July 28 marked the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the treaty that guarantees protection to people with a “well-founded fear” of returning to their home country. Now the U.S. response to the collapse of Afghanistan threatens to reduce it to a dead letter.
Few are aware that the United States played a major role in shaping the 1951 Refugee Convention, as it came to be known, nor that the country committed to it in 1967 and embedded it in U.S. statutes in 1980. Even fewer are aware that the U.S. State Department and an American lawyer played key roles in shaping its most important provisions. They made commitments the United States should be honoring—and strengthening—today. Louis Henkin often thought of himself as a refugee. He arrived at Ellis Island as a child, his Jewish family desperate to escape the instability of Belarus. In 1950, when he was thirty-three years old with barely three years of legal experience behind him, the State Department appointed him to the UN’s ad hoc international drafting committee. Henkin always believed he was appointed because the United States had no intention of signing the Refugee Convention; a junior staffer with some legal experience could maintain a low public profile while following instructions.
The United States was still deeply committed to racial segregation, protected against interference by a poisoned alliance between Southern segregationists and opponents of internationalism who were fiercely hostile to the UN. It is likely that many in the State Department and the committee knew that to place the convention before the Senate for ratification by a two-thirds vote, as the U.S. Constitution requires, was very likely to put U.S. funding of and membership in the UN at risk.
The instructions given to Henkin were contradictory. Although he was told the United States could not sign the convention—which would have the force of a treaty—he also knew Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted it enacted for the sake of major allies who were pushing for it, and out of the belief that U.S. law already duplicated most of its provisions. But Acheson wanted it to be framed within a narrowly limited set of commitments. Because the United States was paying for most of the UN’s expenses, a treaty that made expansive promises of support to refugees would have extended our financial commitment and called congressional attention to a revision of the budget. Therefore, throughout his time on the committee, Henkin walked a tightrope, caught in the political contradictions of preparing a convention that a sufficient number of other nations would be prepared to ratify even without a U.S. signature, satisfying the State Department.