The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides protection and assistance to the world’s refugees. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency was created on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly and began work in 1951, initially aiding more than one million European refugees in the aftermath of World War II.
But in the following decades, as the number of uprooted people grew around the globe, its mandate was extended every five years. In December 2003, the U.N. General Assembly decided to remove the time limitation on UNHCR’s mandate until the refugee problem is solved. During its lifetime, the agency has helped more than 50 million people successfully restart their lives, earning two Nobel Peace Prizes in the process—in 1954 and 1981.
Today, UNHCR is one of the world's principal humanitarian agencies, its staff of 6,500 personnel helping 20.8 million people in over 100 countries. These include not only refugees but related groups such as asylum seekers, refugees returning home and some, but not all, of the estimated 20-25 million people who are displaced within their own countries and officially identified as internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Refugees are legally defined as people who are outside their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, and who cannot or do not want to return home. As a humanitarian, non-political organization, UNHCR has two basic and closely related aims – to protect refugees and to seek ways to help them restart their lives in a normal environment.
International protection is the cornerstone of the agency's work. In practice this means ensuring respect for a refugee's basic human rights and ensuring that no person will be returned involuntarily to a country where he or she has reason to fear persecution – a process known as refoulement.
UNHCR promotes international refugee agreements and monitors government compliance with international refugee law. Its staff work in a variety of locations ranging from capital cities to remote camps and border areas, attempting to provide the above-mentioned protection and to minimize the threat of violence, including sexual assault, which many refugees are subject to, even in countries of asylum.
The organization seeks long-term or 'durable' solutions by helping refugees repatriate to their homeland if conditions warrant, by helping them to integrate in their countries of asylum or to resettle in third countries.
The current High Commissioner for Refugees is António Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister who assumed his post on June 15, 2005. He is the organization’s tenth High Commissioner. UNHCR's programs, its protection regime and other policy guidelines, are approved by an Executive Committee of 66 member states which meets annually in Geneva. The High Commissioner reports verbally to the Economic and Social Council on coordination aspects of the work of the agency, and submits a written report annually to the General Assembly on the overall work of UNHCR.
UNHCR is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions, principally from governments but also from intergovernmental organizations, corporations and individuals. It receives a limited subsidy of under two percent of the total from the United Nations regular budget for administrative costs and accepts 'in-kind' contributions including such things as tents, medicines, trucks and air transportation.
As the number of persons of concern to UNHCR jumped to a high of 27 million in 1994, its budget rose accordingly, from $564 million in 1990 to more than $1 billion annualy for most of the 1990s.
As humanitarian crises have become more complex UNHCR has expanded both the number and types of organizations it works with. United Nations sister agencies include the World Food Program (WFP), which supplies food and basic commodities to refugees, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Other organizations include the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and more than 570 non-governmental organizations.
