How eurocentric is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention—and why does it matter?

In 2021–22, we will be supporting the online partnership seminar ‘Doing refugee history’ at the Institute for Historical Research, London. As part of its programme, the seminar will hold three online ‘Then and now’ workshops for organizations led by and supporting refugees. The first of these (date TBA) will be on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In this post, our editor Benjamin Thomas White suggests one set of questions that historians should think about as the convention marks its seventieth anniversary.

Is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention eurocentric? There are plenty of reasons to think so. Drafted at a time when membership of the UN was heavily skewed towards the global north, and much of the global south remained under European colonial rule, the convention was preoccupied with assisting Europeans displaced during the second world war. Its definition of ‘refugee’ was universal in that it was not restricted to any particular group, unlike earlier international refugee law, which specifically protected Russian and Armenian refugees. But it was limited in two important ways. Geographically, it applied only to people displaced from within Europe: it offered no help to the millions displaced by the partition of British India in 1947, while a separate UN agency, UNRWA, supported the 700,000 Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. There was also a temporal limitation, to displacements caused by events occurring before 1 Jan 1951: this left later refugees, mostly displaced outside Europe, without protection in international law. Only in 1967 did a Protocol remove these limitations.

All the same, we should pause before we condemn the convention as hopelessly outdated and eurocentric, as Alex Betts and Paul Collier have done. The text of the convention explicitly incorporated everyone covered by earlier international legal definitions of ‘refugee’, and these were already global in reach: over 50 countries had eventually signed up to the League of Nations arrangements relating to Russian refugees, for example. As the colonial empires gave way to postcolonial nation-states, important regional conventions like the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa sponsored by the Organization of African Unity did not reject the 1951 Convention as eurocentric and irrelevant to their needs—they explicitly built on it as an essential foundation.

If the UN refugee regime that emerged in the 1950s ignored the tens of millions displaced in east Asia during WWII or in south Asia at partition, that was partly because they were not viewed as refugees according to established principles that also applied in Europe. (The Palestinian refugees, defined as such but assisted separately from ‘convention refugees’, are a different matter.) The Chinese refugees of the Sino-Japanese war were displaced within China, not across a border, so they no more counted as refugees than the ten million French citizens who fled south to escape the German advance in summer 1940. The partition refugees did cross a new border, but they were assumed to have an automatic claim to citizenship in the receiving state: the reality may have been more complicated, as Vazira Zamindar has shown, but the same principle applied to the ‘ethnic Germans’ expelled from central and eastern Europe in the late 1940s, and had applied to the people caught up in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey a generation earlier. National authorities, not international organizations, were held to be properly responsible for them.

In fact, even though the UN membership in the late 1940s was skewed towards Europe, the conference that prepared the text included representatives from states in the Middle East and the Americas. Brazil acceded to the convention in 1962, Egypt not until 1981; Iraq has never acceded to it, and Venezuela is a party to the 1967 Protocol only. Yet all these states were among the 26 countries involved in drafting the convention. Why they chose to participate is a question worth investigating. Their participation doesn’t in itself mean that the convention is not eurocentric. But it does suggest that we need a more nuanced understanding before we can assert that it is.

Perhaps more important, the 1951 Convention offered contracting states two alternative definitions of refugee: one with the geographical limitation, and one without. Legal scholars usually focus on the first, but as Laura Madokoro pointed out not long ago, few of the initial signatories adopted this definition. Most of them, whether in the global north or south, adopted the less restrictive definition, meaning that in theory at least they would accept non-Europeans as refugees. Colombia, another initial signatory, adopted the limited definition at first but the extended definition when it ratified the convention in 1962. And many of the new postcolonial states that acceded to the convention between 1951 and 1967 also also adopted the expansive definition, either as soon as they acceded (like Cameroon) or soon afterward (like Côte d’Ivoire). So, well before the 1967 Protocol, states in both the global north and the global south were using the flexibility of the 1951 text itself to create momentum for a non-eurocentric refugee regime. We need a much better understanding of their reasoning, and the practical implications of their choices—and we won’t be able to reach it if we dismiss the convention as eurocentric.

Why does all of this matter? The refugee regime is under great strain at the moment. It faces several large and complex displacement crises, some old and some new. The convention definition of ‘refugee’ has proved flexible enough to expand beyond the populations it originally covered. For example, the text assumes that a refugee is ‘he’: it makes no reference to gender-based violence, or sexual or gender identity. But its reference to ‘membership of any social group’ has allowed individuals to claim protection after fleeing persecution on these grounds, at least in some jurisdictions. In other respects, though, the convention is creaking, unable to accommodate people trying to escape persistent structural inequality and a life of poverty, or displaced by the climate emergency—people who are forced to flee, but not by direct ‘persecution’. (Whether the founding document of the international refugee regime is irredeemably eurocentric may be less important than whether it is simply too narrow.)

Any serious plan for reforming the refugee system needs to grapple with the fact that the global north dominates the international institutions that embody it, while most refugees are in the global south. But the gravest threat to the refugee regime is the rise of xenophobic politics in the global north, not some inherent problem in its keystone legal text. Writing off the 1951 Convention as ‘eurocentric’ risks jettisoning important aspects of modern refugee protection that have long benefitted refugees (and states) in the global south—and serving the narrowly defined interests of rich states that are trying to keep refugees out. What we need instead is a better historical understanding of how states and refugees in the global south participated in, expanded on, and responded to the convention, especially in the years before the 1967 Protocol.

The image shows the signature of the 1951 Refugee Convention in Geneva, Switzerland, 1 Aug 1951: three men and one woman seated at a large table in a rooom with large windows, with a group of suited men (plus one or two women) standing behind them, looking on. All are white. The three seated men (l-r): Mr. John Humphrey, Director of the Human Rights Division; Mr. Knud Larsen (Denmark) President of the Conference; Dr. G.V. van Heuven Goedhart, High Commissioner for Refugees. (Our source for the image, UNHCR’s web page about the convention, does not identify the seated woman.) © UN Archives

Thanks to Laura Madokoro and Becky Taylor for their comments on a draft of this piece.