WARS HAVE always had civilian victims. But it was the scale of the two world wars of the early 20th century that prompted governments to draw up international laws to protect some of the people displaced by them. On July 28th 1951 the United Nations adopted the “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees”, which came into force in 1954. Commonly known as the “Refugee Convention”, this provided a set of guidelines on the treatment of people fleeing persecution. So who does, and who does not, meet its definition of a “refugee”? And to what protection are they entitled?

The characteristics of a refugee were first defined 100 years ago. In 1921 the League of Nations set up a High Commission for Refugees to assist the millions of people left stateless by the first world war. A quarter of a century later, after the second world war, Europe faced an even larger refugee crisis. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed at the UN in 1948, obliged states to protect refugees but it was the Refugee Convention of 1951 that outlined how. The first version was limited to people who became refugees due to events in Europe before 1951. In 1967 the “Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” extended the convention’s protections to non-Europeans and extended its validity past 1951. Between 1975 and 1989 cold-war era proxy wars displaced millions and the worldwide number of refugees increased five-fold. The number has been growing ever since. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, set up to monitor compliance with the convention, estimates that by the end of 2020 26.4m people were refugees. (This includes 20.7m under the mandate of the UNHCR and another 5.7m Palestinian refugees who are not.)

The Refugee Convention defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” The fundamental provision of the document is that of “non-refoulement”, which prohibits sending people back to countries where they face a “credible” threat of persecution. The document also demands that countries will not punish refugees who entered their countries illegally, if they arrived “directly” from the place they were threatened. The convention also outlines refugees’ rights to work, housing and education in their host countries. Over time, tribunals in various countries have broadened their interpretation of the convention. Some have recognised, for example, that persecuting women because of their sex is grounds to acknowledge them as refugees and that irregular entry should not bar asylum-seekers from getting refugee status even if they passed through a third country.

The rights conferred by the convention are butttressed by other human-rights treaties, such as the convention against torture. But many people who are forced to leave their homes are not covered by the definitions of the convention. Millions of people fleeing natural disasters, for example, are excluded. As climate change threatens communities, some people argue that such “climate migrants” deserve international protection. But the idea of broadening the refugee definition to that extent has little political support. Over the past several years a rise in the number of asylum-seekers coming to Europe and America has provoked a backlash against the obligations imposed by the refugee convention. On the convention’s 70th birthday the world is still producing refugees. But many of today’s forcibly displaced people are fleeing perils that its drafters could not imagine.