June 20 — World Refugee Day
The desire to move from one place to another has always been a characteristic of humankind, especially those for whom constant movement is a way of life and a pleasure. Some are pushed by a sense of adventure, curiosity, desire for a change of scenery, a desire to test one’s mettle. This is a natural choice.
Recently, however, for a growing number of people, moving has become a dire necessity. These are the refugees who flee from fate and have been forced to leave their homes because of military clashes, depriving them of a place to live, with no means of subsistence.
The data on the number of refugees vary but it is more than 42 million people — about the population of a large European country. Naturally, the problem existed even in the most ancient times but in international law the concept of a refugee was coined in 1922 — when this problem reached serious proportions during and after the First World War. The legal documents relating to the status of refugees appeared around that time — the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol. According to these documents, a refugee is a person who left the country, in which he/she resided, due to exceptional circumstances, such as war, armed conflict, as well as the well-founded fear that they could be persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group, etc. The institutions were created to be involved in refugee issues: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, converted from the International Refugee Organisation established after the Second World War. Assistance to refugees and persons internally displaced during armed conflicts is also provided by a number of different organizations, in particular the International Committee of the Red Cross, with hundreds of thousands of officials engaged in the resolution of problems of refugees scattered throughout the world.
