Tuesday 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: 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: Nearly 70% are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. The ranks could grow: 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 or its 1967 protocol. However, many nations, including many hosting large refugee populations, still aren’t party to the convention, leaving millions out of its protections.
“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, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ 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.
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 Center for Human Rights, for which Arce worked, had documented the violence and was deemed a “terrorist organization” 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 program organized by UNHCR and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
“Feeling safe and protected, that is priceless,” he said under Barcelona’s Arc de Triomf, as tourists and residents walked by.
From refugee to Olympic basketball player
Wenyen Gabriel said his parents worked hard too. 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.
Little Wenyen was 2 at the time. Big Wenyen — he’s 2.08 meters (nearly 6 feet, 10 inches) tall — 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 little 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 of the United States,” he said at the headquarters of the refugee agency UNHCR, for which he became its newest goodwill ambassador on Monday. “It’s not easy to make something of yourself in a foreign country.”
The US was once welcoming
Hershel Greenblat was born during World War II, in 1941, inside a cave in Ukraine as his Jewish family hid from the Nazis.
After the war, his family sneaked into Austria, where they lived in U.S. Army camps for displaced persons. After initially considering moving to Israel, they opted for the U.S. after receiving approval in 1949 to immigrate there.
He recalled how his father woke him in the middle of the night as the Army transport ship approached the Statue of Liberty. The kids received welcome boxes packed by American middle-schoolers.
In Atlanta, where his family has lived for decades, Greenblat said refugees today often get a different welcome. He said he wasn’t previously familiar with the convention despite it being sparked by the displacement of WWII — but said refugees deserve protections and opportunities for work and education.
“Refugees in the ’50s worked their butts off to get what they wanted, what they needed,” said Greenblat, now 85.
Rohingya fleeing Myanmar
Sayed Alom, a humanitarian aid worker and one of the 700,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh in 2017, has been languishing in refugee camps there ever since. The Rohingya are the largest group of stateless people, according to UNHCR, and Bangladesh is not a party to either the 1951 convention or the following 1967 protocol.
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.
A Palestinian living for decades in Lebanon
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.
Asked whether she knew of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Ghozlan laughed and said she had not, explaining that she never learned to read or write. But even if she had, Lebanon is not a signatory to the treaties meant to protect her.
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 Turkey, 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, Yusra is hopeful: Some 1.3 million Syrians have returned. But after such an ordeal, change doesn’t just happen overnight. “You can’t just snap your fingers,” she said.
“I do believe that my country and its people are very strong and that I’m going to contribute in the best way possible.”
AP
