications has emerged as a legitimate interdisciplinary area of research, and began to rise by mid to late 20th century, after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Although significant contributions had been made before, the latter half of the 20th century saw the establishment of institutions dedicated to the study of refugees, such as the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem, which was closely followed by the founding of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integrati ...
. In particular, the 1981 volume of the ''International Migration Review'' defined refugee studies as "a comprehensive, historical, interdisciplinary and comparative perspective which focuses on the consistencies and patterns in the refugee experience." Following its publishing, the field saw a rapid increase in academic interest and scholarly inquiry, which has continued to the present. Most notably in 1988, the ''
Journal of Refugee Studies
The ''Journal of Refugee Studies'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research on forced migration. It was established in 1988 by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, with its first issue published that May ...
'' was established as the field's first major interdisciplinary journal.
The emergence of refugee studies as a distinct field of study has been criticized by scholars due to terminological difficulty. Since no universally accepted definition for the term "refugee" exists, the academic respectability of the policy-based definition, as outlined in the
1951 Refugee Convention
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals ...
, is disputed. Additionally, academics have critiqued the lack of a theoretical basis of refugee studies and dominance of policy-oriented research. In response, scholars have attempted to steer the field toward establishing a theoretical groundwork of refugee studies through "situating studies of particular refugee (and other forced migrant) groups in the theories of cognate areas (and major disciplines),
rovidingan opportunity to use the particular circumstances of refugee situations to illuminate these more general theories and thus participate in the development of social science, rather than leading refugee studies into an intellectual cul-de-sac."
Thus, the term ''refugee'' in the context of refugee studies can be referred to as "legal or descriptive rubric", encompassing socioeconomic backgrounds, personal histories, psychological analyses, and spiritualities.
UN Refugee Agencies
UNHCR
Headquartered in
Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
, Switzerland, the Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integrati ...
(UNHCR) was established on 14 December 1950. It protects and supports refugees at the request of a government or the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
and assists in providing durable solutions, such as
return
Return may refer to:
In business, economics, and finance
* Return on investment (ROI), the financial gain after an expense.
* Rate of return, the financial term for the profit or loss derived from an investment
* Tax return, a blank document or t ...
or
resettlement. All refugees in the world are under UNHCR mandate except
Palestinian refugees
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–49 Palestine war (1948 Palestinian exodus) and the Six-Day War (1967 Palestinian exodu ...
, who fled the current state of
Israel
Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
between 1947 and 1949, as a result of the
1948 Palestine War
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. It is known in Israel as the War of Independence ( he, מלחמת העצמאות, ''Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut'') and ...
. These refugees are assisted by the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 ...
(UNRWA). UNHCR also provides protection and assistance to other categories of displaced persons: asylum seekers, refugees who
returned home voluntarily but still need help rebuilding their lives, local civilian communities directly affected by large refugee movements,
stateless people and so-called
internally displaced people
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
A ...
(IDPs), as well as people in refugee-like and IDP-like situations. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and to resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to
seek asylum
An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that other country. An asylum seeker is an immigrant who has been forcibly displaced and mi ...
and find safe refuge in another state or territory and to offer "durable solutions" to refugees and refugee hosting countries.
UNRWA
Unlike other refugee groups, the UN created a specific entity called the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the aftermath of the Al-Nakba in 1948, which led to a serious refugee crisis in the Arab region responsible for the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian refugees. This number has gone up to at least 5 million refugees in the last 70 years.
The United Nations defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”
Descendants of this generation also fall under the status of Palestinian refugee. Another refugee wave started in 1967 after the Six-day-War, where mostly Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank were victims of displacement.
According to the United Nations, Palestinian refugees struggle with access to health care, food, clean water, sanitation, environmental health and infrastructure, education, and technology.
According to the report, food, shelter, and environmental health are a human's basic needs.
United Nations agency UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) focuses on addressing these issues to relieve Palestinians from any harm. UNWRA was established as a temporary agency that would carry out a humanitarian response mandate for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The responsibilities for the assistance for protection for Palestinian refugees and human development were originally left to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). This agency failed to function, which led the agency to stop working.
UNRWA took over these responsibilities and expanded their mandate from just humanitarian emergency relief to including human development and protection of the Palestinian society.
Communication with host countries where UNRWA is operating (Syria, Jordan and Lebanon) is very important as the agency's mandate changes per region.
UNRWA's Medium Term Strategy is a report that lists all the issues that the Palestinians are facing and UNRWA's plan to mitigate the severeness of the issues. The report shows that UNRWA focusses mostly on food assistance, health care, education and shelter for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA has succeeded in placing over 700 schools with over 500,000 students, 140 health centers, 113 women community centers, and has awarded over 475,000 loans.
UNRWA's funding relies mostly on voluntary donations. Fluctuations in these donations result in constraints in carrying out the mandate.
Acute and temporary protection
Refugee camp
![Refugee camp](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Refugee_camp.jpg)
A refugee camp is a place built by
government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
s or
NGOs
A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in h ...
(such as the
Red Cross
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...
) to receive refugees,
internally displaced person
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
A ...
s or sometimes also other migrants. It is usually designed to offer acute and temporary accommodation and services and any more permanent facilities and structures often banned. People may stay in these camps for many years, receiving emergency food, education and medical aid until it is safe enough to return to their country of origin. There, refugees are at risk of disease, child soldier and terrorist recruitment, and physical and sexual violence. There are estimated to be 700 refugee camp locations worldwide.
Urban refugee
Not all refugees who are supported by the UNHCR live in refugee camps. A significant number, actually more than half, live in urban settings, such as the ~60,000 Iraqi refugees in Damascus (Syria), and the ~30,000 Sudanese refugees in Cairo (Egypt).
Durable solutions
The residency status in the host country whilst under temporary UNHCR protection is very uncertain as refugees are only granted temporary visas that have to be regularly renewed. Rather than only safeguarding the rights and basic well-being of refugees in the camps or in urban settings on a temporary basis the UNHCR's ultimate goal is to find one of the three durable solutions for refugees: integration, repatriation, resettlement.
Integration and naturalisation
Local integration is aiming at providing the refugee with the permanent right to stay in the country of asylum, including, in some situations, as a naturalized citizen. It follows the formal granting of refugee status by the country of asylum. It is difficult to quantify the number of refugees who settled and integrated in their first country of asylum and only the number of naturalisations can give an indication. In 2014 Tanzania granted citizenship to 162,000 refugees from Burundi and in 1982 to 32,000 Rwandan refugees. Mexico naturalised 6,200 Guatemalan refugees in 2001.
Voluntary return
Voluntary return of refugees into their country of origin, in safety and dignity, is based on their free will and their informed decision. In the last couple of years parts of or even whole refugee populations were able to return to their home countries: e.g. 120,000 Congolese refugees returned from the Republic of Congo to the DRC, 30,000 Angolans returned home from the DRC and Botswana, Ivorian refugees returned from Liberia, Afghans from Pakistan, and Iraqis from Syria. In 2013, the governments of Kenya and Somalia also signed a tripartite agreement facilitating the repatriation of refugees from Somalia. The UNHCR and the IOM offer assistance to refugees who want to return voluntarily to their home countries. Many developed countries also have Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes for asylum seekers who want to go back or were
refused asylum.
Third country resettlement
Third country resettlement involves the assisted transfer of refugees from the country in which they have sought asylum to a
safe third country Safe third country is a country that is neither the home country of an asylum seeker
An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that ot ...
that has agreed to admit them as refugees. This can be for permanent settlement or limited to a certain number of years. It is the third durable solution and it can only be considered once the two other solutions have proved impossible. The UNHCR has traditionally seen resettlement as the least preferable of the "durable solutions" to refugee situations. However, in April 2000 the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees,
Sadako Ogata
, was a Japanese academic, diplomat, author, administrator, and professor emerita at the Roman Catholic Sophia University. She was widely known as the head of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from 1991 to ...
, stated "Resettlement can no longer be seen as the least-preferred durable solution; in many cases it is the ''only'' solution for refugees."
Internally displaced person
UNHCR's mandate has gradually been expanded to include protecting and providing humanitarian assistance to
internally displaced persons
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
...
(IDPs) and people in IDP-like situations. These are civilians who have been forced to flee their homes, but who have not reached a neighboring country. IDPs do not fit the legal definition of a refugee under the
1951 Refugee Convention
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals ...
,
1967 Protocol
The Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees is a key treaty in international refugee law. It entered into force on 4 October 1967, and 146 countries are parties.
The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees restri ...
and the
1969 Organization for African Unity Convention, because they have not left their country. As the nature of war has changed in the last few decades, with more and more internal conflicts replacing interstate wars, the number of IDPs has increased significantly.
Refugee status
In the United States, the term refugee is defined under the
Immigration of Nationality Act (INA). In other countries, it is often used in different contexts: in everyday usage it refers to a forcibly displaced person who has fled his or her country of origin; in a more specific context it refers to such a person who was, on top of that, granted refugee status in the country the person fled to. Even more exclusive is the Convention refugee status which is given only to persons who fall within the
refugee definition of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol.
To receive refugee status, a person must have applied for asylum, making them—while waiting for a decision—an asylum seeker. However, a displaced person otherwise legally entitled to refugee status may never apply for asylum, or may not be allowed to apply in the country they fled to and thus may not have official asylum seeker status.
Once a displaced person is granted refugee status they enjoy certain
rights
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical the ...
as agreed in the 1951 Refugee convention. Not all countries have signed and ratified this convention and some countries do not have a legal procedure for dealing with asylum seekers.
Seeking asylum
![Refugees from Vietnam landing in Hamburg, Germany 1986](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Refugees_from_Vietnam_landing_in_Hamburg%2C_Germany_1986.jpg)
An asylum seeker is a displaced person or immigrant who has formally sought the protection of the state they fled to as well as the right to remain in this country and who is waiting for a decision on this formal application. An asylum seeker may have applied for Convention refugee status or for
complementary forms of protection. Asylum is thus a category that includes different forms of protection. Which form of protection is offered depends on the
legal definition that best describes the asylum seeker's reasons to flee. Once the decision was made the asylum seeker receives either Convention refugee status or a complementary form of protection, and can stay in the country—or is refused asylum, and then often has to leave. Only after the state, territory or the UNHCR—wherever the application was made—recognises the protection needs does the asylum seeker ''officially'' receive refugee status. This carries certain rights and obligations, according to the legislation of the receiving country.
Quota refugee
Quota may refer to:
Economics
* Import quota, a trade restriction on the quantity of goods imported into a country
* Market Sharing Quota, an economic system used in Canadian agriculture
* Milk quota, a quota on milk production in Europe
* Indi ...
s do not need to apply for asylum on arrival in the third countries as they already went through the UNHCR refugee status determination process whilst being in the first country of asylum and this is usually accepted by the third countries.
Refugee status determination
To receive refugee status, a displaced person must go through a Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process, which is conducted by the government of the country of asylum or the UNHCR, and is based on
international, regional or national law. RSD can be done on a case-by-case basis as well as for whole groups of people. Which of the
two processes is used often depends on the size of the influx of displaced persons.
![Schnorr von Carolsfeld Bibel in Bildern 1860 117](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_117.png)
There is no specific method mandated for RSD (apart from the commitment to the
1951 Refugee Convention
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals ...
) and it is subject to the overall efficacy of the country's internal administrative and judicial system as well as the characteristics of the refugee flow to which the country responds. This lack of a procedural direction could create a situation where political and strategic interests override humanitarian considerations in the RSD process. There are also no fixed interpretations of the elements in the
1951 Refugee Convention
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individuals ...
and countries may interpret them differently (see also
refugee roulette
Refugee roulette refers to arbitrariness in the process of refugee status determinations or, as it is called in the United States, asylum adjudication. Recent research suggests that at least in the United States and Canada, the outcome of asylum d ...
).
However, in 2013, the UNHCR conducted them in more than 50 countries and co-conducted them parallel to or jointly with governments in another 20 countries, which made it the second largest RSD body in the world The UNHCR follows a set of guidelines described in the ''Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status'' to determine which individuals are eligible for refugee status.
Refugee rights
Refugee rights encompass both customary law,
peremptory norm
A peremptory norm (also called or ' ; Latin for "compelling law") is a fundamental principle of international law that is accepted by the international community of states as a norm from which no derogation is permitted.
There is no universal a ...
s, and international legal instruments. If the entity granting refugee status is a state that has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention then the refugee has the
right to employment. Further rights include the following rights and obligations for refugees:
Right of return
![Awara US-Peshmerga](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Awara_US-Peshmerga.jpg)
Even in a supposedly "post-conflict" environment, it is not a simple process for refugees to return home.
[Sara Pantuliano (2009]
Uncharted Territory: Land, Conflict and Humanitarian Action
Overseas Development Institute
ODI (formerly the 'Overseas Development Institute') is a global affairs think tank, founded in 1960. Its mission is "to inspire people to act on injustice and inequality through collaborative research and ideas that matter for people and the p ...
The UN Pinheiro Principles are guided by the idea that people not only have the right to return home, but also the right to the same property.
It seeks to return to the pre-conflict status quo and ensure that no one profits from violence. Yet this is a very complex issue and every situation is different; conflict is a highly transformative force and the pre-war status-quo can never be reestablished completely, even if that were desirable (it may have caused the conflict in the first place).
Therefore, the following are of particular importance to the right to return:
* May never have had property (e.g., in Afghanistan)
* Cannot access what property they have (Colombia, Guatemala, South Africa and Sudan)
* Ownership is unclear as families have expanded or split and division of the land becomes an issue
* Death of owner may leave dependents without clear claim to the land
* People settled on the land know it is not theirs but have nowhere else to go (as in Colombia, Rwanda and Timor-Leste)
* Have competing claims with others, including the state and its foreign or local business partners (as in Aceh, Angola, Colombia, Liberia and Sudan).
Refugees who were
resettled to a third country will likely lose the indefinite leave to remain in this country if they return to their country of origin or the country of first asylum.
Right to non-refoulement
Non-refoulement is the right not to be returned to a place of persecution and is the foundation for international refugee law, as outlined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The right to non-refoulement is distinct from the right to asylum. To respect the right to asylum, states must not deport genuine refugees. In contrast, the right to non-refoulement allows states to transfer genuine refugees to third party countries with respectable human rights records. The portable procedural model, proposed by political philosopher Andy Lamey, emphasizes the right to non-refoulement by guaranteeing refugees three procedural rights (to a verbal hearing, to legal counsel, and to judicial review of detention decisions) and ensuring those rights in the constitution. This proposal attempts to strike a balance between the interest of national governments and the interests of refugees.
Right to family reunification
Family reunification (which can also be a form of resettlement) is a recognized reason for immigration in many countries.
Divided families have the right to be reunited if a family member with permanent right of residency applies for the reunification and can prove the people on the application were a family unit before arrival and wish to live as a family unit since separation. If application is successful this enables the rest of the family to immigrate to that country as well.
Right to travel
Those states that signed the
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and sets out the rights of individual ...
are obliged to issue travel documents (i.e. "Convention Travel Document") to refugees lawfully residing in their territory. It is a valid travel document in place of a passport, however, it cannot be used to travel to the country of origin, i.e. from where the refugee fled.
Restriction of onward movement
Once refugees or asylum seekers have found a safe place and protection of a state or territory outside their territory of origin they are discouraged from leaving again and seeking protection in another country. If they do move onward into a second country of asylum this movement is also called ''"irregular movement"'' by the UNHCR (see also
asylum shopping
Asylum shopping is a pejorative term for the practice by some asylum seekers of applying for asylum in several states or seeking to apply in a particular state after traveling through other states. The phrase is derogatory, suggesting that asylum s ...
). UNHCR support in the second country may be less than in the first country and they can even be returned to the first country.
World Refugee Day
World Refugee Day
World Refugee Day is an international day organised every year on 20 June by the United Nations. It is designed to celebrate and honour refugees from around the world. The day was first established on 20 June 2001, in recognition of the 50th anni ...
has occurred annually on 20 June since 2000 by a special United Nations General Assembly Resolution. 20 June had previously been commemorated as "African Refugee Day" in a number of African countries.
In the United Kingdom World Refugee Day is celebrated as part of
Refugee Week
Refugee Week takes place on the 20th of June each year. It is regularly used as a platform for holding hundreds of arts, cultural and educational events.
Refugee Week events are often intended to celebrate the contribution of refugees to the Unit ...
. Refugee Week is a nationwide festival designed to promote understanding and to celebrate the cultural contributions of refugees, and features many events such as music, dance and theatre.
In the
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees is celebrated in January each year, since instituted in 1914 by Pope
Pius X
Pope Pius X ( it, Pio X; born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto; 2 June 1835 – 20 August 1914) was head of the Catholic Church from 4 August 1903 to his death in August 1914. Pius X is known for vigorously opposing modernist interpretations of C ...
.
Issues
Protracted displacement
Displacement is a long lasting reality for most refugees. Two-thirds of all refugees around the world have been displaced for over three years, which is known as being in 'protracted displacement'. 50% of refugees—around 10 million people—have been displaced for over ten years.
Protracted displacement can lead to detrimental effects on
refugee employment Refugee employment refers to the employment of refugees. Gaining access to legal paid work can be a requirement for asylum status or citizenship in a host country and may be done with or without the assistance of non-governmental organizations. In ...
and
refugee workforce integration
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. , exacerbating the effect of the
canvas ceiling Refugee employment refers to the employment of refugees. Gaining access to Employment, legal paid work can be a requirement for asylum status or citizenship in a host country and may be done with or without the assistance of non-governmental organiz ...
.
Protracted displacement leads to skills to atrophy, leading qualifications and experiences to be outdated and incompatible to the changing working environments of receiving countries by the time refugees resettle.
The
Overseas Development Institute
ODI (formerly the 'Overseas Development Institute') is a global affairs think tank, founded in 1960. Its mission is "to inspire people to act on injustice and inequality through collaborative research and ideas that matter for people and the p ...
has found that aid programmes need to move from short-term models of assistance (such as food or cash handouts) to more sustainable long-term programmes that help refugees become more self-reliant. This can involve tackling difficult legal and economic environments, by improving social services, job opportunities and laws.
Medical problems
Refugees typically report poorer levels of health, compared to other immigrants and the non-immigrant population.
PTSD
Apart from physical wounds or starvation, a large percentage of refugees develop symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental and behavioral disorder that can develop because of exposure to a traumatic event, such as sexual assault, warfare, traffic collisions, child abuse, domestic violence, or other threats on ...
(PTSD), and show post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) or
depression.
These long-term mental problems can severely impede the functionality of the person in everyday situations; it makes matters even worse for displaced persons who are confronted with a new environment and challenging situations.
They are also at high risk for
suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders), physical disorders (such as chronic fatigue syndrome), and s ...
.
Among other symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder involves
anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat wh ...
, over-alertness, sleeplessness,
chronic fatigue syndrome
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or ME/CFS, is a complex, debilitating, long-term medical condition. The causes and mechanisms of the disease are not fully understood. Distinguishing core symptoms are ...
, motor difficulties, failing
short term memory
Short-term memory (or "primary" or "active memory") is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in an active, readily available state for a short interval. For example, short-term memory holds a phone number that has just been recit ...
,
amnesia
Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage or disease,Gazzaniga, M., Ivry, R., & Mangun, G. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: The biology of the mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. but it can also be caused temporarily by the use ...
, nightmares and sleep-paralysis. Flashbacks are characteristic to the disorder: the patient experiences the
traumatic event, or pieces of it, again and again. Depression is also characteristic for PTSD-patients and may also occur without accompanying PTSD.
PTSD was diagnosed in 34.1% of
Palestinian
Palestinians ( ar, الفلسطينيون, ; he, פָלַסְטִינִים, ) or Palestinian people ( ar, الشعب الفلسطيني, label=none, ), also referred to as Palestinian Arabs ( ar, الفلسطينيين العرب, label=non ...
children, most of whom were refugees,
male
Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.
A male organism cannot reproduce sexually without access to ...
s, and working. The participants were 1,000 children aged 12 to 16 years from governmental, private, and United Nations Relief Work Agency
UNRWA
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 P ...
schools in East Jerusalem and various governorates in the West Bank.
Another study showed that 28.3% of
Bosnian refugee women had symptoms of PTSD three or four years after their arrival in Sweden. These women also had significantly higher
risk
In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value (such as health, well-being, wealth, property or the environme ...
s of symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress than Swedish-born women. For depression the odds ratio was 9.50 among Bosnian women.
A study by the Department of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
School of Medicine demonstrated that twenty percent of Sudanese refugee minors living in the United States had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. They were also more likely to have worse scores on all the Child Health Questionnaire subscales.
In a study for the United Kingdom, refugees were found to be 4 percentage points more likely to report a mental health problem compared to the non-immigrant population. This contrasts with the results for other immigrant groups, which were less likely to report a mental health problem compared to the non-immigrant population.
Many more studies illustrate the problem. One
meta-study
A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting me ...
was conducted by the psychiatry department of
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
at Warneford Hospital in the United Kingdom. Twenty
surveys were analyzed, providing results for 6,743 adult refugees from seven countries. In the larger studies, 9% were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and 5% with major depression, with evidence of much psychiatric co-morbidity. Five surveys of 260 refugee children from three countries yielded a
prevalence
In epidemiology, prevalence is the proportion of a particular population found to be affected by a medical condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seatbelt use) at a specific time. It is derived by comparing the number o ...
of 11% for post-traumatic stress disorder. According to this study, refugees resettled in Western countries could be about ten times more likely to have PTSD than age-matched general populations in those countries. Worldwide, tens of thousands of refugees and former refugees resettled in Western countries probably have post-traumatic stress disorder.
Malaria
Refugees are often more susceptible to illness for several reasons, including a lack of immunity to local strains of
malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. Malaria causes symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma, or death. S ...
and other diseases. Displacement of a people can create favorable conditions for disease transmission. Refugee camps are typically heavily populated with poor sanitary conditions. The removal of vegetation for space, building materials or firewood also deprives mosquitoes of their natural habitats, leading them to more closely interact with humans. In the 1970s, Afghanese refugees that were relocated to Pakistan were going from a country with an effective malaria control strategy, to a country with a less effective system.
The refugee camps were built near rivers or irrigation sites had higher malaria prevalence than refugee camps built on dry lands.
The location of the camps lent themselves to better breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and thus a higher likelihood of malaria transmission. Children aged 1–15 were the most susceptible to malaria infection, which is a significant cause of mortality in children younger than 5. Malaria was the cause of 16% of the deaths in refugee children younger than 5 years of age. Malaria is one of the most commonly reported causes of death in refugees and displaced persons. Since 2014, reports of malaria cases in Germany had doubled compared to previous years, with the majority of cases found in refugees from Eritrea.
The World Health Organization recommends that all people in areas that are endemic for malaria use long-lasting insecticide nets. A cohort study found that within refugee camps in Pakistan, insecticide treated bed nets were very useful in reducing malaria cases. A single treatment of the nets with the insecticide
permethrin
Permethrin is a medication and an insecticide. As a medication, it is used to treat scabies and lice. It is applied to the skin as a cream or lotion. As an insecticide, it can be sprayed onto clothing or mosquito nets to kill the insects that t ...
remained protective throughout the 6 month transmission season.
Access to healthcare services
Access to services depends on many factors, including whether a refugee has received official status, is situated within a refugee camp, or is in the process of third country resettlement. The UNHCR recommends integrating access to primary care and emergency health services with the host country in as equitable a manner as possible.
Prioritized services include areas of maternal and child health, immunizations, tuberculosis screening and treatment, and
HIV/AIDS-related services.
Despite inclusive stated policies for refugee access to health care on the international levels, potential barriers to that access include language, cultural preferences, high financial costs, administrative hurdles, and physical distance.
Specific barriers and policies related to health service access also emerge based on the host country context. For example,
primaquine
Primaquine is a medication used to treat and prevent malaria and to treat ''Pneumocystis'' pneumonia. Specifically it is used for malaria due to ''Plasmodium vivax'' and ''Plasmodium ovale'' along with other medications and for prevention if othe ...
, an often recommended malaria treatment is not currently licensed for use in Germany and must be ordered from outside the country.
In Canada, barriers to healthcare access include the lack of adequately trained physicians, complex medical conditions of some refugees and the bureaucracy of medical coverage.
There are also individual barriers to access such as language and transportation barriers, institutional barriers such as bureaucratic burdens and lack of entitlement knowledge, and systems level barriers such as conflicting policies, racism and physician workforce shortage.
In the US, all officially designated
Iraqi refugees
Refugees of Iraq are Iraqi nationals who have fled Iraq due to war or persecution. Throughout the past 30 years, there have been a growing number of refugees fleeing Iraq and settling throughout the world, peaking recently with the latest Iraq ...
had health insurance coverage compared to a little more than half of non-Iraqi immigrants in a Dearborn, Michigan, study.
However, greater barriers existed around transportation, language and successful stress coping mechanisms for refugees versus other immigrants,
in addition, refugees noted greater medical conditions.
The study also found that refugees had higher healthcare utilization rate (92.1%) as compared to the US overall population (84.8%) and immigrants (58.6%) in the study population.
Within Australia, officially designated refugees who qualify for temporary protection and offshore humanitarian refugees are eligible for health assessments, interventions and access to health insurance schemes and trauma-related counseling services.
Despite being eligible to access services, barriers include economic constraints around perceived and actual costs carried by refugees.
In addition, refugees must cope with a healthcare workforce unaware of the unique health needs of refugee populations.
Perceived legal barriers such as fear that disclosing medical conditions prohibiting reunification of family members and current policies which reduce assistance programs may also limit access to health care services.
Providing access to healthcare for refugees through integration into the current health systems of host countries may also be difficult when operating in a resource limited setting. In this context, barriers to healthcare access may include political aversion in the host country and already strained capacity of the existing health system.
Political aversion to refugee access into the existing health system may stem from the wider issue of refugee resettlement.
One approach to limiting such barriers is to move from a parallel administrative system in which UNHCR refugees may receive better healthcare than host nationals but is unsustainable financially and politically to that of an integrated care where refugee and host nationals receive equal and more improved care all around.
In the 1980s, Pakistan attempted to address
Afghan refugee
Afghan refugees are citizens of Afghanistan who were compelled to abandon their country as a result of major wars, persecution, torture or genocide. The 1978 Saur Revolution followed by the 1979 Soviet invasion marked the first wave of inter ...
healthcare access through the creation of Basic Health Units inside the camps. Funding cuts closed many of these programs, forcing refugees to seek healthcare from the local government. In response to a protracted refugee situation in the West Nile district, Ugandan officials with UNHCR created an integrative healthcare model for the mostly
Sudanese refugee population and Ugandan citizens. Local nationals now access health care in facilities initially created for refugees.
One potential argument for limiting refugee access to healthcare is associated with costs with states desire to decrease health expenditure burdens. However, Germany found that restricting refugee access led to an increase actual expenditures relative to refugees which had full access to healthcare services.
The legal restrictions on access to health care and the administrative barriers in Germany have been criticized since the 1990s for leading to delayed care, for increasing direct costs and administrative costs of health care, and for shifting the responsibility for care from the less expensive primary care sector to costly treatments for acute conditions in the secondary and tertiary sector.
Exploitation
Refugee populations consist of people who are terrified and are away from familiar surroundings. There can be instances of exploitation at the hands of enforcement officials, citizens of the host country, and even United Nations peacekeepers. Instances of human rights violations, child labor, mental and physical trauma/torture, violence-related trauma, and
sexual exploitation
Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is an attachment of any ownership right over one or more people with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in sexual activities. This includes forced labor, reducing a person to a s ...
, especially of children, have been documented. In many refugee camps in three war-torn West African countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, young girls were found to be exchanging sex for money, a handful of fruit, or even a bar of soap. Most of these girls were between 13 and 18 years of age. In most cases, if the girls had been forced to stay, they would have been forced into marriage. They became pregnant around the age of 15 on average. This happened as recently as in 2001. Parents tended to turn a blind eye because sexual exploitation had become a "mechanism of survival" in these camps.
Large groups of displaced persons could be abused as
"weapons" to threaten political enemies or neighbouring countries. It is for this reason amongst others that the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goal 10
Sustainable Development Goal 10 (Goal 10 or SDG 10) is about reduced inequality and is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations in 2015. The full title is: "Reduce inequality within and among countries".Unite ...
aims to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible mobility of people through planned and well-managed migration policies.
In a November 2022 report, the
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
accused Egypt’s law enforcement authorities of neglecting the female refugees and asylum seekers taking shelter in the African country, by failing to investigate their rape and sexual assault allegations made against the men of the country. According to the report, 11 incidents of sexual violence had been documented to have been committed in Egypt between the years 2016 and 2022. The sexual violence had been committed against seven women refugees of Sudanese and Yemeni descent and asylum seekers, which included one child. All of the women, including a transgender woman, complained of the country’s men raping them while four of them claimed assaults in more than two incidents. Whereas, the mother of the child assaulted sexually claimed that her 11 year-old daughter had been raped by a man. According to their collective statements of three women, the police in Egypt refused filing an incident report, while the remaining three claimed of being coerced into not filing a report, whereas, one of the women alleged she was sexually harassed on trying to report a rape.
Crime
Little empirical evidence supports concerns that refugees commit crimes at higher rates than natives, and some evidence suggests they may even commit crime at lower rates than natives. Very rarely, refugees have been used and recruited as refugee
militant
The English word ''militant'' is both an adjective and a noun, and it is generally used to mean vigorously active, combative and/or aggressive, especially in support of a cause, as in "militant reformers". It comes from the 15th century Latin " ...
s or
terrorist
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...
s, and the humanitarian aid directed at refugee relief has very rarely been utilized to fund the acquisition of arms. Although conclusions from case studies of refugee mobilizations raised concerns that humanitarian aid may support rebel groups, more recent empirical evidence does not support the generalizability of these concerns. Support from a refugee-receiving state has rarely been used to enable refugees to mobilize militarily, enabling conflict to spread across borders.
Historically, refugee populations have often been portrayed as a security threat. In the U.S and Europe, there has been much focus on the narrative that terrorists maintain networks amongst transnational, refugee, and migrant populations. This fear has been exaggerated into a modern-day Islamist terrorism Trojan Horse in which terrorists hide among refugees and penetrate host countries.
'Muslim-refugee-as-an-enemy-within' rhetoric is relatively new, but the underlying
scapegoating
Scapegoating is the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. Scapegoating may be conducted by individuals against individuals (e.g. "he did it, not me!"), individuals against groups (e.g., ...
of out-groups for domestic societal problems, fears and ethno-nationalist sentiment is not new. In the 1890s, the influx of Eastern European Jewish refugees to London coupled with the rise of anarchism in the city led to a confluence of threat-perception and fear of the refugee out-group. Populist rhetoric then too propelled debate over migration control and protecting national security.
Cross-national empirical verification, or rejection, of populist suspicion and fear of refugees' threat to national security and terror-related activities is relatively scarce. Case studies suggest that the threat of an Islamist refugee Trojan House is highly exaggerated. Of the 800,000 refugees vetted through the resettlement program in the United States between 2001 and 2016, only five were subsequently arrested on terrorism charges; and 17 of the 600,000 Iraqis and Syrians who arrived in Germany in 2015 were investigated for terrorism.
One study found that European jihadists tend to be 'homegrown': over 90% were residents of a European country and 60% had European citizenship.
While the statistics do not support the rhetoric, a PEW Research Center survey of ten European countries (Hungary, Poland, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Greece, UK, France, and Spain) released on 11 July 2016, finds that the majority (ranges from 52% to 76%) of respondents in eight countries (Hungary, Poland, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Greece, and UK) think refugees increase the likelihood of terrorism in their country.
[Wike, Richard, Bruce Stokes, and Katie Simmons. "Europeans fear wave of refugees will mean more terrorism, fewer jobs." ''Pew Research Center'' 11 (2016).] Since 1975, in the U.S., the risk of dying in a terror attack by a refugee is 1 in 3.6 billion per year; whereas, the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash are 1 in 113, by state sanctioned execution 1 in 111,439, or by dog attack 1 in 114,622.
In Europe, fear of immigration, Islamification and job and welfare benefits competition has fueled an increase in violence. Immigrants are perceived as a threat to ethno-nationalist identity and increase concerns over criminality and insecurity.
In the PEW survey previously referenced, 50% of respondents believe that refugees are a burden due to job and social benefit competition.
When Sweden received over 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015, it was accompanied by 50 attacks against asylum-seekers, which was more than four times the number of attacks that occurred in the previous four years.
At the incident level, the 2011 Utøya Norway terror attack by Breivik demonstrates the impact of this threat perception on a country's risk from domestic terrorism, in particular ethno-nationalist extremism. Breivik portrayed himself as a protector of Norwegian ethnic identity and national security fighting against immigrant criminality, competition and welfare abuse and an Islamic takeover.
Contrary to popular concerns that refugees cause crime, a more empirically grounded concern is that refugees are at high risk of being targets of anti-refugee violence. According to a 2018 study in the ''Journal of Peace Research'', states often resort to anti-refugee violence in response to terrorist attacks or security crises. The study notes that there is evidence to suggest that "the repression of refugees is more consistent with a scapegoating mechanism than the actual ties and involvement of refugees in terrorism."
In 2018, US president Donald Trump made some comments about refugees and immigrants in Sweden; he stated that the high numbers of crimes are because of refugees and immigrants.
Representation
The category of "refugee" tends to have a universalizing effect on those classified as such. It draws upon the common humanity of a mass of people in order to inspire public empathy, but doing so can have the unintended consequence of silencing refugee stories and erasing the political and historical factors that led to their present state.
Humanitarian groups and media outlets often rely on images of refugees that evoke emotional responses and are said to speak for themselves. The refugees in these images, however, are not asked to elaborate on their experiences, and thus, their narratives are all but erased. From the perspective of the international community, "refugee" is a performative status equated with injury, ill health, and poverty. When people no longer display these traits, they are no longer seen as ideal refugees, even if they still fit the legal definition. For this reason, there is a need to improve current humanitarian efforts by acknowledging the "narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory" of refugees alongside their shared humanity. Dehistorizing and depoliticizing refugees can have dire consequences. Rwandan refugees in Tanzanian camps, for example, were pressured to return to their home country before they believed it was truly safe to do so. Despite the fact that refugees, drawing on their political history and experiences, claimed that Tutsi forces still posed a threat to them in Rwanda, their narrative was overshadowed by the U.N. assurances of safety. When the refugees did return home, reports of reprisals against them, land seizures, disappearances, and incarceration abounded, as they had feared.
Employment
Integrating refugees into the workforce is one of the most important steps to overall integration of this particular migrant group. Many refugees are unemployed, under-employed, under-paid and work in the informal economy, if not receiving public assistance. Refugees encounter many barriers in receiving countries in finding and sustaining employment commensurate with their experience and expertise. A systemic barrier that is situated across multiple levels (i.e. institutional, organizational and individual levels) is coined "
canvas ceiling Refugee employment refers to the employment of refugees. Gaining access to Employment, legal paid work can be a requirement for asylum status or citizenship in a host country and may be done with or without the assistance of non-governmental organiz ...
".
Education
Refugee children
Nearly half of all refugees are children, and almost one in three children living outside their country of birth is a refugee.Emily Garin, Jan Beise, Lucia Hug, and Danzhen You. 2016. “Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Childr ...
come from many different backgrounds, and their reasons for resettlement are even more diverse. The number of refugee children has continued to increase as conflicts interrupt communities at a global scale. In 2014 alone, there were approximately 32
armed conflicts
War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular ...
in 26 countries around the world, and this period saw the highest number of refugees ever recorded
[Dryden-Peterson, S. (2015). The Educational Experiences of Refugee Children in Countries of First Asylum (Rep.). Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.] Refugee children experience traumatic events in their lives that can affect their learning capabilities, even after they have resettled in first or second settlement countries. Educators such as teachers, counselors, and school staff, along with the school environment, are key in facilitating
socialization
In sociology, socialization or socialisation (see spelling differences) is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultur ...
and
acculturation
Acculturation is a process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Acculturation is a process in which an individual adopts, acquires and ...
of recently arrived refugee and
immigrant
Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...
children in their new schools.
Obstacles
The experiences children go through during times of armed conflict can impede their ability to learn in an educational setting. Schools experience drop-outs of refugee and
immigrant
Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...
students from an array of factors such as: rejection by peers, low self-esteem, antisocial behavior, negative perceptions of their academic ability, and lack of support from school staff and parents.
Because refugees come from various regions globally with their own cultural, religious, linguistic, and home practices, the new school culture can conflict with the home culture, causing tension between the student and their family.
Aside from students, teachers and school staff also face their own obstacles in working with refugee students. They have concerns about their ability to meet the mental, physical, emotional, and educational needs of students. One study of newly arrived
Bantu
Bantu may refer to:
*Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages
*Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language
* Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle
*Black Association for National ...
students from Somalia in a Chicago school questioned whether schools were equipped to provide them with a quality education that met the needs of the pupils. The students were not aware of how to use pencils, which caused them to break the tips requiring frequent sharpening. Teachers may even see refugee students as different from other immigrant groups, as was the case with the Bantu pupils. Teachers may sometimes feel that their work is made harder because of the pressures to meet
state requirements for testing. With refugee children falling behind or struggling to catch up, it can overwhelm teachers and administrators, further leading to anger.
Not all students adjust the same way to their new setting. One student may take only three months, while others may take four years. One study found that even in their fourth year of schooling, Lao and
Vietnamese refugee students in the US were still in a transitional status.
[Liem Thanh Nguyen, & Henkin, A. (1980)]
Reconciling Differences: Indochinese Refugee Students in American Schools
. The Clearinghouse, 54(3), 105–108. Refugee students continue to encounter difficulties throughout their years in schools that can hinder their ability to learn. Furthermore, to provide proper support, educators must consider the experiences of students before they settled the US.
In their first settlement countries, refugee students may encounter negative experiences with education that they can carry with them post settlement. For example:
* Frequent disruption in their education as they move from place to place
* Limited access to schooling
* Language barriers
* Little resources to support language development and learning, and more
Statistics found that in places such as Uganda and Kenya, there were gaps in refugee students attending schools. It found that 80% of refugees in Uganda were attending schools, whereas only 46% of students were attending schools in Kenya.
Furthermore, for
secondary levels, the numbers were much lower. There was only 1.4% of refugee students attending schools in Malaysia. This trend is evident across several first settlement countries and carry negative impacts on students once they arrive to their permanent settlement homes, such as the US, and have to navigate a new education system. Unfortunately, some refugees do not have a chance to attend schools in their first settlement countries because they are considered
undocumented immigrants
Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country or the continued residence without the legal right to live in that country. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upwar ...
in places like Malaysia for
Rohingya refugees.
In other cases, such as Burundians in Tanzania, refugees can get more access to education while in displacement than in their home countries.
Overcoming obstacles
All students need some form of support to help them overcome obstacles and challenges they may face in their lives, especially refugee children who may experience frequent disruptions. There are a few ways in which schools can help refugee students overcome obstacles to attain success in their new homes:
* Respect the cultural differences amongst refugees and the new home culture
* Individual efforts to welcome refugees to prevent feelings of isolation
* Educator support
* Student centered pedagogy as opposed to teacher centered
* Building relationships with the students
* Offering praise and providing
affirmations
* Providing extensive support and designing curriculum for students to read, write, and speak in their native languages.
One school in NYC has found a method that works for them to help refugee students succeed. This school creates support for language and literacies, which promotes students using English and their native languages to complete projects. Furthermore, they have a learning centered
pedagogy
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as ...
, which promotes the idea that there are multiple entry points to engage the students in learning.
Both strategies have helped refugee students succeed during their transition into US schools.
Various websites contain resources that can help school staff better learn to work with refugee students such a
Bridging Refugee Youth and Children's Services With the support of educators and the school community, education can help rebuild the academic, social, and emotional well-being of refugee students who have suffered from past and present
trauma
Trauma most often refers to:
*Major trauma, in physical medicine, severe physical injury caused by an external source
*Psychological trauma, a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a severely distressing event
*Traumatic inju ...
,
marginalization
Social exclusion or social marginalisation is the social disadvantage and relegation to the fringe of society. It is a term that has been used widely in Europe and was first used in France in the late 20th century. It is used across discipline ...
, and
social alienation
Social alienation is a person's feeling of disconnection from a group whether friends, family, or wider society to which the individual has an affinity. Such alienation has been described as "a condition in social relationships reflected by (1) ...
.
Cultural differences
It is important to understand the cultural differences amongst newly arrived refugees and school culture, such as that of the U.S. This can be seen as problematic because of the frequent disruptions that it can create in a classroom setting.
In addition, because of the differences in language and culture, students are often placed in lower classes due to their lack of English proficiency.
Students can also be made to repeat classes because of their lack of English proficiency, even if they have mastered the content of the class. When schools have the resources and are able to provide separate classes for refugee students to develop their English skills, it can take the average refugee students only three months to catch up with their peers. This was the case with Somali refugees at some primary schools in Nairobi.
The histories of refugee students are often hidden from educators, resulting in cultural misunderstandings. However, when teachers, school staff, and peers help refugee students develop a positive
cultural identity
Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct cultur ...
, it can help buffer the negative effects refugees' experiences have on them, such as poor academic performance, isolation, and discrimination.
Refugee crisis
Refugee crisis
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of Forced displacement, forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced person, internally displaced, refugees, asylum ...
can refer to movements of large groups of
displaced persons
Forced displacement (also forced migration) is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, g ...
, who could be either
internally displaced person
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
A ...
s, refugees or other migrants. It can also refer to incidents in the country of origin or departure, to large problems whilst on the move or even after arrival in a safe country that involve large groups of displaced persons.
At the end of 2020, the UNHCR estimated the number of forcibly displaced people to be about 82.4 million worldwide. Of those, 26.4 million (nearly a third) are refugees while 4.1 million were classified as
asylum seeker
An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that other country. An asylum seeker is an immigrant who has been forcibly displaced and mi ...
s and 48 million being internally displaced. 68% of refugees originates from just five countries (
Syria
Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
,
Venezuela
Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...
,
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...
and
South Sudan
South Sudan (; din, Paguot Thudän), officially the Republic of South Sudan ( din, Paankɔc Cuëny Thudän), is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the C ...
and
Myanmar
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...
). 86% of refugees are hosted in
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
, with
Turkey
Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...
, hosting 3.7 million refugees, being the top hosting country.
In 2006, there were 8.4 million UNHCR registered refugees worldwide, the lowest number since 1980. At the end of 2015, there were 16.1 million refugees worldwide. When adding the 5.2 million
Palestinian refugees
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–49 Palestine war (1948 Palestinian exodus) and the Six-Day War (1967 Palestinian exodu ...
who are under
UNRWA
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 P ...
's mandate there were 21.3 million refugees worldwide. The overall forced displacement worldwide has reached a total of 65.3 million displaced persons at the end of 2015, while it was 59.5 million 12 months earlier. One in every 113 people globally is an
asylum seeker
An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that other country. An asylum seeker is an immigrant who has been forcibly displaced and mi ...
or a refugee. In 2015, the total number of displaced people worldwide, including refugees, asylum seekers and
internally displaced persons
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
...
, was at its highest level on record.
Among them,
Syrian refugees were the largest group in 2015 at 4.9 million.
In 2014, Syrians had overtaken
Afghan refugees
Afghan refugees are citizens of Afghanistan who were compelled to abandon their country as a result of major wars, persecution, torture or genocide. The 1978 Saur Revolution followed by the 1979 Soviet invasion marked the first wave of inter ...
(2.7 million), who had been the largest refugee group for three decades. Somalis were the third largest group with one million. The countries hosting the largest number of refugees according to UNHCR were Turkey (2.5 million),
Pakistan
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...
(1.6 million),
Lebanon
Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus li ...
(1.1 million) and
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
(1 million).
the countries that had the largest numbers of
internally displaced people
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
A ...
were
Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...
at 6.9, Syria at 6.6 million and
Iraq
Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq ...
at 4.4 million.
Children were 51% of refugees in 2015 and most of them were separated from their parents or travelling alone. In 2015, 86% of the refugees under
UNHCR
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integrati ...
's mandate were in low and middle-income countries that themselves are close to situations of conflict. Refugees have historically tended to flee to nearby countries with ethnic kin populations and a history of accepting other co-ethnic refugees. The
religious
Religion is usually defined as a social system, social-cultural system of designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morality, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sacred site, sanctified places, prophecy, prophecie ...
,
sect
A sect is a subgroup of a religious, political, or philosophical belief system, usually an offshoot of a larger group. Although the term was originally a classification for religious separated groups, it can now refer to any organization that b ...
arian and
denominational
A religious denomination is a subgroup within a religion that operates under a common name and tradition among other activities.
The term refers to the various Christian denominations (for example, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and the many variet ...
affiliation has been an important feature of debate in refugee-hosting nations.
See also
*
Asylum shopping
Asylum shopping is a pejorative term for the practice by some asylum seekers of applying for asylum in several states or seeking to apply in a particular state after traveling through other states. The phrase is derogatory, suggesting that asylum s ...
*
Conservation refugee Conservation refugees are people (usually indigenous) who are displaced from their native lands when conservation areas, such as parks and other protected areas, are created.
Definition
Many conservation refugees (such as the Great Lakes Twa) were ...
, people displaced when conservation areas are created
*
Church asylum
Church may refer to:
Religion
* Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities
* Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination
* Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship
* C ...
*
Deportation
Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...
*
Diaspora
A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. Historically, the word was used first in reference to the dispersion of Greeks in the Hellenic world, and later Jews after ...
, a mass movement of population, usually forced by war or natural disaster
*
Emergencybnb
Emergencybnb was a website that aimed at helping vulnerable segments in society find free temporary lodging offered by their neighbors. A test version of the website was published in March 2016, with a catchphrase that read: "Host a refugee or a v ...
, a website to find accommodation for refugees
*
Emergency evacuation
Emergency evacuation is the urgent immediate egress or escape of people away from an area that contains an imminent threat, an ongoing threat or a hazard to lives or property.
Examples range from the small-scale evacuation of a building due t ...
*
Forced displacement in popular culture Forced displacement and the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers and otherwise forcibly displaced people became of increasing interest in the popular culture since 2015 with the European migrant crisis.
Books
Fiction
* ''Refugee Tales: Volume ...
*
Ghost town repopulation
*
HIAS
HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) is a Jewish American nonprofit organization that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees. It was originally established in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees. In 1975, the State Departme ...
*
Homo sacer, a banned person who may be killed by anybody
*
Human migration
Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location (geographic region). The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another (ex ...
*
List of largest refugee crises
This is a list of largest refugee crises to occur.
List
The list below includes the number of refugees per event with at least 1 million individuals included. This list does not include internally displaced persons (IDP). For events for which e ...
*
List of people granted asylum
This is a list of people granted political asylum for individual and publicly known reasons. They were persecuted because of their actions as individuals, not because they were members of a persecuted group. Individual reasons for persecution c ...
*
List of refugees
This is a list of prominent people who fled their native country, went into exile and found refuge in another country. The list follows the current legal concept of refugee only loosely. It also includes children of people who have fled. The peopl ...
*
Mehran Karimi Nasseri
Mehran Karimi Nasseri ( fa, مهران کریمی ناصری pronounced ; 1945 – 12 November 2022), also known as Sir, Alfred Mehran, was an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 A ...
, an Iranian refugee who lived in
Charles de Gaulle Airport
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (french: Aéroport de Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle, ), also known as Roissy Airport or simply Paris CDG, is the principal airport serving the French capital, Paris ( and its metropolitan area), and the largest intern ...
*
Nansen Refugee Award
The Nansen Refugee Award is awarded annually by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to an individual, group, or organization in recognition of outstanding service to the cause of refugees, Internally displaced person, displac ...
*
No person is illegal
No one is illegal is a loosely connected international network, which advocates for refugees and migrants present in a country unlawfully. Activists in the network take initiatives in favor of migrants who stay in a country illegally and are at ...
, network that represents non-resident immigrants
*
Open borders
An open border is a border that enables free movement of people (and often of goods) between jurisdictions with no restrictions on movement and is lacking substantive border control. A border may be an open border due to intentional legislation ...
*
Political asylum
The right of asylum (sometimes called right of political asylum; ) is an ancient juridical concept, under which people persecuted by their own rulers might be protected by another sovereign authority, like a second country or another enti ...
*
Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program
The Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program (PSR) is a Canadian government initiative that allows for refugees to resettle in Canada with support and funding from private or joint government-private sponsorship. The government also offers semi-pri ...
- resettling refugees with the support and funding from private or joint government-private sponsorship
*
Queer migration LGBT migration is the movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBT) people around the world and domestically, often to escape discrimination or ill treatment due to their sexuality. Globally, many LGBT people attempt to leave dis ...
*
Refugee and Asylum Participatory Action Research
*
Refugee crisis
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of Forced displacement, forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced person, internally displaced, refugees, asylum ...
*
Refugee health
Refugee health is the field of study on the health effects experienced by people who have been displaced into another country or even to another part of the world, as a result of unsafe circumstances such as war or persecution. forced displaceme ...
*
Refugee Nation
Refugee Nation is a 2015 proposal to create a new nation to voluntarily resettle the world's refugee population to solve crisis. According to United Nations estimates, there were about 82 million refugees and internally displaced people in t ...
, a plan to create a nation for refugees
*
Refugee Phrasebook
Refugee Phrasebook is an online collection of useful vocabulary and phrases for refugees who have recently arrived in various European and potentially other host countries. Published as open source software, it is a multilingual tool that provi ...
*
Refugee Radio
Refugee Radio is a charity registered in England.
The organisation broadcasts a radio programme in partnership with Radio Reverb, a local radio station in the South East. The programme is syndicated on various internet radio stations and is based ...
*
Refugee Studies Centre
The Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) was established in 1982, as part of the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House), in order to promote the understanding of the causes and consequences of forced migrati ...
*
Right of asylum
The right of asylum (sometimes called right of political asylum; ) is an ancient juridical concept, under which people persecuted by their own rulers might be protected by another sovereign authority, like a second country or another enti ...
*
Refugee children
Nearly half of all refugees are children, and almost one in three children living outside their country of birth is a refugee.Emily Garin, Jan Beise, Lucia Hug, and Danzhen You. 2016. “Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Childr ...
and
refugee women Refugee women face gender-specific challenges in navigating daily life at every stage of their migration experience.
Retrieve ...
*
Third country resettlement
Third country resettlement or refugee resettlement is, according to the UNHCR, one of three durable solutions (voluntary repatriation and local integration being the other two) for refugees who fled their home country. Resettled refugees have the ...
Footnotes
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Further reading
* Fell, Peter and Debra Hayes (2007), "What are they doing here? A critical guide to asylum and immigration." Venture Press.
* Gibney, Matthew J. (2004), ''"The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees",
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press
A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
.
* Schaeffer, P (2010), 'Refugees: On the economics of political migration.' International Migration 48(1): 1–22.
* Refugee number statistics taken from 'Refugee',
Encyclopædia Britannica
The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various time ...
CD Edition (2004).
* Reyhani, Adel-Naim (2022), ''"Refugees"'', in Elgar Encyclopedia of Human Rights, Edward Elgar Publishing.
* Waters, Tony (2001), ''Bureaucatizing the Good Samaritan'', Westview Press.
* UNHCR (2001)
Refugee protection: A Guide to International Refugee LawUNHCR,
Inter-Parliamentary Union
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU; french: Union Interparlementaire, UIP) is an inter-parliamentary institution, international organization of national parliaments. Its primary purpose is to promote democratic governance, accountability, and coop ...
External links
UNHCR RefWorldBridging Youth Refugees and Children's Services
{{Authority control
Aftermath of war
Forced migration
Population
Right of asylum