75 Years of the Refugee Convention: Ensuring Rights on Paper are also Rights in Practice

On the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Yusra Herzi, Program Officer for Forced Displacement at PILnet, Jasmine Simperingham, PILnet’s Program Director for Forced Displacement, and Dr. Awmaima Amrayaf, Senior Impact Adviser at DLA Piper and a member of PILnet’s Global Board, share their reflections on its ongoing importance and the role of the legal community in upholding the rights it contains.

After the horrors of World War II displaced millions, the 1951 Refugee Convention was created to commit states to provide concrete rights and protection to those forced to flee. Originally limited to Europe, the Convention now serves as the fundamental legal instrument protecting people experiencing displacement around the world. Seventy-five years on, it remains one of the clearest expressions of a simple principle: a person does not lose their rights because they are forced to cross a border. The challenge today is not whether that principle remains relevant; it is whether our institutions, policies, and practices are equipped to deliver on it.

PILnet is joining the UN Refugee Agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and members of the Civil Society Coalition to uphold the 1951 Refugee Convention in calling for renewed commitment to the Convention’s principles. We are engaging with UNHCR’s year of action and dialogue—a year-long series of dialogues asking how the international protection system can better respond to the realities of displacement today. Specifically, we will be asking how the legal community can respond more effectively. Are we adapting fast enough? Do our institutions, practices, and partnerships reflect the realities experienced by displaced people? And if refugees are already acting as advocates, paralegals, researchers, and lawyers within their own communities, what would it take for the legal profession to recognize, support, and learn from that expertise?

Seventy-five years on, pressure for the Convention to make good on its promises is growing.

More than 117 million people are forcibly displaced today, a number so vast it risks losing all human meaning. A teacher whose qualifications are not recognized in the country that gave her shelter. A father held in detention at a border with no interpreter, no explanation, and no way to challenge what is happening to him. In each of these cases and countless others, the 1951 Refugee Convention gives that person rights: to have their qualifications and status recognized, to a fair hearing, to protection from arbitrary detention, and to not be returned to a country where they face persecution or serious harm (non-refoulement).  The principle of non-refoulement sits at the heart of the Convention. Because non-refoulement has been recognized as a rule of customary international law, binding on states whether or not they have ratified the Convention, every lawyer—not only those working in refugee law—has a stake in whether it holds. When non-refoulement is eroded, it is not a niche protection gap. It is a crack in the architecture of international law itself.

The Convention remains the backbone of the international protection system, but that system is under serious strain. Around the world, asylum standards are eroding. Accelerated border procedures that undermine due process, and de facto detention for people who have committed no crime, are on the rise. So too are “externalization measures” that seek to shift or avoid state responsibility for refugee protection, often restricting access to territory, asylum procedures, and effective remedies, and undermining the state’s legal obligation not to return people to face serious harm. 

As displacement continues to rise and the international protection system comes under increasing pressure, we must ensure that the rights guaranteed by the Convention and the customary international law obligation of non-refoulment that stand alongside it are felt in practice, not just recognized in principle. But this is becoming harder for the legal community to do.

Migration and citizenship have become deeply politicized, and the lawyers and advocates helping people access legal rights and pathways are increasingly recast as part of the problem they are trying to solve. This is not confined to policy. Lawyers, paralegals, and legal aid providers have faced harassment, intimidation, and prosecution simply for representing asylum seekers. 

At the same time, funding reductions of up to 60 percent have forced UNHCR and NGO partners to close offices, cut staff, and scale back legal programs, precisely as needs are rising fastest. We know that access to legal support shapes outcomes at every stage: whether someone understands the asylum process they are in, whether wrongful detention can be challenged, and whether a protection claim is properly made and fairly decided. Legal expertise is not a luxury in this system. It is embedded in its infrastructure which is one of the reasons why the legal community will always have a unique role to play in ensuring that the rights in the Convention are experienced in practice.

We are uniting the legal community. 

Recognizing the essential role the legal community plays in advancing access to justice, rights, and solutions to displacement, in 2019, PILnet led on the development of the Global Refugee Forum Legal Community Pledge (the Pledge). The Pledge is a unique global initiative which brings together legal service providers and advocates—including nonprofits, law firms, refugee-led organizations, UN agencies, bar associations, and law schools—and mobilizes commitments and builds partnerships in solidarity with displaced people. Collectively, pledge members have committed to provide over one million hours of free legal assistance. To support the coordination of the Pledge, PILnet has built a dedicated team combining deep legal experience in the sector with the lived experience of displacement:

• We operate the only globally accessible legal matching brokerage dedicated to connecting nonprofits in this sector with pro bono support, which has connected over 100 organizations with free legal services and built over 200 new pro bono partnerships.
• We pioneered a pro bono pitching roundtable model, allowing nonprofits to pitch project ideas directly to law firms.
• We track pro bono hours, facilitate monthly member exchanges, host annual workshops, and coordinate joint advocacy and engagement with UN and other actors, including a joint statement from members of the Pledge at last year’s Global Refugee Forum Progress Review. 

We will be drawing on this experience as we engage with the dialogues around the 75th Anniversary, including to highlight and examine the role of partnerships and coordinated legal sector mobilization. 

Refugees must be viewed as full partners, not just consultants.

Through this work, we have learned that coordination matters, but so does meaningful participation of those with lived experience of displacement. Some of the most effective and innovative approaches emerge when lawyers work alongside refugee leaders and refugee-led organizations, not simply as beneficiaries of legal assistance but as partners in identifying needs, shaping priorities, and co-designing solutions. While the legal community brings expertise in the law, people with lived experience bring expertise in how laws, policies, and protection systems operate in practice. Bringing these forms of knowledge together has strengthened the impact of the Pledge and offers important lessons for the wider refugee protection system.

Centering lived experience has become central to our work at PILnet. Across the legal and forced displacement sector we see that participation often remains consultative rather than transformative. If meaningful participation is to become more than a principle, those of us working to ensure that the rights in the Refugee Convention are upheld must be experienced in practice that moves beyond inclusion towards genuine power-sharing. That means recognizing refugees not merely as beneficiaries of protection but as partners, experts, and leaders in shaping the systems that affect their lives. Meaningful participation may bring about more innovative programs and policies but it is not itself an innovation. It is essential to building legal and other responses that are effective, accountable, and grounded in reality.

What we will be doing.

• Engaging with UNHCR and the coalition to ensure the legal community is an integral part of the dialogues taking place throughout the year, and that the importance of legal assistance and access to law is reflected throughout.
• Using our convening power to bring members of the legal community together with refugees to interrogate how the legal community can respond more effectively, including through a dedicated session at the PILnet Global Forum in Cape Town and further discussion at our Pledge Workshop on Friday, 13 November.
• Supporting GRF Legal Community Pledge members, encouraging them to hold their own dialogues, and helping translate those discussions into practical actions to strengthen access to justice, support refugee-led solutions, and close the gap between rights on paper and rights in practice.

What you can do.

• Join the Global Refugee Forum (GRF) Legal Community Pledge. Commit to providing pro bono hours, hiring and including refugees in your work, and advocating for stronger legal protection for displaced people. If you have not already joined, this is the most direct way to make a sustained, structured commitment to refugee rights, aligned with advocacy and other collective efforts.
• Offer your pro bono capacity. The GRF Legal Community Pledge matching mechanism exists to connect firms with organizations working on forced displacement, and demand continues to outpace supply. Look out for matters on our global clearinghouse list and take part in our upcoming Refugee Rights Pro Bono Roundtables in Asia and the US. Firms that have committed to the Pledge receive prioritized access to these impactful pro bono opportunities.
• Look honestly at how you work. Are your partnerships with displaced communities and the organizations serving them genuinely equitable? Ask your partners whether your tools, your processes, and where you direct your legal assistance actually match what is needed.
• Use this anniversary as a moment to connect and influence. Reach out to local organizations and refugee-led groups in your community; bring colleagues and clients into the conversation; and help shift the narrative around refugees within your firm or institution and beyond it.

The Convention’s future will not be determined by its text alone. It will be determined by the willingness of all of us—states, civil society, refugee leaders, and the legal community—to uphold its principles and make them real. We hope you will take this opportunity to join us and explore how the legal community can respond more effectively to forced displacement. 

If you are interested in joining the Pledge, check out the Pledge Framework and Pledging Guidance, or reach out to any of us to discuss.  If you are interested in discussing ways that you can engage in the 75th Anniversary dialogues this year, or even host your own dialogue, do get in touch! Visit our Refugee Convention 75th Anniversary Page here.