We Must Defend the Refugee Convention

In 1941, as the Nazis swept through Greece and took Athens, my grandfather, Nicolas Taptiklis, fled for his life. In the middle of the night, he boarded a tiny boat with twelve others and crossed the dangerous waters of the Aegean Sea to Turkey. Under Nazi occupation, his service with the British Navy made staying in Greece a risk he could not take.

Greeks who helped the Allies risked arrest, imprisonment, or execution, and the punishment could reach their families and communities too. From Turkey, he made his way with thousands of others to Syria, where he finally found safety in Damascus. That journey never left him.

When the war ended, Europe was filled with people who had also lost their homes, their families and, in many cases, nearly their lives. Around 11 million people were displaced in Germany: Holocaust survivors, former prisoners of war, forced laborers, and others left in camps, waiting for the world to decide what came next. My grandfather returned to Europe and put his medical training to work for people whose own lives had been broken by the same war he had fled.

He joined the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, one of the first humanitarian agencies and a precursor to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. In a camp in Göttingen, Germany, he treated tuberculosis, typhoid, and people whose bodies had survived the war but still bore its scars. The world had learned, at unbearable human cost, what happens when people fleeing war have nowhere safe to go.

Through WWII, Families were turned away from protection, people returned to countries where they feared for their lives, and millions were left in camps because home was no longer safe or even existed at all. From that devastation came a simple lesson; people escaping war and conflict should be able to find safety. They should not be forced back to a place where they could be killed or tortured.

When people flee for their lives, they need somewhere safe to go. That principle became the heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War as countries tried to create a framework to prevent the atrocities of the war from ever occurring again. The Convention defined who is a refugee, set out the basic rights for refugees, and established the responsibilities of states toward people seeking protection.