The Refugee Convention is dead: let's bury it and start again

In the past decade, there's been a shift away from international norms for protecting people displaced by war and persecution. What would it take to fix this?

A Protest supporting refugees at the gates of Downing Street in November following the deaths of 27 people in the English Channel. Penelope Barritt/Alamy Live News

The 1951 Refugee Convention is dead; all that remains is to formally bury it.

For too long, the convention, which defines the term ‘refugee’ as well as his or her rights, has been more honoured in the breach than the observance. So has the 1967 protocol to the convention, which broadened refugees’ rights by removing geographical restrictions — the original convention applied only to Europe — and giving people fleeing persecution anywhere equal claim to international protection.

The list of countries brazenly flouting the convention is long — and growing longer — even though a newly published flagship report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the UN migration agency, says that the vast majority of people in the world (96.4%) continue to live in the country in which they were born. The World Migration Report …