The Kingdom has opened its doors to host hundreds of thousands of Syrians since the beginning of the crisis. Not as refugees in camps, but on the basis of brotherly and ethical principles in order to maintain their dignity and safety.

These are the words of then Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Nayef at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in 2016, responding to international criticism that Saudi Arabia was ‘not doing its part’ in the global refugee crisis. Despite the Crown Prince’s claims, the official number of UNHCR-registered refugees in the country at the time was only 140. What lies behind this apparent paradox? In this blog post, I seek to discuss Saudi Arabia’s long and often complicated history with the ‘refugee question’, focusing on the period subsequent to the establishment of the contemporary international refugee law regime in 1951 and specifically highlighting key issues that I will be studying closer as post-doctoral researcher within the REF-ARAB project.

Saudi Arabia is not a party to the main global refugee protection instrument, the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor does it have any specific domestic legal framework pertaining to refugee issues. Thirty-five percent of Saudi-Arabia’s roughly 30 million inhabitants are not citizens – and many come from important refugee-producing countries. The Kingdom is home to an estimated 250,000–500,000 Rohingya, 300,000–400,000 Palestinians and 750,000–1,000,000 Syrians. The great majority of these migrants are regularized through the kafala system of sponsorship. In this sense, even de facto refugees – who would meet the refugee definition set out in the 1951 Convention – are attended to through a system of labor migration. 

Labour migration as refugee protection?

In short, the kafala system requires every foreign national working in the country to have a sponsor, usually a Saudi national or a company. The worker needs the permission of the sponsor to leave the country or to change jobs, and the sponsor is responsible for the regulation of the workers residence permit for as long as they are in the country. While the system can provide residency and work, it is important to stress that it does not come close to resembling a right-based refugee protection system. Nevertheless, the kafala system has on some occasions been used in relation to particular refugee groups such as the Palestinians, Eritreans, Yemenis and Rohingya.

One example is from 1949, when King Abdulaziz asked Saudi-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) to employ Palestinian refugees from other states in the region already hosting many Palestinians – a specific recruitment office was even set up in Beirut. Palestinians in Saudi Arabia, including those whose families have stayed in the country for generations, are thus officially to this day governed by the kafala-system. In practice however, they have been treated with more flexibility than other groups.  

Similarly, a royal decree in 1979 granted the Eritrean Liberation Front (EFL) a status of institutional sponsor for Eritrean migrants, meaning that, for several decades, Eritreans could enter the country without a work contract, fees for their residence permits were waived, and the presence of undocumented Eritrean nationals was tolerated. Until 1990, also Yemeni nationals were exempted from a range of regulations normally applying to other foreign nationals, including the obligation to have a Saudi sponsor. More recently, Rohingyas have since 2005 been able to regularize their residence status and obtain work permits. The Saudi government has explicitly encouraged companies to recruit Rohingyas, and announced in 2012 that a worker from Myanmar would only count as a quarter of a foreign worker within the Saudization program.

Following the outbreak of conflict in Syria in 2011, a number of royal decrees have been issued to regularize the status of Syrian nationals in the country. Syrians have been able to reside in the Kingdom with a temporary “visitor status”, renewable every six months. As of 2018, almost 700,000 Syrians stayed in Saudi Arabia on the basis of such permits. The visitor status grants access to services such as free healthcare. In 2015, Yemeni nationals were also given the opportunity to obtain visitor status under similar conditions, and that same year more than 400,000 Yemenis had regularized their status in this way. In 2016, Syrian and Yemeni holders of the visitor permit were also made eligible for a work permits. It has however been more difficult for Syrians to enter Saudi Arabia in later years. 

As we can see in the above, inherent in this approach to those seeking protection is a state of “permanent temporariness”. While the Saudi system of temporarily regularizing the status of certain groups has some virtue in that it secures access to economic participation, education and health care, it does not sufficiently secure international protection as understood by international refugee law. 

Gulf War refugees and UNHCR’s Establishment

By focusing on the Rafha refugee camp (1991 to 2009) and the refugees hosted there, as well as on the role of the UNHCR in assisting and protecting these refugees, my postdoctoral project concentrates on a case that arguably departs from Saudi Arabia’s usual handling of refugee situations as described above. Over the next two years, I will be exploring this understudied case, where approximately 33,000 Iraqis were granted temporary asylum in Saudi Arabia following the mass uprisings against Saddam Hussein. Understanding the circumstances of the camp’s establishment and management, and the role of UNHCR in these processes, will contribute to a greater understanding of Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the international refugee regime and the refugee question in general.

The Rafha case is not only important as an outlier case, but also because its creation coincided with UNHCR’s establishment in Saudi Arabia. Although UNHCR’s Liaison Office was established in 1987, a permanent office came into being in 1993. That same year, UNHCR and Saudi Arabia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (modified in 2010 after the permanent closure of the Rafha camp). However, UNHCR’s mandate remains restricted and its ability to assist refugees has arguably been limited.

While many of the camp’s Iraqi refugees were early on resettled to third countries or repatriated to Iraq with the assistance of UNHCR, some stayed in the camp for years. In 2005, UNHCR negotiated a deal with the Saudi authorities who for the first time authorized the settlement of about 300 of the refugees in urban areas, providing them with refugee identification cards, access to healthcare and education and allowing them to work. Only 95 refugees remained in the Rafha camp in September 2006.

Materially speaking, the conditions in the camp – fully funded by the Saudi government – were sufficient, or even “considered the best in any refugee camp situation in the world” according to UNHCR. The Saudi authorities provided the refugees with air cooling, food, clothes, a monthly allowance and even cigarettes, in addition to health care and schooling. On the other hand, camp residents had little or no freedom of movement, and were not able to obtain work permits to work outside the camp.  Protests sometimes led to clashes with camp security, leaving refugees injured or killed.

The case of the Rafha camp and the Iraqi refugees is unique in relation to Saudi Arabia’s historical relationship to refugees. While other refugees, as the former Crown Prince’s statement highlights, are legally treated as foreign workers (though in some cases with a special status), the Rafha camp stands out. Understanding why the camp was established and how it was managed will thus contribute to a greater understanding of Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the international refugee regime and the refugee question in general – including how the Rafha case might have affected these.

This post was originally published on the Ref-Arab project website in October 2020 and is republished with permission.

The images are from the series Lisières by Yann Gayet and are also reproduced with permission.