The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and has 20,305 staff working in 136 countries as of December 2023.

The League of Nations, founded in January 1920, was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. The following year it established the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, appointing Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen as the first to hold the post.

After Nansen’s death in 1930, the Nansen International Office for Refugees continued his work. This Office was replaced in 1938 by the appointment of a High Commissioner for Refugees. As refugees fled Nazi Germany, the League of Nations appointed James McDonald as High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany. Facing strict global immigration limits, he helped resettle more than 80,000 refugees, mainly to Palestine. In 1935, McDonald resigned in protest at the League’s failure to act against the persecution of Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped them of citizenship and basic rights. His office was replaced in 1938 by a new High Commissioner for Refugees. Its role was very limited and ended in 1946.

After the dissolution of the League of Nations and the creation of the United Nations, the international community faced an acute refugee crisis in the aftermath of World War II. To address this, the Allies established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1944, tasked with supporting millions of displaced people across Europe. In 1946, this work was expanded through the creation of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the first international agency to comprehensively address all aspects of refugees' lives.

In the late 1940s, the IRO fell out of favour, but the UN agreed that a body was required to oversee global refugee issues. After a series of extensive debates in the United Nations General Assembly, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established in December 1949 by Resolution 319 (IV) as a subsidiary organ of the Assembly. However, the organisation was only intended to operate for 3 years from January 1951, due to the disagreement of many UN member states over the implications of a permanent body.

UNHCR's mandate was originally set out in its statute, annexed to resolution 428 (V) of the General Assembly of 1950. According to UNHCR, its mandate is to provide, on a non-political and humanitarian basis, international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions for them. This mandate has been subsequently broadened by numerous resolutions of the General Assembly and its Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). People who were already receiving assistance from other organs of the United Nations, such as UNKRA and UNRWA, were excluded from UNHCR’s mandate.

In addition to establishing UNHCR, governments also adopted the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, that defines who is a refugee and standards for the treatment for those fulfilling this definition. To this day, the Convention remains the foundation of international refugee law and established the legal framework and scope of UNHCR’s work, which initially focused on Europeans displaced by the war.

Soon after the signing of the convention, it became clear that refugee crises were continuing and were not solely restricted to Europe. In 1956, UNHCR was involved in coordinating the response to the uprising in Hungary. Just a year later, UNHCR was tasked with dealing with Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, while also responding to Algerian refugees who had fled to Morocco and Tunisia in the wake of Algeria's war for independence. The responses marked the beginning of a wider, global mandate in refugee protection and humanitarian assistance.