War in Ukraine: Refugees, migrants, asylum seekers… What are the differences?

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of people displaced by the conflict has increased dramatically. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the main terms mentioned: refugees, migrants and asylum seekers.

Asylum seekers and refugees

Asylum seekers and refugees are complementary phases of the same process. Refugee status is defined by Article 1^er A2 of the 1951 Geneva Convention. Thus, the article provides that:

“The term refugee applies to anyone who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of which he is a national and who cannot or, because of this fear, does not want to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

Thus, a refugee is an asylum seeker whose file with a country has been accepted. The application for asylum, and therefore the status of refugee, can also be requested by a person who does not have a nationality and who “finds himself outside the country in which he had his habitual residence as a result of such events, cannot or, because of the said fear, does not want to return there.”

Migrants

Unlike the term “refugee”, that of migrant has no precise legal definition. It is however defined by the United Nations as: “any person who has resided in a foreign country for more than one year, whatever the causes, voluntary or involuntary, of the movement, and whatever the means, regular or irregular , used to migrate.”

On the side of the NGO Amnesty International, the definition of the word migrant is more economical. This is a person who “may be led to move outside his country for various reasons: to exercise a job or to seek it, to join members of his family…”

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) distinguishes between refugees and migrants in the following way: “We call ‘refugees’ people who flee war or persecution by crossing an international border. And we call ‘migrants’ people who move for reasons that are not included in the legal definition of a refugee.”