On July 28, 2026 – exactly 75 years after the adoption of 1951 Refugee Convention at a special United Nations conference in Geneva – the UN refugee agency (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR) launched a global campaign of solidarity with refugees called “The Promise”, “urging governments, organizations and individuals to renew their commitment to protecting people forced to flee war, violence and persecution.”
The new initiative is led by the newly appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Barham Salih, who assumed office on January 1, 2026, for a five-year term. Salih succeeded Filippo Grandi, whose 10-year tenure as High Commissioner ended on December 31, 2025.
While UNHCR and its supporters are re-committing to the 1951 Refugee Convention on its 75th anniversary, others are denouncing the legal framework drafted in the aftermath of World War II as an obsolete system. In its place, critics are pushing for a new one that takes into account modern day large-scale migration and is less permeable to abuses.
A Renewed Commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention
The Promise is presented as a “public statement of solidarity, bringing together prominent figures from across society to reaffirm support for refugees and the right to seek safety.”
The campaign was launched with 75 inaugural signatories, symbolizing the Convention’s 75th anniversary. The initial group includes faith leaders, Nobel laureates, artists, athletes, business figures, refugee and human rights advocates.
Among the 75 initial signatories are: Actor-filmmakers Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, and Ben Stiller; Olympic champion and IOC President Kirsty Coventry; entrepreneurs Hamdi Ulukuya, Mo Ibrahim, and Tadashi Yanai; Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Malala Yousafzai, Nadia Murad, and Dr Denis Mukwege and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, also of the NGO The Elders; and Sarah Mullaly, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The list of all signatories can be accessed here. UNHCR has indicated that additional individuals and organizations will be invited to endorse The Promise ahead of the 2027 Global Refugee Forum (GRF).
By signing The Promise, participants reaffirm what UNHCR describes as the central commitment of the Refugee Convention: “that people forced to flee war, violence and persecution must be able to seek safety and rebuild their lives.”
Signatories affirm their support for a world in which, among other things:
- Safety is a certainty: Everyone has the right to seek safety from war, violence, and persecution.
- Refugees are included: Refugees belong in our communities, schools, and workplaces, where they can find opportunities and contribute to the societies that host them.
They also pledge to “act together from governments to local communities, global institutions to town halls, boardrooms to faith groups, businesses to civil society…[u]ntil everyone is safe.”
Through The Promise, UNHCR seeks to build a broad international coalition in support of refugee protection ahead of the Global Refugee Forum in 2027.
The Global Refugee Forum
The Global Refugee Forum (GRF) was established to support the practical implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) which was officially adopted in 2018 by the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The GRF is described as an “opportunity for stakeholders to share good practices and pledge financial support, technical expertise and policy changes to support comprehensive responses for refugees and ultimately the objectives of the Compact.”
Held every four years in Geneva, the GRF is intended to maintain momentum and assess progress on pledges made towards the advancement of the GCR. The inaugural Forum took place in 2019, followed by the second in 2023. The next Forum is scheduled for 2027.
Two UN Global Compacts, the GCR and its sister compact on migration, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and regular Migration (GCM) were set in motion following the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that was adopted by UN member states (including the United States under the Obama administration) in 2016.
The successful adoption of both compacts concluded a two-year process that began with the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and was considered to be a historic victory for UN efforts to regulate migrant and refugee flows on a global level.
In 2018, the Trump administration voted “no” on both compacts, arguing that they were inconsistent with U.S. immigration policy.
The Biden-Harris administration subsequently reversed that position by endorsing the vision embodied in both compacts. At the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, the administration reaffirmed the U.S. government’s commitment to the GCR and announced new pledges supporting the economic inclusion and social protection of refugees.
The Debate Over the1951 Refugee Convention
As UNHCR is pushing for a renewed international commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, critics stress the need to review (if not abolish) the existing asylum system and revisit the 1951 Refugee Convention that, in their view, has become obsolete.
In their book, “Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World”, Oxford scholars, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier denounce an obsolete refugee system designed at the onset of the Cold War to provide people who were persecuted by communist regimes an opportunity to live elsewhere. According to them, the Refugee Convention was “unambiguously a product of its time and place, explicitly temporary and at the time intended only to apply to people in Europe.” The Convention, in their words, “explicitly focused on state persecution of individuals in postwar Europe was applied globally and permanently in 1967 [through the “Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees” that entered in force on October 1967] without modification.” (The United States did not sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, but did sign the 1967 Protocol.)
The co-authors are calling for the need to “build a new system that works” while UNHCR is pushing for a renewed international commitment to that same system.
Others have made similar arguments. My colleague Mark Krikorian wrote that it is time to withdraw from the U.N. Refugee treaty, as it is “being used by the American Left to pry open our borders.” Likewise, my colleague George Fishman has argued that the Convention’s drafters never signed up for a mass influx of aliens and that the “crisis in America’s asylum system has its roots in the Refugee Convention’s non-refoulement obligation.”
Which Path Forward?
The launch of The Promise highlights a growing divide in the international debate over access to refugee protection.
Which path should policymakers choose? Align with UNHCR’s call for renewed commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention or build a new system better suited to the realities of twenty-first-century migration trends? Under a Harris-Walz administration, there is little doubt that the U.S. government would have embraced the former approach.