Ghulam Ali was 10 when he left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and spent four decades in Iran. Arrested in a purge last year, he was deported back alongside 14 family members. “I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,” he recently told a journalist. “But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything – my home, my little savings, my dignity.”
On Bangladesh’s southern tip, Jasim Uddin searched for his brother who had paid $2,850 for passage on a Malaysia-bound trawler that sank in the Andaman Sea. This is the world’s deadliest sea route, which claimed the lives of nearly 900 Rohingya refugees in 2025.
I wonder how they celebrated last month’s 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention? Meanwhile, governments cheered UNHCR’s reported 3 per cent fall in refugee numbers to 41.6 million – the first decline in forced displacement in a decade.
What explains this surprising statistic, considering the increased and more brutal wars that drive refugee flows? Indeed, 5.4 million fled across borders in 2025, while more than seven in 10 of all refugees come from familiar crisis zones: Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and South Sudan. The outward flows were outweighed by 4.4 million returns, nearly 90 per cent to just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan.
A simple in-out ledger does not tell the full story. The global figures include six million Palestinians in apparently permanent limbo under UNRWA’s challenged mandate, nine million “asylum seekers” and 7.2 million others in “need of international protection”. Not forgetting 4.5 million stateless people, counted separately.
These confusing administrative classifications weaken the protection cause, while borders clang shut across every continent.
In truth, to flee or return was never a free choice. Thus, although Afghan refugee numbers fell 36 per cent, 42 per cent of the 779,000 returnees were deported from Iran and Pakistan. And now, the guardian of refugee rights, UNHCR, is obliged to support harm-reduction efforts for involuntary returnees, such as the 180,000 Syrians driven home by the bombardment of their Lebanese refuge.
Meanwhile, those fleeing violence and persecution are not treated equitably. Their welcome depends on host attitudes, and relatively few gain settled status while millions live ambiguously, in fear of expulsion. The experience of Syrians and Ukrainians in Europe or Afghans in Asia shows that even initially popular refugees eventually outstay their welcome.
The forced displacement picture is yet more complex. Twice as many refugees are internally displaced. That is 82.2 million, including Sudan’s 9.1 million, Colombia’s 7.2 million and Syria’s 6 million, while 2.1 million Gazans squeeze ever tighter within their shrinking territory.
All this raises awkward questions for the anniversary of the Refugee Convention. Why should someone who manages to cross a frontier acquire a body of international rights, while someone equally endangered, lacking the money or strength to reach one, acquires almost none? Crossing a border tests capacity and luck more than need.
Meanwhile, desperate people perish along migratory routes and fall prey to trafficking and modern slavery. But while 28 million in forced labour deserve rescue and protection, many don’t meet refugee criteria.
But don’t blame the Refugee Convention. It was narrowly cast for a specific problem: the two million Europeans still uprooted in 1951 after the Second World War. UNHCR did its job well and deserved the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954, and again in 1981 after the Convention globalised through its 1967 Protocol.
Millions owe their lives to this Convention and Protocol and none of the 149 states party have been so shameless as to renounce them, despite prevailing geopolitics. Instead, the hollowing-out of obligations is far worse.
Take the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum. It allows third-country hubs for refugee processing and returning rejected or “undesired” refugees. That breaks the spirit, if not the letter, of the Convention. Meanwhile, Washington has slashed its refugee admissions quota except for white South Africans. This is facilitated by the US Supreme Court’s Kafkaesque ruling that potential refugees blocked from crossing the border have not “arrived” and so cannot claim asylum.
Overall, legal routes are all but closed. Resettlement and sponsorship arrivals more than halved to 81,800 last year – just one place for every 500 escaping crises.
But, for all the hype, the Convention was never universal. Forty-six per cent of signatories maintain reservations, such as Turkey’s geographical limitation, which means that fewer than 100 people hold full Convention status, although it still hosts 2.4 million, mostly Syrians, even after mass returns home.
South Asian countries, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf states never signed at all, while being among the world’s biggest hosts or donors. Pakistan sheltered generations of Afghans and the UAE’s $1.46 billion last year made it the world’s third-largest humanitarian donor.
The inescapable conclusion is that a nation’s humanitarian credentials do not depend on a signature. Non-signatories can honour moral obligations as much as signatories can evade them.
The general squeeze on global humanitarianism also affects refugees with, for example, ration cuts that left Uganda’s most vulnerable refugees on 40 per cent of a food basket and a million others with nothing. UNHCR’s $8 billion budget is currently only a third funded and, after losing 5,000 staff and downsizing its presence in 185 offices, it is shifting its oversized headquarters to the smaller Palais Wilson.
I was once based in the Palais Wilson, on a difficult assignment with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and found that overlooking Geneva’s shimmering lake was perfect for contemplating worldly contradictions. UNHCR should do the same, inspired by the symbolism of returning to its roots. Because the Palais Wilson housed the League of Nations, whose Nansen office invented the refugee passport a century ago.
Returning to the roots of an idea when trunk and branches have been severely pruned provides opportunity to grow a vigorous new body better adapted to a harsher climate.
But not by rigidly maintaining the sanctity of a 20th-century instrument for a 21st-century world, nor by renegotiating the Convention text to risk producing something worse. Neither by continuing to exceptionalise refugees in a world of forced migration with multiple causes and vulnerabilities, not least with climate disruptions underway. Perhaps there are lessons from UNRWA’s flawed Palestinian mandate? Indefinite relief dependence is not a substitute for good politics; it merely makes their absence survivable for a time until it becomes unsustainable.
Countries are aware that these problems can only be sorted through voluntary international co-operation. In that spirit, a Global Compact on Refugees was agreed in 2018 with modest success in strengthening the integration of refugees already in the system. But the parallel Global Compact on Migration has made little headway.
The trend towards externalising border controls, as the EU has done with Tunisia and Libya, is controversial, and the recent surge of 50,000 Moroccans into the Spanish territory of Ceuta has polarised opinions around migration management even further. In reality, different approaches for different circumstances are necessary, knowing that solutions are best found closest to the problems. Such as regional agreements covering those fleeing violence, in Africa and Latin America, which, far-sightedly, include climate displacement. Most of all, financing self-reliance locally is more efficient, such as Uganda’s humane model to integrate 2.1 million refugees.
Reported hostile public attitudes need nuanced interpretation. Most of the global public remains humanitarian-minded and believes it right to allow asylum for people in existential distress. But they want better migration management and more durable solutions. Therein lies the crux of the problem.
Ghulam Ali, badly let down by faithlessness to the Convention, has a solution. All he wants is schooling and a future for his grandchildren, for which he is more than willing to work if a country allows him peace and safety. That is exactly what the authors of the Convention had in mind on surveying a shattered Europe 75 years ago.
