Sir,
It would be preposterous of me to offer congratulations on your election to head the UN Refugee Agency. Having served 20 years with the organization, I would like to share some observations.
You have been elected to flog a dead horse.
The 1951 Refugee Convention, the foundation of your organization, was conceived in a European Cold War context. Based on its principles—that people claiming refugee status should be heard and that recognized refugees should be protected from refoulement—Western governments built an extensive body of national asylum laws. In practice, however, the principle was applied selectively. During the Cold War, no European democracy would repatriate someone fleeing a Communist country. In crises such as Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, those who fled to the West were not screened for refugee status because repatriation was politically impossible and integration posed few cultural difficulties.
This order began to change with the Vietnamese boat people. Two attributes defined that exodus: Southeast Asian countries were unwilling to provide permanent asylum and accepted refugees only temporarily pending resettlement elsewhere; and the United States, humiliated by its defeat, felt obliged to resettle large numbers. By 1979 Vietnamese boat people were effectively treated as refugees and resettled in the US and Western countries. When outflows continued, the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) introduced screening: those recognized as refugees would be resettled, and those not would be repatriated.
Repatriation was supposed to be voluntary. Yet, with Western governments turning a blind eye, UNHCR organized deportation operations for the last groups who refused return. The CPA closed the boat people crisis only because three conditions were met: origin states accepted returns, the US moved on from Vietnam, and the Soviet collapse left Hanoi with no alternative but rapprochement. Throughout, UNHCR served its beneficiaries—but conventions were activated only when political conditions allowed.
Another defining episode was the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. With other agencies inert, Sadako Ogata authorized an airlift to deliver aid inside Bosnia. The beneficiaries were neither refugees nor displaced persons in the technical sense; they were civilians in their homes. It was a case where UNHCR acted because governments wanted humanitarian relief and the political context permitted it.
Both the CPA and Bosnia show what a high commissioner can do when politics makes it possible. But UNHCR has little institutional memory, and those precedents have limited relevance to today’s challenges.
Looking ahead, Western industrialized democracies are less willing to remedy humanitarian crises caused by violence in other parts of the world. When donor funds decline, host governments will increasingly handle problems themselves. A small example: when USAID suspended subsidies for clinics serving Burmese refugees in Thailand, Thai authorities did what they had long refused to do—grant work permits so refugees could cover their health costs.
On a larger scale, the cost of hosting some 1.5 million Rohingya expelled from Myanmar to Bangladesh since 2017 is estimated at least US$3 billion and rising. One practical option might be to offer Bangladesh a one-time lump sum in exchange for granting Rohingya residence and work permits for, say, ten years. Bangladesh may resist, but well-targeted threats to cut funding could be persuasive. There is precedent: in 1996 threats to cut funding induced Malaysia and Indonesia to close the last camps for Vietnamese boat people and deport the remaining few, ending that crisis. In some circumstances, denying aid is more humanitarian than providing it.
Bureaucracies proliferate if unchecked, and UNHCR is no exception. The organization now has roughly 17,000 staff—an abhorrent number that could be halved. Consider China: in 1979 UNHCR ran a US$50 million resettlement program for Vietnamese refugees with one mid-level international staffer and a secretary in Beijing, supported by local staff. Four decades later UNHCR runs a small program in China budgeted at about $350,000 managed by five international staff including a director-level post. This drift occurred across the organization. Overstaffing and over-promotion devalue performance and prioritize quantity over quality.
Reducing staff is difficult. A bureaucracy that presided over staff inflation may lack the appetite to reverse course; an outside independent entity might be required to oversee cuts and reform. Ethical management demands it.
Today the world faces simultaneous crises of a magnitude rarely seen before. Population displacement, refugee flows and globalization of irregular migration have produced growing unease in many industrialized societies—precisely the major donors to UNHCR. The result is a new paradigm, one that bears little resemblance to the ecosystem in which the Refugee Convention was conceived. The convention itself is not dead; the ecosystem that sustained it is. That ecosystem needs a new convention.
Governments are groping for solutions and have not been particularly successful. Democracies, constrained by electoral cycles and short-term thinking, find it hard to plan ahead. UNHCR should be involved in shaping new frameworks—but it must operate constructively, with open minds, political realism, and a perception of today’s world rather than yesterday’s.
Your involvement in such an effort will invite criticism—from some NGOs that prefer preaching to practice and from dogmatic elements within your office. History will not be on their side.
Although nobody elected you to reimagine the office for the future, who’s to stop you if you do?
But whatever you do, sir, I wish you luck.
Alexander Casella
Alexander Casella, PhD, is a former UNHCR director for Asia and Oceania and a former UNHCR regional representative in the Middle East.
