Symposium on the 1951 Refugee Convention at 75: Resilience in Times of Contestation: The Turbulent Destiny of the Refugee Convention

[Dr. Vincent Chetail is Professor of International Law and Director of the Global MIgration Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and development Studies]

Anniversaries invite reflection, but they can also induce complacency. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees falls in a moment of acute tension: never have so many people needed its protection and never has the political will to provide it seemed so threadbare.

This anniversary is an occasion neither for uncritical celebration nor for resigned lamentation. It is an opportunity to remember the past and better apprehend the present. The Refugee Convention has survived many political crises since its adoption. Its drafters would even be astonished that it still stands at seventy-five. I take the opportunity of this anniversary to briefly sketch the turbulent destiny of the Refugee Convention since 1951 and reflect what it means for our troubled times.

From Planned Obsolescence to Universal Reach: A Very Short History 

Nothing predestined the Refugee Convention to be the universal reference instrument it has become today seventy-five years after its adoption. It was even planned to become obsolete shortly after its adoption. Entered into force in 1954, it only applied to people who had already fled persecutions occurring before 1951. This backward-looking implementation is surprising and represents a unique feature among the many conventions adopted by the UN after 1945. 

The priority of the time was to protect European refugees who were displaced in the aftermath of the Second World War after the partition of Europe following the Yalta Conference. Yet the Convention was contested from the outset: the main opposition came from communist countries which rejected a convention they consider as an instrument of capitalist propaganda. Pakistan and India further criticized its European bias, while recalling that “suffering knew no racial or political boundaries; it was the same for all.”

Yet the Refugee Convention survived the Cold War and decolonization process. The decisive impetus came from newly independent states in Africa. For them, the limitations of the refugee definition made no sense in the context of post-colonial displacement and independence wars. This became obvious quite early during the war between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (1954-1962) that placed hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco outside the Convention’s reach.

The Convention eventually became a universal instrument in 1967 when its additional Protocol removed its initial restrictions, extending its provisions to refugees displaced by any events, anywhere, at any time. By universalizing the refugee protection regime, the number of state parties has grown considerably with two main waves of ratification: from 1967 to 1987 thanks to decolonization and, then from 1991 to 2000 with the dissolution of Soviet Union. 

Cumulative ratifications, 1954–2026

Ratification waves

Regional distribution of state parties (2026)

Non-signatory states

There are today 149 parties from all regions of the world, though 44 UN Member States still did not ratify it (mainly from Middle East and Asia-Pacific). While having provided a decisive impulse towards the universalization of refugee protection, the Global South remains the most reliable support by hosting three quarters of the total number of refugees in the world. Even several non-signatory states count major countries of asylum, such as Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Real Threat: Evasion, not Obsolescence

Clearly, the drafters of the 1951 Convention did not anticipate that what they produced would become the legal foundation upon which the protection of millions of refugees across every continent would rest. Nor, perhaps, could they have anticipated that seventy-five years later, their instrument would be simultaneously indispensable and imperiled. 

The Convention at seventy-five is not in danger of becoming irrelevant. It is in danger of being rendered meaningless by states that invoke its language while systematically dismantling its substance. The clearest expression of this evasion is the externalization of asylum – the effort by states, mainly Western ones, to relocate refugee processing and protection obligations to third countries, typically in the Global South. The logic is as simple as cynical: if people cannot reach the territory of a state party, that state’s obligations under the Convention cannot be engaged. 

Alongside externalization, pushbacks – the forced return of people crossing borders without individual screening – have become normalized in Europe and beyond. These practices do not merely create practical barriers to asylum; they eradicate it. An asylum seeker who is pushed back before they can register a claim is invisible to the legal system.

These tactics of evasion are insidious: they do not seek to reform the law but to evade it while maintaining the appearance of compliance. The task of this anniversary is to name that danger clearly, and to insist that the covenant holds.

A Covenant, Not a Convenience

What does the seventy-fifth anniversary require of us? Certainly not celebration divorced from accountability. The Convention is not a monument; it is a covenant. Its authority derives not from its age but from its legally binding force. For states like for individuals, legal duties are not always convenient; otherwise, they would not be legal duties. Refugee protection is not about charity or political inclination. 

Seeking asylum is a fundamental right, neither a crime nor a privilege. Pacta sund servanda requires states to respect for the treaties they have ratified and to implement them in good faith. Nothing more, but nothing less. The Convention’s core obligations are not free-floating treaty commitments dependent entirely on the political willingness of states parties. They did not emerge from a vacuum. They are rooted in the long tradition of asylum and continuously reinforced by the customary and conventional foundations of public international law.

The 1951 Convention endorses in legal terms the antique custom of asylum as a truly universal value common to all cultures, religions and civilizations. Its contemporary resilience is reinforced by a strong institutional anchorage within the UN system through the UNHCR, its operational support and the duties of states parties to cooperate with it. This shall not be underestimated as the very existence of a dedicated UN agency represents a unique characteristic when compared to other UN treaties.

From a more technical angle, the Convention’s resilience cannot be understood without paying attention to the hybridity and plasticity of its very content. Both historically and legally, it is a hybrid legal creation caught in-between the traditional law of aliens and the emerging law of human rights. Contrary to subsequent human rights treaties, it does not seek to provide an exhaustive list of the human rights states ought to guarantee towards refugees. Its approach is more pragmatic, focusing on specific situations that refugees are likely to encounter in their host countries (such as the need to work, to buy property, to access courts, etc.) and laying down concrete parameters according to which refugees shall be treated in each of these situations. 

Likewise, the 1951 Convention heavily relies on domestic law to define the different standards of treatment and implement the refugee definition which internalize, in turn, the very content of the Refugee Convention into the legal order of each state party. From this angle, there are a few UN treaties like this one which are implemented on a daily basis by asylum case workers, judges and many other state authorities.

Beyond the Convention itself, the principle of non-refoulement has achieved a status of customary law that now transcends treaty law (see here, here and here). This cardinal obligation survives even where the treaty does not, and it binds even those who never subscribed to it. This represents by far its more enduring legacy. 

Yet the Convention’s continuing vitality is not primarily a function of what it contains – its text has not been amended since 1967 – but from its embeddedness in a broader normative ecosystem that has progressively supplied, updated, and reinforced its protective content. The integrated approach to refugee protection I developed elsewhere is obvious when it comes to the subsequent human rights conventions. The continuing relevance of the Refugee Convention has been possible precisely because it has been reframed and enhanced by international human rights law. 

Refugee law and human rights law are now so interdependent and intricate that the former has become an integral component of the latter. Both in pith and substance:

“refugee law cogently constitutes a right to have rights, when victims of human rights’ violations have no other option than to leave their own country and ask for the substitute protection of another state.”

It has become “a remedial or palliative branch of human rights law.” 

This integrated approach is not confined to human rights. It is grounded in the principle of systemic integration under Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties and the complementarity model as an alternative to lex specialis. From this stance, the 1951 Convention is not a self-contained instrument; it is a constitutional node in the architecture of public international law. 

Virtually every branch of the system intersects at this point, because forced displacement is itself a cross-cutting phenomenon. It is produced by violations of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law; it unfolds through maritime spaces regulated by the law of the sea; it involves people on the move who are workers, or who have been trafficked or smuggled; it generates obligations of state responsibility, institutional engagement, security responses, and jurisdictional claims. All these bodies of law are simultaneously applicable, and their cumulative application represents the bedrock of the Refugee Convention. 

Conclusion

The Convention is more than the sum of its forty-six articles. It is a living framework whose authority derives from the richness of a normative ecosystem in which it operates and evolves across decades. Its relevance and resilience can only be understood within this broader network of legally binding rules enshrined in customary law and treaty law. After all:

“international law is not a menu à la carte. It is binding as whole and its overall design makes sense only when its rules are understood and applied in their totality.”

The Refugee convention is neither a relic of the past nor a panacea for the future. It is an imperfect instrument for an imperfect world. But it is the product of a historical moment of moral clarity that is rare in international relations. Seventy-five years on, that clarity is more needed, not less.