Does everyone who is persecuted have the right to asylum?

Every year, on 20 June and since 2001, we observe World Refugee Day in remembrance of the millions of human beings seeking refuge and who have become displaced around the world. At the end of 2023 it was estimated that there were 117.3 million stories of lives forced to leave the place they lived in a forceful way due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights’ violations, and other events that severely altered public order.

The first time this day was observed was to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, a treaty that was established mainly for the millions of Europeans who were forced to flee their homes during World War I and the many others who were forcefully displaced during World War II. It is an international instrument that aims to find a solution to situations that may arise anywhere in the world but which, at the time of adoption, was really focusing on what had happened in Europe.

Given its clear geographic limitation, in October 1967 the Convention went through the one and only amendment since its inception through the adoption of a Protocol that eliminated the reference to a geographic and temporal specificity and, hence, increased the scope of the Convention to apply everywhere in the world and grant protection to everyone fleeing from conflict and persecution.

By 2024, 146 countries have ratified the Convention and 147 have ratified its 1967 Protocol. This includes all the EU Member States, Russia, the UK, Japan, Tunisia, China, Australia and Switzerland; and the US, which only ratified the Protocol.

This means that all these countries have an international obligation, assumed in a free and voluntary way, to afford refugees a basic set of rights that allows them to try and continue with their life in a new place (property, housing, education, work, legal documents, aid, etc.) while taking into consideration their overarching duties to:

• Apply the provisions of the Convention to all refugees with no discrimination based on race, religion, or country of origin.
• Afford all refugees in their territory a treatment that is, at least, as favourable as that afforded to their nationals.
• Afford all refugees equal treatment as afforded to foreign nationals generally.
• Refrain from expelling, refouling or placing refugees at the border of their territories when this could endanger their life and freedom based on their race, religion, nationality, belonging to a given social group, or based on their political opinions.

All these obligations are in force, are demandable and should be fulfilled. I know the reality in many regions of the world may seem to prove the opposite, but no; these international obligations are still in force despite, for instance, the approval of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum; the signing of bilateral agreements such as the one held between the UK and Rwanda; or the adoption of national legislation or policies that contain provisions that are clearly contrary to this international protection.

In any case, one should ask oneself if all these laws, treaties, regulations and public policies are compatible with previously acquired international obligations on refuge. The problem is who will demand accountability? What country will have the courage and commitment to human rights to denounce other States when they act against their own international obligations on refugees? There are options to do this, but who will?

From civil society, the academia, and other sectors of society we must continue to denounce the failure to comply with these minimum rights and to denounce, at a national level, anything that goes against these international obligations.

Most importantly, we must remind the rest of society, humanity and our governments, through our everyday actions, that international obligations on refuge continue to be valid, that these obligations are important not only when it is Europeans who are fleeing, and that we could all be refugees, because this isn’t something you plan, it happens.