Sir,
Permit me—after two decades inside the organization—to offer a candid appraisal of the task ahead. You have been chosen to lead an agency whose founding framework, the 1951 Refugee Convention, was shaped in a Cold War Europe that no longer exists. That convention established essential principles—that asylum claims be heard and that recognized refugees not be returned to danger—but it was applied selectively and depended on a political ecosystem that has since dissolved.
During the Cold War, Western democracies rarely repatriated refugees from Communist states. Episodes such as the Hungarian exodus of 1956 and the Czechoslovak flight of 1968 were treated as political impossibilities; claimants were not rigorously screened because return was not politically feasible and integration into host societies posed few perceived problems. That order began to fray with the Vietnamese boat people.
Two features defined the Vietnamese crisis: Southeast Asian states were unwilling to offer permanent asylum and accepted arrivals only temporarily pending resettlement; and the United States, embarrassed by its defeat, accepted large numbers for resettlement. By 1979, Western countries treated many boat people as refugees. But as outflows continued, the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) of 1989 imposed screening: those recognized as refugees were to be resettled; others were to be returned.
Repatriation was nominally voluntary. In practice, Western governments often turned a blind eye while UNHCR organized removals for those who refused to go back. The CPA resolved the crisis not by law alone but because three political facts converged: origin states agreed to accept returns, the United States changed course, and geopolitical shifts left countries like Vietnam few alternatives. UNHCR served beneficiaries, but the conventions were activated only when politics permitted.
Another instructive case is Sarajevo in 1992. With other agencies unable or unwilling to act, Sadako Ogata authorized an airlift to deliver aid into besieged areas. The people reached were civilians trapped at home, not refugees in the strict sense. The operation succeeded because there was political will for relief and a permissive context.
These episodes show what a high commissioner can do when politics allow. They also show that institutional memory in UNHCR is weak; precedents exist, but their relevance to today’s problems is limited.
The present reality is different. Western industrial democracies are increasingly reluctant to shoulder the costs of violent crises elsewhere. As donor funding tightens, host governments will be forced to manage problems themselves. Consider a small but telling example: when USAID cut subsidies for clinics treating Burmese refugees in Thailand, Thai authorities did what they had long resisted—grant work permits so refugees could pay for health care.
On a larger scale, hosting roughly 1.5 million Rohingya in Bangladesh since 2017 has cost at least US$3 billion and is still rising. A practical option may be to negotiate a one-time lump-sum payment in return for temporary residence and work permits—say, for a decade. Bangladesh may balk, but well-targeted financial leverage can change behavior. There is precedent: in 1996, threats to withdraw funding prompted Malaysia and Indonesia to close the remaining camps for Vietnamese boat people and deport the few who remained, ending that crisis. In some circumstances, withholding aid can be more humane in the long run than continuing to prop up unsustainable arrangements.
This brings me to internal reform. UNHCR has ballooned into a bureaucracy of roughly 17,000 staff. That scale is excessive and has consequences: overpromotion, diluted performance standards, and a tendency to prioritize outputs over impact. Look at China: in 1979, an effective US$50 million resettlement program operated with one mid-level international officer, a secretary, and local staff. Today UNHCR’s modest China program is run by several international staff including a director-level post—an example of institutional drift that has occurred across the agency.
Reducing headcount and flattening management will be politically and institutionally difficult. An agency that presided over its own expansion will resist contraction; meaningful reform may require independent external oversight to design and implement cuts and to ensure ethical, accountable management.
We face simultaneous, unprecedented pressures: mass displacement, cross-border irregular migration, and political unease in donor societies. The convention itself is not obsolete, but the political and institutional ecosystem that sustained it is gone. That ecosystem needs rethinking—perhaps codified in new frameworks that reflect today’s geopolitics, migration dynamics, and fiscal realities.
UNHCR should be at the table shaping those frameworks, but it must do so with political realism, intellectual openness, and a willingness to abandon stale assumptions. That role will invite criticism—from NGOs that prefer moralizing to negotiating, and from entrenched elements within the agency who see change as a threat. History will not vindicate those who cling to yesterday’s models.
You were not explicitly elected to reimagine the office, yet nothing prevents you from doing so. If you take on that challenge—bringing practical politics, fiscal discipline, and fresh thinking to bear—you can leave a more effective UNHCR for the era ahead.
Whatever path you choose, I wish you success.
Alexander Casella
Alexander Casella, PhD, is a former UNHCR director for Asia and Oceania and a former UNHCR regional representative in the Middle East.
