Can the UN’s Refugee Convention survive?

Published 30 July 2026 · world

The 1951 UN Refugee Convention marks its 75th anniversary this week but is facing a populist pushback against immigration in Western nations. At the end

The 1951 UN Refugee Convention marks its 75th anniversary this week but is facing a populist pushback against immigration in Western nations. At the end of World War II, great swaths of Europe lay in ruins and millions had been forcibly displaced. The humanitarian disaster prompted the United Nations to agree on a comprehensive legal framework outlining states’ obligations to protect refugees. This became the 1951 Refugee Convention, which initially applied to Europeans but was subsequently amended in 1967 to apply to all those fleeing persecution. Today, 149 nations are parties to the convention and no country has ever withdrawn from it. At least, not yet. Nearly eight decades later, the world is struggling. The Syrian civil war triggered an enormous influx of refugees into Europe. Now, millions of refugees have fled Sudan’s brutal civil war, state collapse in Venezuela has caused mass migration, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many other conflicts around the world are in full swing, again causing mass displacements. The UN currently records more than 41 million refugees worldwide. The UN convention defines a refugee as a person who is outside their country of origin with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. The principle of non-refoulement – the stipulation that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they could be harmed – is a cornerstone of the treaty. In recent years, some of the world’s richest countries have begun to roll out increasingly punitive policies towards refugees as populist, anti-immigration sentiment has taken hold. Last month the Supreme Court ruled in favour of allowing the Trump administration to turn back asylum seekers at the border and remove temporary protected status (TPS) from Haitians and Syrians. This year refugee admissions to the US have been almost exclusively white South Africans. Refugees attempting to reach Australia by boat are now either turned back at sea or sent to offshore detention facilities, leading to strong criticism from human rights organisations on the Pacific island of Nauru.

Denmark, which was the first country to sign the convention three-quarters of a century ago, has stripped Syrian refugees of legal status and threatened them with deportation after deeming those from Damascus and surrounding regions safe, despite the country still being under the control of the Assad regime at the time. It passed a sweeping package of reforms in 2019. A decade on from the refugee crisis, fuelled by the Syrian war and which saw more than one million people flee to Europe, border guards in several European Union states now routinely conduct violent pushbacks. Greece turns back boats while Poland forces them over the border into Belarus. ‘Share, not shift, responsibilities’ For campaigners, new European policies fly in the face of the convention’s principles, such as the right to territorial asylum and the principle of non-refoulement. Adriana Tidona, migration researcher at Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera: “The new Migration and Asylum Pact will make it easier for EU countries to reject asylum applications without review, and send people to so-called ‘safe third countries’ to which they have no connection and where they have never even set foot.” The 75th anniversary of the convention, Tidona said, is “an urgent reminder of the need to re-centre international cooperation in refugee protection and to share, not shift, responsibilities. In the United States, the Trump administration is reportedly mulling withdrawing support from the UN refugee agency UNHCR, amid accusations that it pursues “a mass migration agenda”. It has also recently removed “protected status” for Syrian and Haitian nationals. But for proponents of refugee rights, the Refugee Convention has its own limitations anyway. While tens of millions have benefitted from its protection from persecution since 1951, others who are escaping different kinds of hardship such as poverty, climate change, natural disasters or gang violence, do not necessarily qualify under the criteria. Without any specific court or treaty which can oversee and punish breaches, governments tend to interpret the convention according to their interests or even flout it altogether, experts say.