In 2015, a picture of a dead child on the beach shocked the world and drew its attention

to the issues of refugees. On the media, the world would hear about the refugee crisis,
in which masses of people were being forced out of their countries and risking their lives
seeking asylum. European countries started to highlight the great number of migrants
they were receiving and the burden that this was for hosting countries, calling out for the
necessity of burden sharing. However, it is important to be critical about the information
being spread. For once, Europe is not the place hosting the biggest number of refugees.
Countries like Turkey, for example, have been receiving asylum seekers in a much
greater number in the last decade. Besides, masses of forced migrants are not a new
phenomenon. The refugee issues require a global mobilization to be solved (Duarte et
al, 2016). For this reason, in 1951, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) was created and has been the only UN agency with the objective of ensuring
refugee protection and well being (UNHCR, 2010). The aim of the essay is to
investigate the political and institutional impacts in the UNHCR with the end of the Cold
War, having in mind the refugee issue as a global and long time issue to be addressed.

The UNHCR was established on 1 January 1951. In the same year, it created a tool, the
United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugee, which had as an aim to be
the UN agency responsible for honoring Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, that assures that every person has the right of seeking asylum, as well
as establishing the basic rights of these people. Besides the Convention, another
UNHCR tool that can be used by States is the UNHRC Protocol from 1967, which
slightly changed the definition of refugee in the Convention, which will be further
explored in the essay. There are currently 147 States that signed at least one of these
tools (UNHCR, 2010). The agency is represented by the High Commissioner, who does
not have political authority with States or other UN agencies. Its headquarters is in
Geneva, although the majority of their staff works in offices in the field, all over the
world. Reports have shown that the UNHCR staff is highly committed to their cause and
values. However, they are in a constant state of stress and many times risk their lives in
their work (Loescher et al, 2008).
The actions of the UNHCR are divided in three durable solutions. They are repatriation,
integration and resettlement. The repatriation solution focus on taking displaced people
back to their country of origin in a safe way. For that, they created the 4R: “repatriation,
reintegration, rehabilitation and construction” (Loescher, 2008, p. 116). For a long time
and specially during the Cold War, that meant that the UNHCR would wait for conflicts
to be over, so it would be safe for people to be back. It is important to notice that, for the
block aligned to the United States, it was unthinkable that someone would want to go
back to one of the Communist countries (Crisp, 2001). The second solution, integration,
aims at integrating the refugee in the society of their first country of asylum, the one
where they first arrived. The last one, resettlement, aims at integrating the asylum
seeker in the society of the country that accepted to host them other than the first one
they arrived (Loescher, 2008).

The creation of the UNHCR came from the tensions derived from the Cold War. There
were clear divisions between the United States, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
and the Western Europe related to the best solutions for the refugee crisis. For the
Soviet bloc, repatriation was the only way to handle the refugee issues. The United
States believed in the resettlement of the war refugees. Western Europe, on the other
hand, believed that there was the necessity of an agency to handle the issues. The
1951 Convention was written by 35 states. Amongst them, Egypt was the only
independent Nation State in Africa. The Soviet Union and its Nation State allies did not
sign it. Therefore, the agency absorbed the world’s tension from the very beginning,
having divergent and sometimes conflicting views on how to act on the refugee issues
(Cunliffe, 1995).

The only change in the 1951 Convention was the 1967 Protocol, which made the
definition of refugee broader (UNHCR, 2010). The first definition of a refugee was very
excluding, with a strong time and place limitation, as it only considered a refugee those
who were fleeing from events happening before the Convention. It considered a refugee
those with a grounded reason for fear of persecution, who could not find protection in
their own country. However, it did not include people fleeing from armed conflicts or for
economic issues. By that definition, seeking asylum was also not considered a human
right and the host countries’ sovereignty was prioritized over the asylum seekers’ needs
(Cunliffe, 1995). Finally, the Convention did not address how host States would afford
receiving the refugees either (Loescher, 2008). With the Protocol, the time definition
was removed (UNHCR, 2010), opening the definition for those who are seeking asylum
for reasons other than the World War II. The current definition of refugee states that
they are “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to
a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” (UNHCR, 2010).

With the end of the Cold War and the decolonization in Africa and Asia, other changes
took place. Conflicts all over the world started to rise and the refugee population has
dramatically changed in size and nationality. In 1950, the estimation was of 1 million
refugees whereas in 1991 it skyrocketed to 15 million. Besides, during the Cold War,
the majority of the refugee population were Europeans who came from countries of the
Soviet bloc. Because of that, there was a better disposition of accepting the asylum
requirements, as the Western countries could use them as an anti-communist
propaganda. This way, these people could be used as a political tool, giving the
impression that the communist countries were a bad place to live, which would make a
great number of people try to seek asylum elsewhere. However, with the end of the
Cold War, many citizens of Africa and Asia started to seek asylum. The change in the
nationality also changed the foreign politics of many of those countries. The frontier
control was reinforced and many barriers were created to prevent those refugees to
entry the countries. That increased the crisis within the UNHCR as the number of
refugees was increasing, but the number of countries willing to accept those asylum
seekers was reduced (Cunliffe, 1995).

It is important to highlight the importance that the UN, and therefore all its agencies,
give to sovereignty. The UN would try to be seen as apolitical, during the Cold War, as a
way to reinforce that they would not interfere in the matters of Nation States. For that
reason, although the Convention stated that every person should have the right to seek
asylum, it was the host countries’ right to accept the requirement or not. As a
consequence, the UNHCR gave a lot of focus to repatriation out of the three durable
solutions (Barnett, 2001), many times repatriating individuals before it was actually safe
to do so (Loescher, 2008).

Because of the great focus on repatriation after the Cold War, the UNHCR had to shift
its focus on development programs to reintegrate the returnees in the society. Before,
the agency would make sure that repatriation was voluntary and would give little support
to individual refugees, such as the transport back to the returnee’s origin country and a
package with objects for basic needs. In the 1990s, this was considerated insufficient
and the strategy was changed. The guidelines followed five basic principles. Firstly, the
UNHCR embraced the responsibility of the reintegration. Secondly, the assistance
started to be focused on the community instead of the individuals. Thirdly, the focus of
the actions would be in the development of the community, in order to prevent
dependency. Fourthly, the aim of the actions would be the development of the areas of
origin. Lastly, there should be a transition between the short and long term actions.
Although the agency has had good results in programs that were related to
infrastructure building, the community-based actions were not as successful (Crisp,
2001).

Another topic to be addressed is the issue of funding in the UNHCR. The agency does
not have a fixed budget. It operates solely on a donation basis, in which the United
States is responsible for 30% of the donations and Western Nation-States from the
North are responsible for almost the totality of the funding. Besides, the countries make
their donations with what is called “earmarks”. That means that they can choose the
projects in which their donations will be allocated. As a consequence, these countries
do not always choose to support the projects in more need. The projects aimed at the
development in Africa, for example, are the ones that receive least budget. Besides, the
agency never knows how much money they will have for the projects, as they do not
have a fixed income. That makes it harder for long time planning of the projects. This
configuration of funding makes the actions clearly Eurocentric and, more often than not,
does not prioritize the places that need the most. As a response to that, the UNHCR
has been trying to get different countries to donate, so they can diversify the earmarks.
Besides, the UNHCR now alternates its Chair between the North and the South in order
to attract the donation of those countries. Another action has been experimenting with
the funding coming from the private sector (Loescher, 2008).

The bias in the funding and the flaws in the UNHCR have created another problem to
the agency. With the rise of other humanitarian institutions to deal with the issue of
refugee, such as the European Commission and the Consultation on Asylum and
Migration, many countries have been shifting their donations to these other institutions,
creating competition for the UNHCR. This way, these countries can have more control
on how the issue is being addressed to make sure it is in a way that they will have
advantages (Loescher, 2008). Therefore, it is of utmost importance that the agency
finds alternative sources of funding.

Considering the end of the Cold War, it is possible to notice that the issue of refugees in
the UN and, therefore in the UNHCR, have been through many changes both in its
views, actions and institutional policies. The end of the Cold War has brought a huge
transformation in the number and profile of refugees, as well as in the way that this has
been handled by countries all over the world. This has impacted the UNHCR and
demanded that the agency took action to make changes and adapt to the new scenario.
The agency, that has been very state-centric in the beginning, has shift its profile to a
more humanistic approach. This was reflected in the way the UNHCR defines a
refugee, the more holistic approach for development programs, the seek of
diversification in the funding. The agency has also been pressured to have repatriation
as its main durable solution, which has been challenging it to find solutions to
sustainable reintegration. There are many issues still to be addressed or rethought in
the future and we can expect a new wave of changes with the recent changes in the
configuration of refugee issues.

References
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undertow. International Migration Review, 35(1), 244-277. DOI:
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https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2001.tb00010.x

Cunliffe, A. (1995). The refugee crises: A study of the United Nations High Commission
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Duarte, M., Lippert-Rasmussen, K., Parekh, S., & Vitikainen, A. (2016). Introduction to
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Ethics, 12(3), 245-251. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2016.1253034

Loescher, G., Betts, A., & Milner, J. (2008). The United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR): The politics and practice of refugee protection into the 21st
century.

UNHCR, 2010. Convention and Protocol Relating to The Status of Refugees. [online]

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