UN refugee agency does not believe in term ‘refugees’

“We consider the word refugees derogatory and do not use it,” said UNHCR spokesman in Germany, Chris Melzer, of the German news agency.

The German name of the UN refugee organization will not be shaken either. The head of the UN agency, Filippo Grandi, remains the high commissioner for refugees, not refugees, Melzer stressed.

The organization Pro Asyl also stays with ‘refugees’. “In a legal sense, a refugee is someone who has rights,” she wrote in 2016. The federal government uses both “refugees” and “war refugees” on its websites.

Melzer finds the term ‘refugee’ too banal. “We’ve all run from something at one time or another, whether it was a downpour, an annoying duty, or something else,” he says. For example, a refugee is also a criminal who is on the run from the police or has escaped from prison. “Refugee” on the other hand is “quasi a protected term”. “It has been firmly defined by the Geneva Refugee Convention for over 70 years and has a sharpness and strength that protects people.”

Don’t lump things together with criminals

The treaty is called in German “Agreement on the legal status of refugees”. With regard to the “definition of the term ‘refugee'”, Article 1 states that the term refugee applies to any person who, “due to a well-founded fear of persecution because of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or because of their political beliefs is outside the country of which he is a national and cannot or, because of these fears, does not wish to enjoy the protection of that country.”

“It is inappropriate to put criminals or those who have fled a downpour in the same category as people who have had to flee from opposition to a regime or from a war to save their lives,” says Melzer. He doesn’t accept the argument that words ending in “ling” are derogatory because cowards or fools also end the same way. After all, there is also “treasure”. (SDA)