Symposium on the 1951 Refugee Convention at 75: The 1951 Convention is not a Relic, it is a Warning

[Mustafa Alio is co-Manager of R-SEAT]

I do not write about the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (‘the Convention’) as an abstract legal document. I write as someone who was forcibly displaced. My life was shaped by the fact that, at a critical moment, refugee protection was not only charity or sympathy. It was a matter of rights.

For many people, the Convention may sound distant: a treaty adopted decades ago, written in legal language. But for refugees, its meaning can be simple. It can mean that a border is not the end of hope. It can mean that a person fleeing danger is not treated as a criminal for trying to survive. It can mean that a family is not sent back to danger.

The Convention did not solve everything for me or for millions of refugees. But it created a legal floor. It said that people forced to flee are still people with rights. In a world becoming more comfortable with cruelty toward refugees, that floor matters more than ever.

Seventy-five years after its adoption, the question is not whether the Convention is still relevant. It is. The harder question is whether states are still willing to give its promises real meaning, and whether societies can still imagine themselves in someone else’s place. This is not only a question for refugees or for governments; it is a question for all of us, as neighbours, families, and communities. Every person knows fear. Every family knows uncertainty. None of us survives entirely alone. The Convention was born from memory. It came after the world had seen what happens when people fleeing persecution are abandoned, when borders close, when nationality becomes fragile, and when states decide that some lives are too inconvenient to protect. It was born from failure: from the cost of too little law and too much indifference.

That memory should matter today, especially to the younger generation of decision-makers who will soon inherit this system. The Convention is not an old document from another world. It is a warning from that world. It reminds us that no society is permanently safe, no passport is permanently powerful, and no people are permanently protected from war, persecution, collapse, or exile.

This history is personal to me in another way. I come from Syria, a country now known through war, exile, camps, and refugee arrivals. But during the Second World War, European civilians fleeing war and occupation found safety in parts of the Middle East, including Syria. Poles, Greeks, and Yugoslavs were among those supported through refugee camps across the region. The direction of refuge is never fixed. The lands we now associate with displacement were once places where Europeans sought safety.

If this feels distant, look around. Ukrainians fleeing invasion reminded many in Europe that war can still empty cities overnight. Beyond the legal categories that determine refugee status,  fires, droughts, floods, and disasters also remind us how quickly people can lose homes, security, and control over their lives. Imagine surviving that kind of fear and uncertainty, only to be told that your search for safety makes you illegal. Imagine surviving that, only to be told that your search for safety makes you illegal.

This is why the Convention matters beyond law. Refugee protection is not a favor offered by stable countries to unstable ones. It is a rule created because stability itself is never guaranteed. It is like a fire alarm installed after a tragedy. You do not remove it because the building is calm today. You keep it because you remember what fire can do.

The Convention should not be judged by whether it answers every displacement challenge on its own. Many modern displacement challenges require tools beyond the Convention. But this is exactly why it remains essential. It is the floor, not the ceiling. A floor does not build the whole house. But without it, everything collapses.

The Convention establishes that refugees are not simply vulnerable people waiting for aid. They are rights-holders. They are entitled to have their claims for protection assessed, documentation, work, education, courts, movement, and dignity. It says that people who have lost the protection of their own state should not also lose their humanity in the eyes of another. Weakening that floor will not produce order. It will make protection depend on mood, nationality, race, religion, politics, and electoral timing.

The numbers tell a different story from the politics. More than seven in ten refugees and other people in need of international protection live in low- and middle-income countries. If every refugee in the world lived in high-income countries, they would equal only around three percent of those countries’ population. And yet, in Germany, USA, UK, and many other wealthy countries, politicians have made many people believe that refugees are among the greatest threats facing wealthy societies.

How did this happen? Not because the numbers demand it, but because fear is politically useful. A small number can be made to look enormous when repeated often enough. Housing shortages, weak public services, inflation, inequality, and political failures are real. But blaming refugees for them is like blaming smoke for the fire while refusing to ask who lit the match.

Today, the Convention is rarely attacked only by saying it should disappear. The challenge is often smarter than that. It comes through policies that keep the language of protection while making protection harder to reach: deterrence, externalization, containment, underfunded asylum systems, long delays, return pressure, and public narratives that present refugees as threats before they are seen as people. This is how a legal promise can be hollowed out without being formally abandoned.

A right that cannot be accessed is not a right in practice. It is a promise trapped behind a border, a procedure, or a policy designed to exhaust the person before protecting them. A life jacket kept behind locked glass may look like safety, but it will not save anyone drowning.

The world should be honest about what happens when refugee protection is weakened. A world with fewer rights for refugees will not be a world with fewer refugees. It will be a world with more people trapped in danger, more pressure on poorer host countries, more irregular movement, more exploitation, and more instability. When wealthy states make asylum harder to access, they are moving responsibility onto countries with weaker infrastructure and fewer resources.

But people do not stop needing protection because protection is denied. If people cannot move safely, they will move dangerously. If rights are closed off, survival will search for another route. If refugees are pushed into the margins for years, excluded from work, education, documentation, and decision-making, the result will not be stability. It will be deeper poverty, desperation, lost potential, and a weaker social contract for everyone.  A policy of containment may appear orderly from the outside, but when it traps people without rights, options, or a say in the decisions shaping their lives, it becomes a pressure cooker rather than a solution.

This is why refugee-led organizations and refugee participation matter to the future of the Convention. The Convention recognized refugees as people with rights. The next step is to recognize refugees as people with knowledge and agency. Refugee-led organizations often see when a policy looks good on paper but fails in a camp, at a border, in a workplace, or inside a community. This is not symbolic inclusion. It is making protection work better.

The next generation of leaders has a choice. They can inherit the Convention as a living promise and build complementary tools around it. Or they can allow it to become a ceremonial document praised in speeches while being weakened in practice.

So we should ask plainly: are we ready for a world without the Convention’s protection? A world where the answer to people fleeing persecution is not law, but power? A world where cruelty becomes policy and survival depends on which passport a person had before everything fell apart?

If that world had existed when Europeans were fleeing war and persecution, how many doors would have been closed to them? If the Global South had responded then the way some wealthy states respond now, how many lives would have been abandoned?

The 1951 Convention is not perfect. But the alternative to imperfection is not order. The alternative is a world where the powerful decide who deserves safety and who can be left behind. I know what it means to need protection. I also know what can happen when protection opens a door instead of closing one. Refugees do not only survive. When given rights, safety, and a fair chance, they rebuild, contribute, lead, create, and help societies grow stronger.

That is why I believe the Convention is not a relic. It is a warning, a promise, and a floor we cannot afford to break. On its 75th anniversary, we should honor not only the text of the Convention, but the lives it helped protect, the families it helped keep safe, and the futures it made possible. The best way to mark this anniversary is not through speeches alone, but through renewed courage to defend it. May the Convention continue, for the next 75 years and beyond, to protect those forced to flee, to restrain cruelty, and to remind the world that no one should have to beg for the right to survive.

Photo attribution: by Bharath Kumar on Unsplash