World Refugee Day 2026 will take place on Saturday, June 20, with the theme “Until everyone is safe, we keep showing up.” That promise remains as important as ever. The right to seek safety was never meant for a select few. It is a right that belongs to everyone. The UNHCR is calling on governments, communities, and individuals to keep the protection promise that turns 75 this year, as the 1951 Refugee Convention reaches its anniversary. UNHCR is marking the milestone with a year of dialogues and a global campaign that launches on World Refugee Day itself.
This year, World Refugee Day sits inside a particular policy context. It arrives just over eight weeks before the five-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2026. It arrives after the largest single-year return movement of Afghan nationals in recent memory, with an estimated 2.8 million Afghans returning to Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan during 2025, around two-thirds under conditions of forced removal rather than voluntary repatriation. And it arrives after a year in which several allied jurisdictions narrowed, suspended, or formally closed the resettlement pathways their governments had previously committed to.
These circumstances highlight a distinction that the Refugee Convention is increasingly required to address, and which local staff protection measures cannot circumvent. A pathway does not constitute a status. resettlement schemes, humanitarian parole programs, and special immigrant visas are mechanisms intended to offer protection either as alternatives to, or prior to, formal Convention refugee status. When such mechanisms are suspended or terminated, individuals involved do not automatically acquire Convention refugee status. They become displaced with diminished or lapsed protection. Or, in the absence of safe and legal pathways, they are left to make the choice between taking dangerous, clandestine routes to escape persecution, or live in hiding and under threat in their own country.
The 1951 promise meets the 2025 reality
At the end of 2025, UNHCR estimated 117.8 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, a decrease of roughly five per cent across the year and the first annual fall in more than a decade. The decline was primarily attributed to returns, many involving circumstances that were neither secure nor entirely voluntary, particularly affecting Afghan, Congolese, and Sudanese populations. As of the end of 2025, there were 41.6 million refugees, 68.7 million internally displaced persons, and approximately 4.5 million individuals who were stateless or whose nationality was undetermined. Nearly 4.4 million refugees repatriated to their countries of origin during 2025, marking a significant increase compared to the previous year. Sudan remains the most significant forced displacement crisis globally, surpassing Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. The figures for Syria decreased appreciably, as close to one million internally displaced individuals and more than 500,000 refugees returned, often to regions where conditions remain challenging.
Within the Afghanistan population, there exists a segment whose legal classification does not consistently align with the term ‘refugee’. Between 2021 and 2025, significant numbers of Afghans were relocated to allied countries through various pathways, including the United States Special Immigrant Visa program, the United Kingdom’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme, Canada’s Special Immigration Measures (SIM) and humanitarian pathways, Germany’s admission programme, and Australia’s Afghan Locally Engaged Employee (LEE) Program. The legal status granted in these host countries varies significantly. Many individuals entered the United States under humanitarian parole, which is a temporary status lasting up to two years and, as of January 2026, has been suspended for new and pending applications for nationals of Afghanistan and eighteen other countries pursuant to Presidential Proclamation 10998. Others remain in processes for adjustment of status, asylum determination, or family reunification.
A significant number of Afghans remain within the areas where they worked, or in third countries where their protection is limited and temporary. Pakistan, which hosts around 1.6 million registered Afghan refugees, restarted its Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan on March 7, 2025, expanding it throughout the year to include holders of Afghan Citizenship Cards and later those with Proof of Registration cards, both of which are recognized under the agreement with UNHCR. Iran, which also shelters millions of Afghans, began a regularisation and return program in March 2025 with a deadline set for July 6. UNHCR reports that approximately 1.8 million Afghans returned from Iran in 2025 and around 930,000 from Pakistan. Amnesty International has described the 2025 returns as unlawful under international law. UN human rights experts have called the mass forced returns “appalling.”
Pathways are not refugee status
This is the analytical consideration that local staff protection must address. Pathways were established specifically because Convention refugee status, which requires individuals to be outside their country of nationality and meet the legal threshold for a well-founded fear of persecution, does not sufficiently encompass the operational realities faced by those whose risk arises from service to international missions. These pathways serve as pragmatic instruments intended to supplement, rather than replace, Convention protection. They are mechanisms subject to initiation or termination by the political authority responsible for their creation.
The closures of 2025 made the fragility of that instrument visible. The United Kingdom closed ARAP to new principal applications at 3 p.m. on 1 July 2025 with limited notice, alongside the wind-down of ACRS and the Afghanistan Response Route created to relocate those most at risk from a 2022 Ministry of Defence data breach that exposed the personal details of some 18,700 principal ARAP applicants and their associates; the Ministry later assessed that up to roughly 27,000 Afghans were eligible for relocation as a result of the breach. Approximately 22,000 applications remained pending at closure. The United States Special Immigrant Visa programme remains legally intact but ceased meaningful operation on 1 January 2026 under broader entry restrictions imposed by Presidential Proclamation 10998. Federal courts have since pushed back: a 6 February 2026 ruling held that SIV processing is mandated by statute and must continue, and a further decision on 5 June 2026 vacated the policies that had paused adjudication of immigration benefits for nationals of Afghanistan and 38 other countries.
As of August 2025, 178,110 Afghans had received Chief of Mission approval but had not yet been interviewed or issued visas; the window to apply for that approval closed on 31 December 2025. Germany suspended its Afghan admission schemes in May 2025 and has since moved to revoke around half of the roughly 2,300 admission promises made to Afghans waiting in Pakistan; more than 500 lawsuits have followed, and in an interim order dated 4 December 2025 the Federal Constitutional Court instructed the government to decide promptly on affected families’ visa applications. Australia closed its LEE program to new applicants on 30 November 2023.
Canada had settled more than 55,000 Afghans arriving under the various streams of the Afghanistan Resettlement Initiative by November 2024, but Aman Lara and other veteran-led groups have identified more than 650 verified Canadian-affiliated principal applicants, representing over 3,000 people with their families, who remain outside the official referral lists because their employment ran through United States or other coalition contracts.
Afghans promised protection through various relocation and resettlement pathways now hold varying statuses: some are relocated and stable, others have seen their refugee status made temporary, or face uncertain or expired parole, remain stranded abroad, wait in application pipelines, stay hidden in Afghanistan, or risk deportation from third countries. International protection commitments are inconsistent; some are upheld, others quietly abandoned. In Germany, courts rather than the government are trying to enforce these promises, but have so far been unsuccessful for Afghan interpreters whose status under legal Paragraph 22 was only ‘discretionary’.
And even those who have gained refugee status following their evacuation have seen that status hollowed out. For example, Denmark introduced in 2019 a temporary subsidiary protection status to the Aliens Act, “meaning all humanitarian residence permits granted since then have been done so with a view to temporary stay, making temporary protection the new norm for all humanitarian immigrants in Denmark—including resettled refugees”. Earlier this month, the Netherlands also closed the option for refugees with temporary status to apply for a permanent residence permit. Afghan interpreters and guards who had been granted asylum after 12 June 2021 can now only apply for a 3-year extension to their Temporary Residence Permit, leading to concern within the community. For those exercising their right to claim asylum outside relocation or resettlement pathways, the prospect also looks bleak. In the UK, analysis by charity Amnesty International UK shows that the grant rate on Afghan asylum claims has fallen from 96 per cent in 2024 to the current rate of 34 per cent; this is even lower than before the Taliban returned to power.
Five years on, the protection gap has widened
As 15 August 2026 approaches, marking the fifth anniversary of Kabul’s fall, LSI maintains the stance articulated in its August 2025 article for Aman Lara: governments are obligated to fulfill their commitments to Afghan allies. The passage of five years does not alter the fundamental responsibilities owed; rather, it accentuates the need to clarify whether relevant authorities intend to uphold these commitments before both institutional memory and political focus shift elsewhere.
The most recent LSI analysis, in our May 2026 piece ‘The 97 Percent’, surfaced a structural figure that should reframe how governments and mission partners think about duty of care. According to the Aid Worker Security Database, 97 percent of aid workers killed in 2025 were national staff. That figure is not specific to Afghanistan. It is a general statement about who carries risk in international missions. It applies in Sudan, now the world’s largest displacement crisis, where the humanitarian workers killed since 2023 have been almost entirely Sudanese nationals. It applies in Gaza, where UNRWA has confirmed 391 colleagues killed since the start of the war, 309 of its own personnel and 82 people supporting its work, as of June 2026. It applies in Ukraine, where Danish Refugee Council demining personnel and a clearly marked UN inter-agency convoy were attacked in 2025. Across all of these contexts, the United Nations reported in April 2026 that more than 1,000 humanitarian workers had been killed in the three years to the end of 2025, with 2024 the deadliest year on record. The Afghanistan pathway crisis sits inside that broader pattern. Local staff carry the risk. The institutional architecture of protection is not yet built for that fact.
World Refugee Day: Key Policy Recommendations for 2026
This year, World Refugee Day presents the following recommendations for governments and mission partners:
1. Recognise the distinction between a protection pathway and secure legal status. Relocation and resettlement pathways can open access to safety, but they are policy instruments that may be narrowed, paused, or closed before durable status is granted. When that happens, the duty to protect does not disappear; risk and responsibility are pushed back onto the people promised protection and the countries where they have sought safety.
Honor pending commitments. Individuals within ARAP, SIV, Canadian SIM, German admission, and Australian LEE programs have been processed through formal protection frameworks. Suspending or narrowing these channels represents a harmful policy shift with immediate consequences for people approved for protection. Reinstating, processing, and completing these approvals is one of the most effective steps relevant governments can take before the five-year milestone.
Support and implement the Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff in International Missions, launched in March 2026 by Local Staff International and the University of York. The Guidelines set out comprehensive standards across the full employment lifecycle, from pre-recruitment to post-mission risk. The companion legal research by Sara de Jong and Betsy Fisher, “Falling Between the Cracks of Law,” explains the legal gaps through which protection too often fails. Both resources are designed for practical use by mission planners, procurement officers, and senior leaders, as well as legal and human rights professionals.
World Refugee Day calls for sustained commitment to refugee safety. For LSI and its global network, this includes individuals whose involvement in international missions has contributed to their risk. The fifth anniversary in August serves as a critical indicator of the integrity with which this commitment has been upheld.