Abstract
The Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 caused an exodus of 200,000 refugees. Most of the refugees fled to Austria. Austria immediately called on states to help both financially and by physically sharing the refugees by means of resettlement. As a result, most of the refugees were resettled very quickly in a large number of states. Those facts stand in stark contrast to the contemporary resettlement practice that is characterized by a scarcity of resettlement places and few resettlement states. On the assumption that past practice informed and shaped contemporary resettlement law and practice, the resettlement of the Hungarian refugees – the first large-scale resettlement under the present legal regime – is revisited with a view to understanding why it was considered necessary to resettle the refugees, how so many resettlement places were secured, whether UNHCR applied a responsibility sharing device, what eligibility criteria – if any – were applied by the resettlement states, and what was actually offered to the refugees by those states.
Highlights
On 21 May 1958, Atle Grahl-Madsen submitted a number of questions pertaining to Hungarian refugees to the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Oslo in connection with a lawsuit involving Hungarian refugees in Norway
On the assumption that past practice informed and shaped contemporary resettlement law and practice, the resettlement of the Hungarian refugees – the first large-scale resettlement under the present legal regime – is revisited with a view to understanding why it was considered necessary to resettle the refugees, how so many resettlement places were secured, whether UNHCR applied a responsibility sharing device, what eligibility criteria – if any – were applied by the resettlement states, and what was offered to the refugees by those states
One of those questions was whether Hungarian refugees “who left their home country after the uprising in 1956, [are] considered to be refugees ‘as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951’ and eligible under the Convention relating to the status of refugees of 28th July 1951?”
Summary
The research into the resettlement of the Hungarian refugees in 1956 and 1957 is in that sense not meant to be of immediate relevance to contemporary practice, it is rather more modest: it seeks to give past answers to contemporary and recurrent questions pertaining to resettlement; answers that may eventually contribute to identifying the applicable legal framework and any flaws or oversights from which it may or may not suffer Those questions are, as indicated above, why it was considered necessary to resettle the Hungarian refugees, how the requisite resettlement places were secured, if this large-scale resettlement was realised by means of a sharing device, what, if any, selection criteria were applied by resettlement states, and, lastly, what was offered by those states to the refugees concerned?. Both and UNHCR’s involvement appears to end when the refugees are moved out of the country of refuge, and that seems to be an incongruous flaw in the contemporary legal framework considering the fact that resettlement, defined, is not tantamount to loss of refugee status
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