Hisham Zawil, contributor to the AI Ethics Lab and Tech & Digital Partnerships & Engagement at the United Nations Refugee Agency, reflects on what the 1951 Refugee Convention means to Silicon Valley and refugees, seventy-five years on.
On 28 July 1951, in Geneva, governments opened a treaty for signature that solidified the refugee protection regime. Anyone who fled with a “well-founded fear” of persecution, or serious threats to their life or freedom could ask for protection, and no state that joined could push them back toward the danger. The drafters had just watched punch cards and sorting machines, the best information technology of their age, used to sort human beings for mass atrocities. The world answered with this promise.
The anniversary fell this week, on Tuesday, and UNHCR marked it in the same Geneva building where the promise was made. I watched from the Bay Area, moved by the speeches by our new High Commissioner and other leaders and refugees in one tab, the news from South Lebanon in the other. My family’s home is there, near the Litani River, in villages that have been forcibly displaced twice in two years, their homes, schools and religious institutions systematically destroyed. Most weeks those facts live in separate rooms; the anniversary sat them at the same table….