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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a Labour peer and a former child refugee and MP
In 1938, 32 countries gathered in Evian, France, failed to reach an agreement to let in hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Protection was dependent on each country’s discretion at the exclusion of certain groups. For example, Switzerland’s border restrictions allowed for the admission of political refugees but barred entry to “those who seek refuge on racial grounds, as for example, Jews”. It wasn’t alone in denying safety to those fleeing Nazi persecution.
When the international community defined who has the right to seek asylum in the wake of the Holocaust, it was clear that it must be based on a person’s need of protection from persecution and not left to countries’ discretion. And so, the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK was instrumental in developing, was established.
The decades since have proved time and again that the principles laid down by the convention remain relevant and important. They include that refugees have the legal right to seek asylum and recipient countries must not impose penalties on them. These have become fundamental tenets of modern civil society and the international rule of law.
It is with alarm that I have witnessed global efforts to unpick what the world was so clear-sighted in establishing. In the UK, this began with the former Conservative government misidentifying asylum seekers as “illegal” or “invaders”. At the same time, they closed almost every safe route to the country available to refugees. Those fleeing conflict confronted a near perfect Catch-22: if they came to the UK via “irregular” routes they would be deemed “illegal”, but they overwhelmingly only had access to “irregular” routes. In its very title, the Illegal Migrants Act of 2023 reinforced the message that asylum seekers were criminals.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act went even further. Its suggestion that asylum seekers should be banished and their bid for refugee status be determined in a distant, unaccountable country was flagrant in its disregard for the Refugee Convention.
The current Labour government’s recent decision to change guidance on how to apply the “good character” requirement for British citizenship is also unhelpful. If allowed to stand, the amendment will punish refugees already settled in the UK by refusing them citizenship on the basis of how they travelled here.
Beyond the UK, a sweeping away of the rights of refugees is spreading, with offshoring, enforced repatriation and pushbacks already in place or under discussion in Italy, Hungary, and Austria. US President Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to threaten the mass displacement of millions of people represents the worst excesses of this callous disregard for the protections established for us all over 70 years ago.
Attacks on the rights of refugees is the canary in the coal mine. These now extend beyond the Refugee Convention to other instruments of international law including the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court.
Some argue that because countries run humanitarian programmes in response to mass refugee and humanitarian crises, there is no longer any need for the Refugee Convention. In the past 10 years in the UK, for instance, more than 400,000 people in need of protection from countries such as Hong Kong and Ukraine have arrived through temporary, nationality-specific visa schemes. However, it is clear that these specific, limited and discretionary schemes are no substitute for the fundamental protections enshrined in the convention.
The global community was once able to arbitrarily refuse to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. My fear is that affording protections and safety to refugees is, tragically, becoming as unpopular today as offering protection and safety to many of Europe’s Jews was in 1938.
