What is UNHCR-RSD?

Refugee status determination (RSD) is the doorway to the protection and assistance that the international community provides to refugees.  In dozens of countries, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) acts as the gatekeeper.

UNHCR does this by determining whether an individual asylum-seeker (and in some cases, an entire family) meets the international legal definition of a refugee. In this role, the UN’s refugee agency effectively decides among asylum-seekers who can be saved from deportation and in some cases released from detention, who can get humanitarian assistance, and often who can apply to resettle to third countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and some states in the European Union.

In recent years, UNHCR has decided more individual refugee cases than the United States, and in some years more than any government. In legal theory this work is supposed to be done by governments, but in practice UNHCR-RSD is a cornerstone of refugee policy in much of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

UNHCR has been doing this work for decades, nearly since its founding in the early 1950s. The official history of UNHCR RSD can be traced to a November 1951 memorandum by the High Commissioner. But it was largely ignored until recently. Beginning in the 1990s, lawyers and human rights organizations began to take more notice.