North Western University, Khulna

Department of Law
Program: LL. B (Hon’s)
4th Year 3rd Semester
Course Title: International Migration & Refugee Law
Course Code: LL. B - 4303
An Assignment
On
History of International Refugee Law

Submitted To:
S.M. Hayat Mahmud
Assistant Professor of Law
Khulna University
Khulna

Submitted By:
Jahidur Rahman
ID No- L.L.B 20173018106
Department of Law
4th Year 3rd Semester
North Western University, Khulna

Date of Submission: 22 September 2021

The mass expulsions and persecutions before, during, and after the Second World War, then,
have shaped the contours of international refugee law until this very day. In 1938, a number of
states Belgium, Great Britain, and Ireland, India, Denmark and Iceland, Spain, France, Norway,
and the Netherlands agreed on the Convention concerning the Status of Refugees coming from
Germany. During the Second World War, the emerging United Nations founded two agencies
tasked with the relief of the European refugees the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration in 1943 and the International Refugee Organization in 1947 that preceded the
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees established in 1950. Originally
elected as a team of only three years, it was tasked with the protection of refugees, the
facilitation of their voluntary repatriation, and their assimilation within new national
communities. The plight of refugees during and in the aftermath of the Second World War was
addressed in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which includes a
right to asylum this was, however, not meant to be an individual right of a state. rather, it
confirmed the right of the state to grant asylum. The most decisive development was the
adoption of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees commonly known
as the Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention on Refugees on 28 July 1951. It has
generally been described as the most comprehensive legally binding international instrument in
universal refugee law and its key provisions remain applicable until this very day. Its temporary
scope, however, was explicitly restricted to World War II and the subsequent persecutions the
definition of a refugee refers to the events occurring before 1 January 1951. In addition, states
could opt to consider only Europeans as refugees in the sense of the Refugee Convention.
However, already at the time of the conclusion of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the drafters
acknowledged the need for a universal standard. This goal was achieved through the 1967
protocol to the Refugee Convention which eliminated the temporal and geographical limitations.
In recent decades, refugee law has also been heavily influenced by the evolution of human rights
law which started immediately after the Second World War and gained increasing importance
during the 1970s. Even though human rights treaties such as the Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights hereinafter CCPR or the European Convention on Human Rights hereinafter ECHR and
its protocols do not include provisions on asylum as such, many of their key provisions such as
the prohibition of torture and other forms of ill-treatment are also highly relevant for asylum
seekers.
Grounded in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, which recognizes
the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries, the United Nations
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in 1951, is the centerpiece of
international refugee protection today. (1) The Convention entered into force on 22 April 1954,
and it has been subject to only one amendment in the form of a 1967 Protocol, which removed
the geographic and temporal limits of the 1951 Convention. (2) The 1951 Convention, as a post-
Second World War instrument, was originally limited in scope to persons fleeing events
occurring before 1 January 1951 and within Europe. The 1967 Protocol removed these
limitations and thus gave the Convention universal coverage. It has since been supplemented by
refugee and subsidiary protection regimes in several regions, (3) as well as via the progressive
development of international human rights law.