The home secretary is attacking a key pillar of postwar humanitarian law in pursuit of eye-catching headlines. Instead, the 1951 refugee convention should be celebrated
And who hosts these refugees, covered by the UNHCR mandate? It is certainly not Britain. More than a third are hosted by just five countries – Turkey, Germany, Iran, Colombia and Pakistan. Three-quarters are hosted in low- and middle- income countries, and 70% by neighbouring countries.
That 780 million, seen in this light, is nothing more than a bogus figure being pushed in pursuit of a grubby and cruel argument. Braverman and her supporters’ mooted reform of the 1951 refugee convention is based on straw-man arguments, cooked up to justify her own hard-right populist position on migration.
What exactly does Braverman want to unpick? The 1951 convention was a milestone in humanitarian law. Drawn up close to the end of the second world war, which saw vast refugee displacements, it provided a single, legal and universal definition of what it meant to be a refugee, as well as significant rights, including non-discrimination.
For Braverman, however, the refugee convention is not to be celebrated for the humanitarian protections that it offers but to be criticised for driving “illegal migration”. For while the figure of 780 million has been deployed as deliberately eye-catching, it is a subtext to Braverman’s more pernicious central argument: her refusal to recognise that some of those crossing the Channel might qualify as refugees under the convention’s definition.
While it seems unlikely that Braverman will find much of a serious international audience for her ideas, her speech marks the latest concerning coarsening of the terms of the debate in the UK around migration and refugees by attacking a key pillar of humanitarianism in pursuit of headlines.
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