The UN refugee agency was meant to close after three years
When the United Nations set up its refugee office, many member states balked at creating anything permanent, so it was given a three-year lifespan starting in 1951 and a budget of $300,000. Seven decades later the agency employs over 20,000 people in 136 countries and ranks among the UN's biggest spenders.
Its roots reach back to the League of Nations, which in 1921 named the Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen its first High Commissioner for Refugees. After Nazi Germany began driving people out, James McDonald was appointed to help those fleeing and resettled more than 80,000 despite strict immigration limits worldwide, before resigning in 1935 over the League's inaction against the Nuremberg Laws. Wartime and postwar bodies followed, including the International Refugee Organization of 1946, which fell out of favour within a few years.
The UN General Assembly created the new office in December 1949, and the 1951 Refugee Convention defined who counts as a refugee and how they must be treated; it remains the bedrock of refugee law. At first the focus was Europeans uprooted by the war, but crises kept coming: Hungary in 1956, Chinese refugees in Hong Kong and Algerians in Morocco and Tunisia soon after. A 1967 protocol removed the original limits of time and place, and decolonisation shifted the agency's centre of gravity so far that by the end of the 1960s two-thirds of its budget went to Africa.
Later decades brought displacement from the war in Vietnam, conflicts inflamed by Cold War rivalry, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The agency increasingly ran camps and extended help to people displaced within their own countries. It also built ProGres, a biometric database begun during the Kosovo War that now holds fingerprints and iris scans for over 11 million refugees; in Kenyan camps it helped the World Food Programme eliminate $1.4M in waste and fraud.
By 2019 its annual budget had reached $8.6 billion, drawn mostly from voluntary government donations. That dependence proved fragile: after major donors cut funding, the agency announced in June 2025 that around 3,500 posts would go.
Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
