By Mohamad Kharita
On 22–23 June, scholars, experts, and refugee law practitioners gathered in Oslo to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. I was invited to the plenary roundtable to deliver a perspective on where the Convention stands today.
I spent 12 years as a refugee, navigating the stark realities of refugee systems in two completely different countries: Lebanon, a non-signatory state, and Norway, a signatory state. Professionally, I approach this as an international refugee law practitioner, holding an LL.M. in Public International Law from the University of Oslo (UiO), where my master’s thesis focused on a specific concept: how states use legal terminologies of international law as a tool of statecraft to shape their migration policies, using Lebanon as a case study.
This blog post is an attempt to merge those two worlds. I want to give you a comprehensive, comparative look at how legal language operates in both Lebanon and Norway. My goal is to give you a glimpse into how different states articulate their asylum and refugee policies on the ground, and ultimately make a simple contribution to answer the defining question of the conference: Is the Refugee Convention still relevant today?
The Background: Setting the Scene
To understand how states use language as a weapon or a shield, we first need to look at the numbers and the historical context.
The Syrian Civil War caused the displacement of more than 13 million people. Around 7 million remain internally displaced within Syria, while 6.5 million fled across borders, sparking what became globally known as the Syrian Refugee Crisis (SRC). Historically, when a mass influx of displaced people occurs, neighboring countries bear the brunt of the crisis. The numbers speak for themselves: at the SRC’s peak, Turkey hosted 3.5 million, Lebanon hosted 1.5 million, Jordan hosted 730,000, and Iraq hosted 340,000 (UNHCR).
By contrast, the entirety of Europe hosted roughly 1.5 million Syrian refugees combined. Germany hosted the largest share with 973,000, followed by Sweden at 198,000. Norway hosted around 40,000.
To analyze how the Lebanese government responded to this influx, we have to look through two very specific lenses: economic survival and demographic history.
1. The Survival Mode
Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world. To put it plainly, for every four Lebanese citizens, there is one Syrian refugee. A thought experiment: to understand the sheer scale of this, imagine if Norway, with its population of 5.5 million, suddenly hosted all 1.5 million refugees currently living across the entire European Union.
This demographic pressure hit a country already on the brink of total collapse. Since 2019, Lebanon’s currency has lost 98% of its value due to hyperinflation. The banking system collapsed, locking citizens out of their life savings. Over 80% of the population lives in multidimensional poverty, and basic infrastructure like electricity and water has largely disintegrated. Under these brutal conditions, the Lebanese government has since 2014 triggered what I call “survival mode,” making the refugee response highly politicized and structurally inadequate (Fakhoury 2021).
2. The Sectarian Balance
The second lens is rooted in history. Lebanon is a diverse but fragile country with 17 recognized religious sects (including Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and Druze). The entire political architecture of the Lebanese government is built on the so-called consociationalism, which is a political system with a strict power-sharing formula designed to balance these exact groups (Salloukh, B. F.2024). Therefore, any step toward permanent legal integration for any non-Lebanese is viewed by the political establishment as an existential threat to the country’s demographic and political stability.
This is the leading reason why Lebanon is not a signatory state to the 1951 Refugee Convention. The country officially categorizes itself as ‘not a country of asylum’ or a transit country (Janmyer 2017), despite the historical irony that Lebanon actively participated and profoundly contributed to the era of the establishment of international refugee and human rights regimes (Janmyr 2026).
Lebanon: Open Avoidance and Missing Label
Because Lebanon is not bound by the 1951 Convention, it operates with sense of semantic freedom. For example, the state deliberately avoids the word “refugee” (laji’) in official administrative texts and statements, choosing instead labels like “displaced person” (nazih) or “guest”.
The question here is: if Lebanon is not a signatory state, why does the avoidance of the word refugee matter? When the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with the UNHCR in 2003, the goal was to define the work of the agency in Lebanon. On one hand, the agreement asserted the notion that Lebanon is a transit country, and was criticized because of that. On the other hand, it stipulated that the UNHCR is responsible for the resettlement of any “UNHCR-recognized refugees” by registration to other countries (Janmyr, 2018). Hence, any person who flees to Lebanon and could not be registered at the UNHCR, would not be considered as a “UNHCR refugee”, this person would be a “displaced. That is partly why the Lebanese government suspended the agency from registering new refugees since May 2015.
Thus, by avoiding the international legal category of a refugee, the state successfully evades the international legal obligations attached to it, most notably, the pathway to local integration (protecting the political system) or long-term state responsibility (lacking of state’s resources).
Another example is the narrative of “safe and dignified return” as a replacement for “voluntary return”. The simplest distinction between the two phrases is who owns the decision of “going back home”, or who has the agency to make the decision of return.
Theoretically, “safe” means that the returnees must face no physical and psychological damage, and be provided with basic material security, while “dignified” means returnees must be treated with respect, no coercion, no pressure, and family must not be separated. But in non-signatory context, safe and dignified return was used as a political label to justify large scale returns. Furthermore, under “survival mode,” the state can claim it is pursuing “safe returns” while simultaneously applying intense, deliberate structural, economic, and administrative pressures on the ground to make life unliveable for displaced people, effectively forcing them to depart, this is what is called in international legal framework as “constructive refoulement”.
Norway: Fine Print, but Bureaucratized?
Let us look at the opposite end of the spectrum, Norway. In Norway, a signatory state since the birth of the treaty, the 1951 Convention functions as the main source for domestic legislation, and the official label is refugee “Flyktning”. The legislation provides the most important tool, the legal status which is important not only for the individual, but also to the state because it provides a predictable, structured baseline for at least the first five years.
Speaking about refugee return, the framework in Norway in “voluntary return”. This is a massive legal distinction because the agency here is in the hand of the individual. Refugees go back home when they decide it is safe for them to go back. Even if a refugee makes a return decision, the state is still obligated to make a forward-looking risk assessment under the “real risk” standard of country of origin (F.G. v. Sweden 2016 p113-115).
However, moving to a wealthy and well-resourced signatory state does not mean politics disappears from the migration apparatus. It simply shifts from the realm of open avoidance to the realm of bureaucratic optimization as we have been witnessing in the last decade.
In a system like Norway’s, statecraft is played in the fine print of, for example, the administrative law. When domestic political tides shift toward restricting immigration, the state does not tear up the Convention, political agendas manifest through micro-level adjustments. For example, tightening the thresholds for what qualifies as a “temporary protection” (Schultz 2022), or using complex economic incentives and legal limitations to test the boundaries of what legally constitutes a truly “voluntary” return (Bendixsen, S 2019).
What I want to mention here is that refugees’ vulnerability does not vanish in a signatory state, it is just managed by a highly sophisticated and well-resourced legal bureaucracy.
The Verdict: Is the Convention Still Relevant at 75?
When evaluating these two models, it is easy to feel a sense of legal cynicism. Whether a state relies on the structural informality of Lebanon or the hyper-regulated bureaucracy of Norway, governments remain highly adept at bending the language of migration law to match their political realities.
So, in these lights, is the 1951 Refugee Convention outdated?
My answer at the roundtable was an unshakeable YES, it is still entirely relevant.
We cannot romanticize the Convention as a perfect shield for refugee protection against state politics, but we must recognize its value as it still considers the source of international legitimacy for refugee protection. The Convention provides a recognized legal existence to millions of displaced people worldwide. Without this treaty, millions more would be forced to live their life in the shadows, completely stripped of a mechanism to demand their right to live in safety.
Lastly, the future of refugee law requires us to maintain a dual perspective. We must defend the 1951 Convention as an indispensable human infrastructure, while remaining critical of how states use its text as a tool of statecraft.
Mohamad Kharita, a LL.M graduated in Public international law and a refugee law practitioner.
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