Today, June 20, is World Refugee Day, an international day of recognition first organized by the UN in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. While Canada is a signatory to that Convention and has generally had a laudatory record, from helping resettle refugees from Indochina in 1979 to Afghan and Syrian families more recently, political support for immigration has been weakening, even in cases of refugees. Today, there are roughly 123 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, an increase of 6 percent from the previous year, driven by new wars in Ukraine, Gaza, the DRC, Sudan, and other places. Political, economic, and ecological instability will only make it worse. While the vast majority of refugees today are internally displaced, nearly 43 million are cross-border exiles under UNHCR’s mandate—an increase of 28 million since 2011. As these numbers rise, the political climate in wealthier states has turned against the very Convention they once designed.
At Carleton’s recent “Safe Havens and Knowledge Networks in Canada” conference, organized in part by the Scholars at Risk Committee, the audience was reminded that one of the most famous refugees of the last century was Albert Einstein. Carleton Physics Professor Dr. Mustafa Bahran recounted his own escape from Yemen in 2015, and subsequent long journey via, Saudi Arabia, the United States and eventually to Canada, a journey made possible only through a global network of people working to provide support for refugees. Carleton’s Scholars at Risk Committee remains deeply and unreservedly committed to providing safe shelter to academic refugees from around the world.