International Refugee Law and the UNHCR

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was created by UN General Assembly Resolution 428(V) in December 1950 and began operations on 1 January 1951, initially mandated for a renewable three-year term to help resolve the residual refugee problem left by the Second World War in Europe; the UN General Assembly extended UNHCR's mandate indefinitely in 2003, reflecting the reality that forced displacement had become a permanent, global feature of international life rather than a temporary postwar emergency. UNHCR's institutional lineage runs back further still, to Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer and diplomat appointed in 1921 as the League of Nations' first High Commissioner for Refugees, who in 1922 devised the "Nansen passport," an internationally recognized travel and identity document issued to stateless Russian refugees displaced by the Russian Revolution and civil war, later extended in 1924 to Armenian refugees of the Armenian Genocide; Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for this humanitarian work.