Can the UN’s Refugee Convention survive?

At the end of World War II, great swaths of Europe lay in ruins and millions had been forcibly displaced.The humanitarian disaster prompted the United Nations to agree on a comprehensive legal framework outlining states’ obligations to protect refugees. This became the 1951 Refugee Convention, which initially applied to Europeans but was subsequently amended in 1967 to apply to all those fleeing persecution. Today, 149 nations are parties to the convention and no country has ever withdrawn from it.At least, not yet.Nearly eight decades later, the world is struggling. The Syrian civil war triggered an enormous influx of refugees into Europe. Now, millions of refugees have fled Sudan’s brutal civil war, state collapse in Venezuela has caused mass migration, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many other conflicts around the world are in full swing, again causing mass displacements.The UN currently records more than 41 million refugees worldwide.The UN convention defines a refugee as a person who is outside their country of origin with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”....