Six refugees speak out as UN-backed treaty to help people fleeing war, persecution marks 75 years
Tuesday (July 28, 2026) marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was born after the ravages of World War II to help
Tuesday (July 28, 2026) marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was born after the ravages of World War II to help people fleeing war, violence and persecution. Proponents say the treaty has saved millions of lives. Respect for it though has come under strain as some countries have denied entry to asylum seekers. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, the United States has led a policy of sending asylum seekers to third countries — upending years of U.S. policy. More than 41 million refugees remain forcibly displaced and nearly 70% are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. The ranks could grow as the International Committee of the Red Cross counts more than 130 armed conflicts around the globe. The convention took key steps toward defining what a refugee is, laying out their rights, and establishing standards of treatment. Nearly 150 countries are parties to the convention. “It codified a simple but powerful principle that people forced to flee persecution, conflict or violence must be able to find safety and protection,” said Elizabeth Tan, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) Director of international protection and solutions. Its core principle is ‘non-refoulement,’ prohibiting the return of people to a place where they would face persecution, torture or other serious harm. It all rests on the idea that no society is immune to war, persecution or sudden upheaval. Here’s what six refugees say about their experiences and the importance of the convention. Sayed Alom, a humanitarian aid worker and one of the 7,00,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh in 2017, has been languishing in refugee camps there ever since.
Myanmar's military forces “raped our mothers and sisters, burned down our homes, threw our children into the river and set them on fire,” he recalled in an interview in refugee camps outside Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. “We were persecuted until we could no longer live there.” Alom, who expected to return home quickly, says the limbo situation has become ‘imaginably worse’ with kidnapping for ransom, as well as threats from nature, including extreme heat, flooding and landslides destroying the camps. Human rights lawyer Juan Carlos Arce considers himself among millions of people whose lives have been saved by the convention. He fled Nicaragua by foot in 2018 after a government crackdown against protesters killed hundreds. The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, for which Mr. Arce worked, had documented the violence and was deemed a ‘terrorist organisation’ by President Daniel Ortega’s government. He fled to Costa Rica where he was granted asylum. In Costa Rica, rights defenders and Nicaraguan Opposition leaders were attacked and even assassinated, so he moved to Barcelona, Spain, last year under a resettlement programme organised by UNHCR and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM). “Feeling safe and protected, that is priceless,” he said under Barcelona’s Arc de Triomf, as tourists and residents walked by. More than seven decades after fleeing her village, 88-year-old Hussniyah Ahmad Ghozlan still remembers the journey that brought her family to Lebanon. Ghozlan was a child when they fled during the 1948 war after their village — Yajur, southeast of Haifa, Israel — was depopulated. “We got by because we worked, raised our children and built our lives,” she said in an alley near her home in Shatila camp for Palestinian refugees in Beirut.
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