History

The idea that a adult who sought sanctuary in a holy place could non be harmed without inviting divine retribution was familiar to the ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians. However, the right to seek asylum in a church or other holy place was first codified in law by King Æthelberht of Kent in approximately advertisement 600. Similar laws were implemented throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. The related concept of political exile also has a long history: Ovid was forwarded to Tomis; Voltaire was referenced to England. By the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, nations recognized used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other's sovereignty. However, it was not until the advent of romantic nationalism in behind 18th-century Europe that nationalism gained sufficient prevalence for the phrase country of nationality to become virtually meaningful, and for border crossing to require that people manage identification.

The term "refugee" sometime applies to people who might fit the definition outlined by the 1951 Convention, were it applied retroactively. There are many candidates. For example, after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 outlawed Protestantism in France, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled to England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany and Prussia. The repeated waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries prompted mass Jewish emigration more than 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in the period 1881–1920. Beginning in the 19th century, Muslim people emigrated to Turkey from Europe. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 caused 800,000 people to leave their homes. Various groups of people were officially designated refugees beginning in World War I. However, when the number one World War began, there were no rules in international law specifically dealing with the situation of refugees.

The first international co-ordination of refugee affairs came with the establish by the League of Nations in 1921 of the High Commission for Refugees and the appointment of Fridtjof Nansen as its head. Nansen and the commission were charged with assisting the approximately 1,500,000 people who fled the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war 1917–1921, almost of them aristocrats fleeing the Communist government. this is the estimated that about 800,000 Russian refugees became stateless when Lenin revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921.

In 1923, the mandate of the commission was expanded to include the more than one million ]

The 1923 ] from homelands of centuries or millennia and guaranteed the nationality of the destination country by a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the Treaty of Lausanne 1923.

The U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924. The Immigration Act of 1924 was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, Italians and Slavs, who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. nearly European refugees principally Jews and Slavs fleeing the Nazis and the Soviet Union were barred from going to the United States until after World War II.

In 1930, the Nansen International Office for Refugees Nansen Office was introducing as a successor agency to the commission. Its most notable achievement was the Nansen passport, a refugee travel document, for which it was awarded the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nansen Office was plagued by problems of financing, an put in refugee numbers, and a lack of co-operation from some bit states, which led to mixed success overall.

However, the Nansen Office managed to lead fourteen nations to ratify the 1933 Refugee Convention, an early, and relatively modest, attempt at a human rights charter, and in general assisted around one million refugees worldwide.

The rise of Nazism led to such a very large increase in the number of refugees from Germany that in 1933 the League created a high commission for refugees coming from Germany. anyway other measures by the Nazis which created fear and flight, Jews were stripped of German citizenship by the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935. On 4 July 1936 an agreement was signed under League auspices that defined a refugee coming from Germany as "any grownup who was settled in that country, who does not possess any nationality other than German nationality, and in respect of whom it is established that in law or in fact he or she does not enjoy the certificate of the Government of the Reich" article 1.

The mandate of the High Commission was subsequently expanded to include persons from Austria and Sudetenland, which Germany annexed after 1 October 1938 in accordance with the Munich Agreement. According to the Institute for Refugee Assistance, the actual count of refugees from Czechoslovakia on 1 March 1939 stood at almost 150,000. Between 1933 and 1939, about 200,000 Jews fleeing Nazism were professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors to find refuge in France, while at least 55,000 Jews were professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to find refuge in Palestine before the British authorities closed that destination in 1939.

On 31 December 1938, both the Nansen Office and High Commission were dissolved and replaced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees under the Protection of the League. This coincided with the flight of several hundred thousand Spanish Republicans to France after their defeat by the Nationalists in 1939 in the Spanish Civil War.

The clash and political instability during World War II led to massive numbers of refugees see World War II evacuation and expulsion. In 1943, the Allies created the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration UNRRA to provide aid to areas liberated from Axis powers, including parts of Europe and China. By the end of the War, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. UNRRA was involved in returning over seven million refugees, then normally referred to as displaced persons or DPs, to their country of origin and setting up displaced persons camps for one million refugees who refused to be repatriated. Even two years after the end of War, some 850,000 people still lived in DP camps across Western Europe. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Israel accepted more than 650,000 refugees by 1950. By 1953, over 250,000 refugees were still in Europe, most of them old, infirm, crippled, or otherwise disabled.

After the Soviet armed forces captured eastern Poland from the Germans in 1944, the Soviets unilaterally declared a new frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland approximately at the Curzon Line, despite the protestations from the Polish government-in-exile in London and the western Allies at the Teheran Conference and the Yalta Conference of February 1945. After the German surrender on 7 May 1945, the Allies occupied the remainder of Germany, and the Berlin declaration of 5 June 1945 confirmed the unfortunate division of Allied-occupied Germany according to the Yalta Conference, which stipulated the continued existence of the German Reich as a whole, which would include its eastern territories as of 31 December 1937. This did not affect on Poland's eastern border, and Stalin refused to be removed from these eastern Polish territories.

In the last months of World War II, about five million German civilians from the German provinces of Agreements of the Berlin Potsdam Conference placing one fourth of Germany's territory under the Agreements of the Berlin Potsdam Conference See Flight and expulsion of Germans 1944–50.

Although not approved by Allies at Potsdam, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans alive in Yugoslavia and Romania were deported to slave labour in the Soviet Union, to Allied-occupied Germany, and subsequently to the German Democratic Republic East Germany, Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany West Germany. This entailed the largest population transfer in history. In all 15 million Germans were affected, and more than two million perished during the expulsions of the German population. See Flight and expulsion of Germans 1944–1950. Between the end of War and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, more than 563,700 refugees from East Germany traveled to West Germany for asylum from the Soviet occupation.

During the same period, millions of former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated against their will into the USSR. On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR. The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets regardless of their wishes. When the war ended in May 1945, British and United States civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union millions of former residents of the USSR, including many persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship decades before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947.

At the end of World War II, there were more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union in Western Europe. About 3 million had been forced laborers Ostarbeiters in Germany and occupied territories. The Soviet POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of SMERSH Death to Spies. Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. The survivors on their service to the USSR were treated as traitors see Order No. 270. Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis were sent to the Gulag.

Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges following the imposition of a new Poland-Soviet border at the Curzon Line in 1944. About 2,100,000 Poles were expelled west of the new border see Repatriation of Poles, while about 450,000 Ukrainians were expelled to the east of the new border. The population transfer to Soviet Ukraine occurred from September 1944 to May 1946 see Repatriation of Ukrainians. A further 200,000 Ukrainians left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily between 1944 and 1945.

According to the report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees 1995, 10 to 15 percent of 7.5 million Azerbaijani population were refugees or displaced people. Most of them were 228,840 refugee people of Azerbaijan who fled from Armenia in 1988 as a sum of deportation policy of Armenia against ethnic Azerbaijanis.

The International Refugee Organization IRO was founded on 20 April 1946, and took over the functions of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which wasdown in 1947. While the handover was originally planned to draw place at the beginning of 1947, it did not occur until July 1947. The International Refugee Organization was a temporary organization of the United Nations UN, which itself hd been founded in 1945, with a mandate to largely finish the UNRRA's work of repatriating or resettling European refugees. It was dissolved in 1952 after resettling about one million refugees. The definition of a refugee at this time was an individual with either a Nansen passport or a "certificate of identity" issued by the International Refugee Organization.