Refugees - we’d like to help, but …

But as is often the case with international meetings, the conference was also a time for self-congratulation. One after another, the participants recited their own state’s contribution to solving the Russian refugee problem, and why, more often than not, they could not be expected to do much more.

As the Conference wound down to its conclusion, most States indicated, with little obvious enthusiasm, that the matter of signature and ratification would have to be referred to capitals. Promises to continue to receive refugees were made, but the reluctance to accept specific obligations re-emerged.

Only three States signed on the day. The President of the Conference was confident a substantial number of ratifications would follow; but only eight States ratified, and three of them with substantial reservations and declarations.

The years that followed, of course, were dominated by refugee movements - from fascism, Nazism, and the Spanish civil war. As the reality of Nazi militarism began to penetrate political circles, President Roosevelt convened a conference at Evian in 1938. Notwithstanding the times, humanitarian responses were not in the air.

On the contrary, refugees were the potential threats - to the economy, social cohesion, and the process of “appeasement”. Accommodation on exodus with the Nazi regime was contemplated, a new intergovernmental committee on refugees was set up, but practical action (let alone agreement on standards of treatment) was not forthcoming. The war would change all that, though in unexpected ways.

When states finally came together again in the new United Nations, refugees were suddenly high on the agenda. In its first London session in February 1946, the General Assembly identified three key principles: 

1. that the refugee problem was international in character;
2. that there should be no forced return of those with valid objections to going back to their country; and
3. that, subject to the above, repatriation should be promoted and facilitated.

The following year, with a short-term specialised agency - the International Refugee Organisation - now established in principle, the General Assembly called on states to accept a “fair share” of so-called unrepatriable refugees.

Yet the IRO had only ever been seen as a temporary agency, charged with providing protection and solutions for a temporary problem. Even with the continuing exodus from Eastern Europe, western states generally were keen to find an alternative.

The model they chose was an initially non-operational United Nations agency - the UN High Commissioner for Refugees - and a complementary international agreement by way of which states would commit themselves to specific obligations on behalf of refugees: the 1951 Convention.

Australia’s background contribution after World War II to the resettlement of refugees and displaced persons under the auspices of the IRO was, in effect, a response to the General Assembly’s 1947 call on states to take a fair share of non-repatriable refugees.

By then some 160,000 refugee migrants had been admitted to Australia under an agreement with the IRO. Every resettled refugee was required to sign an undertaking, agreeing to remain for two years in the employment found for them and not to change employment without permission.