[On December 14th, 1950, the United Nations adopted its Statute on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75th anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and crucial issue in 2025.]
On two prior iterations of a global refugee organization, and how the UNHCR has built on them but gone much further.
Not surprisingly, the first global organization dedicated to assisting refugees was created by the first truly global organization period: the League of Nations, which in 1921 appointed a High Commissioner for Refugees, naming the Norwegian explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen to the role. Nansen had plenty to do in the continuing aftermath of WWI, including his longtime advocacy for Germany becoming part of the League in order to allow for aid to its internally displaced refugees (he finally achieved that goal in 1926). But his organization and role really came to the fore in response to a pair of 1920s European conflicts: the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, which created hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees in particular; and the Armenian Genocide, which had been ongoing and worsening for nearly a decade and about the effects of which Nansen wrote in his 1923 book Armenia and the Near East and two follow-up volumes. From what I can tell, this first international refugee organization was in many ways a one-man show, but Nansen was clearly a good choice for that role.
Nansen passed away in 1930, and like the League of Nations itself his organization became increasingly powerless across the subsequent decade. The Second World War which concluded that decade created an even more global and dire refugee crisis than the first one had, however, and not long after that war’s resolution a new global refugee organization was thus created: the International Refugee Organization (IRO), founded in April 1946 and gradually folded into the operations of the new United Nations. But the IRO was immediately and significantly hamstrung by two aspects of its Constitution (which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1946): it could only work in areas outside of the Soviet bloc and/or controlled by Western armies of occupation; and it would not concern itself with “persons of German ethnic origin” (which in practice meant both German war refugees and many Jewish refugees of the Holocaust). The IRO’s two Directors-General, William Hallam Tuck and J. Donald Kingsley, did what they could within those parameters, but by 1952 the organization had ceased operations—and that was a year or so after it had for all practical purposes been replaced by the UNHCR.
The UNHCR was initially established with a December 1950 statue, the anniversary of which this week’s blog series is commemorating, but it was with the July 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention, also known as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, that the organization’s sweeping mandate was truly defined. That Convention in turn built on an important prior UN document, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had recognized the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. Together, this pair of UN actions made clear that this new international refugee organization wasn’t going to depend on the efforts of heroic individuals, nor that its purview would be in any way limited by geography or politics or time period. While the UNHCR did focus much of its early efforts on European refugees, by the end of the 1950s it had done significant work with Chinese refugees in Hong Kong and Algerian refugees from the revolution in that North African nation, among other communities. And in 1967 the UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees reaffirmed that this organization could continue to evolve as world history did, could address “new refugee situations that have arisen since the Convention was adopted and the refugees concerned that may therefore not fall within the scope of the Convention.” For 75 years now, this vital global entity has done just that.
Next story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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