Defining Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and IDPs

The legal architecture of forced displacement rests on a small set of precisely defined categories, each carrying different rights and different institutional responsibilities. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in Geneva on 28 July 1951, defines a refugee as a person who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion," is outside their country of nationality and unable or unwilling to avail themselves of its protection. The 1951 Convention originally applied only to people displaced by events occurring before 1 January 1951, and states could additionally restrict its scope to Europe; the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees removed both the temporal and the geographic limitation, making the definition universal in principle. An asylum seeker is someone who has applied for this protection but whose claim has not yet been finally decided, a status that carries interim protections, including in most systems a right to remain pending the outcome, but not yet the full bundle of rights a recognized refugee holds.