Refugees - we’d like to help, but …

All of this has been against a political background and events which the states were simply unable to change or even influence, or which other political interests led them to maintain or encourage.

It is certainly not the case, however, that state practice reveals a common golden thread of humanitarian commitment which time duly translated from conduct into rule. On the contrary, bouts of negative self-interest and dissembling, and persistent unwillingness to sign on to legal obligation, frequently interrupted such legal development.

Through the 1920s Nansen’s mandate expanded to include other groups in addition to the Russians. Although each of these later groups was seen to share certain common characteristics, states preferred an ad hoc, group by group approach, seeking to limit their commitments to known categories and staying away from any general description of unknown quantity.

Following Nansen’s death in 1930, no new High Commissioner was appointed at the time but the functions and responsibilities were transferred to a new office named in Nansen’s honour.

In October 1933, as the Nansen Office was on the point of winding up and on the eve of a decade or so of devastating displacements, a diplomatic conference was convened in Geneva to draft a convention on the legal status of the refugee, and to promote the principle of equal treatment with nationals.

At once the question arose, whether the new treaty should go beyond the specific categories already recognised in the 1920s, and include anyone who no longer enjoyed the protection of their country of origin.

League officials were concerned with what appear today to be legal niceties. They worried that the former countries of origin - the “refugee-producing countries” - might protest, even as they also affirmed that the international community of the time, being based on principles of law and justice, could hardly allow a substantial number of individuals to live without a clear legal status.

Like the drafters who followed them 20 or so years later, they were cautious, anxious not to appear to be doing anything innovative, and claimed merely to be consolidating earlier practice.

But there were indeed innovations and hints of problems yet to come. Non-refoulement - the now familiar principle that no state should return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to where he or she may face persecution - was mentioned for the first time in an international agreement.

Limitations on the power of expulsion were also mooted, for example, where the only reason was destitution, and where destitution in turn was consequential on the state itself having prohibited employment.

The interlinkage of responses and consequences began to be seen and understood: access to education was readily identified as an essential condition of equality but also a resource of potential benefit to the asylum state, should the refugees it trained ever be able to return home.

That debate revealed and further confirmed the central elements: recognition and acceptance of the international character of the refugee problem, at institutional and practical levels; the continuing relevance of national interests; and the convergence in fact of national practices, reflecting in various degrees the acceptance of common principles.