Story audio is generated using AI

Tuesday marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was born after the ravages of World War 2 to help people fleeing war, violence and persecution. Proponents say the treaty has saved millions of lives.

However, respect for it has come under strain as some countries have denied entry to asylum seekers. Under President Donald Trump, the US has followed a policy of sending asylum seekers to third countries, upending years of the country’s policy.

More than 41-million refugees remain forcibly displaced. Nearly 70% are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. The ranks could grow as the International Committee of the Red Cross has counted more than 130 armed conflicts around the globe.

BY NUMBERS:

1951: Year the UN Refugee Convention was established.150: Approximate number of state parties to the convention.41-million+: Total forcibly displaced refugees globally.70%: Percentage hosted in low- and middle-income nations.

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, UN 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 said about their experiences and the importance of the convention.

Rohingya fleeing Myanmar

Sayed Alom, a humanitarian aid worker and one of the 700,000 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 said in an interview in refugee camps outside Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. “We were persecuted until we could no longer live there.”

Alom, who expected to return home quickly, said the limbo situation has become “imaginably worse”, with kidnapping for ransom and threats from nature, including extreme heat, flooding and landslides destroying the camps.

Escaping Nicaragua’s deadly crackdown

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 bloody government crackdown against protesters killed hundreds.

The Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights, for which Arce worked, 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.

“Feeling safe and protected, that is priceless”

—  Juan Carlos Arce, a Nicaraguan human rights lawyer

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 UN’s international organisation for migration.

“Feeling safe and protected, that is priceless,” he said under Barcelona’s Arc de Triomf.

Palestinian living for decades in Lebanon

More than seven decades after fleeing her village, 88-year-old Hussniyah Ahmad Ghozlan 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 in 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.

Asked whether she knew about the 1951 Refugee Convention, Ghozlan said she had not, explaining that she never learned to read or write.

US was once welcoming

Hershel Greenblat was born in 1941 during World War 2 inside a cave in Ukraine while his Jewish family hid from the Nazis.

After the war, his family sneaked into Austria, where they lived in US army camps for displaced persons. After initially considering moving to Israel, they opted for the US after receiving approval in 1949 to immigrate there.

“It’s not easy to make something of yourself in a foreign country”

—  Wenyen Gabriel, UNHCR goodwill ambassador

He recalled how his father woke him in the middle of the night when the army transport ship approached the Statue of Liberty. The children received welcome boxes packed by American middle school pupils.

In Atlanta, where his family has lived for decades, Greenblat said refugees today often receive a different welcome. He said he wasn’t previously familiar with the convention, but said refugees deserve protections and opportunities for work and education.

“Refugees in the 1950s worked their butts off to get what they wanted, what they needed,” said Greenblat, now 85.

From refugee to Olympic basketball player

Wenyen Gabriel said his parents worked hard. He was born in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1997 after his parents fled civil war in southern Sudan. They later moved to Egypt as refugees, before being resettled in New Hampshire in the US.

Wenyen was two at the time. Now 2.08m tall, he earned a basketball scholarship at the University of Kentucky and played in the NBA. In 2024, he played for the young country of South Sudan at the Olympic Games in Paris.

While he at times felt “a bit different from the people in the community” in New Hampshire, there were other refugee families around.

“We had to struggle and figure out how to become something inside the US,” he said at the headquarters of the UNHCR, for which he became its newest goodwill ambassador on Monday. “It’s not easy to make something of yourself in a foreign country.”

Swimming to refuge in Germany

Swimmers Yusra and Sarah Mardini fled war-torn Syria in 2015, joining the wave of refugees from their home country that year, in a saga that has been turned into a highly-regarded movie.

They went first to Lebanon, then Türkiye, where they paid smugglers to take them by sea to Greece. They jumped out of an overloaded boat to keep it from sinking. After an arduous trek across southeast Europe, they received refuge in Germany. Yusra was named a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in 2017.

Now that Syria’s war is over, she is hopeful, as about 1.3-million Syrians have returned. However, after such an ordeal, change doesn’t happen overnight. “You can’t just snap your fingers,” she said.

“I do believe my country and its people are very strong and that I’m going to contribute in the best way possible.”

AP