Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 71
as a whole the ‘refugee population’, or stock of recognised refugees, the
majority of whom are in the poorer parts of the Third World, was 14.9
million in 1989. The numbers peaked in 1992 at 18.2 million, and in 1998
they were down to 11.5 million, the lowest of the last ten years. The decline
was mainly due to declines in the numbers of refugees in Africa and Asia.
But numbers with refugee status in Europe also declined, from 3.2 million
in 1992 to 2.7 million in 1998, in spite of large increases in refugees from
eastern Europe. 116,100 refugees, or less than 1 per cent of the 1998 world
total and 3 per cent of the European total, were in Britain.
Attempts to organise the treatment of refugees on an international basis
began in the 1920s when Fridtjof Nansen was appointed by the League of
Nations as ‘High Commissioner on behalf of the League in connection with
the problem of Russian refugees in Europe’. Some groups of stateless refugees
were issued with a ‘Nansen passport’. The League of Nations also established
a ‘High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and other) coming from Germany’.
The High Commission was largely unsuccessful in its efforts to help Jews.
After the war the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA)
was set up to help resettle refugees; it was replaced by the International
Refugee Organisation (IRO) and then in 1951 by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which had and still has the task of
protecting refugees. The UNHCR was set up under the United Nations
Convention on the Status of Refugees, adopted at Geneva in 1951 and
sometimes known as the Geneva Convention. The 1951 UN convention
continues to be the most important legal instrument determining the fate of
refugees, although in June 2000 the British home secretary Jack Straw raised
the possibility of revising it. It does not, as pre-war international agreements
had, provide for protection of national groups. Instead, it provides protection
for individual refugees who are defined as follows:
Any person who owing to well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race,
religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is
outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling
to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality
and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable, or owing
to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
Under the convention the events giving rise to such fears had to have
occurred before 1951, and most states limited recognition to events which
occurred in Europe. The convention was thus set up to deal with the refugee
crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War and the effects of the Cold
War; the original mandate of the UNHCR was for three years. However in
1967 the Bellagio protocol was adopted and extended the provisions of the
convention to events occurring after 1951 and to non-Europeans, reflecting
the development of conditions in the Third World which cause people to flee.
One hundred and eight states have signed either the convention or the
protocol or both, including all the states of western Europe and some in
eastern Europe. The convention contains a strong prohibition on refoulement,