The State of Hungary’s Migration Policy during the Development of International Refugee Protection

From Provisional Arrangements and Particularism to Taboo

Abstract

The modern international refugee regime emerged as a response to the unprecedented humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of multinational empires, and later the rise of National Socialism turned millions of people into refugees or stateless persons who had lost the protection of their own states. These developments gave rise to a legal problem for which international law at the time had no adequate answer: what legal status should be given to individuals whom their own state was no longer able or willing to protect? Although the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees remains the cornerstone of contemporary international refugee law, many of its fundamental principles had already begun to take shape during the interwar period within the framework of the League of Nation and the international agreements adopted between 1921 and 1938 gradually transformed refugee protection from ad hoc humanitarian assistance into a distinct branch of international law. This year’s 80th anniversary of the deportation of the German minority in Hungary provides an opportunity to compare the development of the international approach to refugee protection with the legal framework that applied to refugees in Hungary during that same period. A juxtaposition of the international and Hungarian frameworks highlights the complexities and shortcomings of refugee protection in a period that shaped the development of Hungary’s refugee protection framework in the 20th century.