History of international protection of refugees and displaced persons

A refugee is a person who has been forced to cut links with her or his own country. S/he cannot rely on her or his own government for protection. This is the key difference between a refugee and an economic migrant. Since refugees do not have access to the legal and social protection that a normal government is supposed to give to its citizens, special arrangements have to be made by the international community to respond to their particular situation.

A. The League of Nations

The idea that the international community of states – rather that individual governments or private charitable organisations – has a duty to provide refugees with protection and find solutions to their problems dates from the time of the League of Nations. When the League was established in 1920, the world was still suffering from the effects of World War I, the Russian Revolution and collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had produced mass movements of people in Europe and Asia.

One of the fundamental problems facing refugees was their lack of internationally recognised identity papers. The League introduced the "Nansen passport", named after Fridtjop Nansen, the first High Commissioner for refugees. It allowed thousands to return home or settle in other countries and represented the first in a long line of international legal measures designed to protect refugees.

Over the following years, the League of Nations set up a succession of organisations and agreements to deal with new refugee situations as they emerged. The League defined refugees in terms of specific groups of people who were judged to be in danger if they were returned to their home countries. The list of national categories included Assyrians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Spaniards, and Austrian and German Jews. Starting with the problem of identity papers and travel documents, measures to protect refugees became more comprehensive as time went on, covering a wide range of matters of vital importance to their daily lives, such as the regularisation of their personal status, access to employment and protection against expulsion.

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The Rights of Refugees and Displaced Persons

Source: The State of the World's Refugees: The Challenge of Protection, UNHCR, 1993