The Refugee Convention at 75: Its Enduring Role in Human Rights Protection

The 75^th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees offers a critical moment to reaffirm the enduring relevance of its principles in today’s global landscape, and to highlight the complementarity of human rights and refugee law in refugee protection and solutions. Marked by protracted displacement, increasing protection risks, and shrinking civic and humanitarian space, the current global context has contributed to an erosion of human rights of refugees and asylum-seekers. These trends underscore the need for renewed multilateral cooperation grounded in collective responsibility, in the spirit of the Refugee Convention, and for approaches that ensure comprehensive, multi-sectoral and rights-centred engagement.

Seventy-five years after its adoption, the 1951 Convention, now ‘globalized’ through its 1967 Protocol and strengthened by international human right law, remains the structural legal framework allowing refugees to be recognized as persons before the law, be included in new communities, and, as such, to concretely access rights in…