Michael Barutciski is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a professor at York University’s Glendon School of Public and International Affairs.

Seventy-five years ago, Western diplomats gathered in Geneva to address the displacement crises of the early Cold War. Signed on July 28, 1951, the resulting Refugee Convention marked the first time widespread support was achieved for legally binding obligations that balance refugee rights with state interests.

But decades of progressively expansive judicial interpretations have drifted far from that original compromise, transforming the world’s primary refugee treaty – which openly accounted for state security and stability – into a vehicle for uncontrolled mass migration.

If well-intentioned policymakers fail to introduce legislative solutions that can temper excessively generous court decisions, and are not able to manage displacement humanely within realistic limits, anxious host populations will solve the dilemma themselves – by electing political insurgents who will gladly dismantle the system if the establishment refuses to mend it.

As an instrument of the Cold War, the Convention’s provisions focused heavily on the political concerns of Western states, particularly since the communist bloc was not invited to Geneva. But reinterpretation of the adopted norms accelerated around the time the Berlin Wall fell. And in this new liberal internationalist climate, academics and advocates began arguing that the treaty’s main purpose was the advancement of refugee rights. Canadians have arguably played a disproportionate role in driving this shift.

The resulting interpretations would be unrecognizable to the drafters. In 1951, the treaty architects carefully limited key notions like “persecution,” while deliberately avoiding commitments regarding whether the obligations should apply to mass flows or war refugees.

Today, that careful balance has been upended by a unidimensional, rights-based focus aimed at maximizing the potential beneficiaries. While the treaty’s text has remained essentially unchanged since initial geographic and temporal limits were lifted in 1967, judicial decisions have fundamentally expanded the strict individual persecution standard. By turning it into a broad umbrella for general human rights violations, we have bypassed the original intention by bringing both mass flows and conflict-driven displacement under its purview.

Most citizens in Western democracies want to help foreigners fleeing extreme mistreatment, but no state can commit to providing refuge to limitless numbers. This tension sits at the heart of current controversies with the Refugee Convention.

For the academic and legal establishments, however, refugee law has been reconceived as a form of “surrogate protection” for anyone emigrating from a country with systemic human rights problems – a revolutionary approach to international solidarity. Are Western societies truly prepared to welcome large populations from every country currently experiencing conflict? If we interpret human rights broadly, many people worldwide could claim to be at risk.

If interpreted in a way that implies we must examine everyone’s claim to protection, the Refugee Convention indirectly promotes de facto open borders. Paradoxically, the system avoids collapse only because states rely on restrictive visa regimes and rigorous offshore interdiction. This unspoken part reflects the underlying hypocrisy.

In Canada, this conundrum is reflected in the historic backlog at the Immigration and Refugee Board, alongside unprecedented strain on local resources. Overwhelmed municipal shelter systems expose the daily disconnect between high-minded policy and the reality of reception infrastructure – with the result being the slow erosion of public goodwill.

The 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention offers a critical opportunity to change this unsustainable trajectory. Today, the greatest threat to refugee dignity is not domestic xenophobia, though societies must remain vigilant against it. It may be a maximalist and activist reading of the historic treaty pushed by open-border advocates that has stifled candid, pragmatic debate.

Refugee protection can only survive if it retains the democratic support of host populations. Without it, public goodwill will continue to dry up, leaving governments to scramble with short-sighted, improvised burden-shifting schemes.

Crucially, sovereign states are not permanently bound by expansive judicial decisions, even if it is reasonable for the interpretation of international treaty law to evolve. National parliaments possess the authority to amend domestic legislation to clarify ambiguous legal terms. By codifying precise thresholds for asylum, most legislatures can effectively override a judiciary and restore the structural parameters originally intended by the treaty.

The central predicament is that few political leaders in the West possess the courage to confront the contradiction characterizing modern refugee law. Instead, mainstream politicians maintain a facade of humanitarian concern, failing to recognize that sustainable policy requires empathy in both directions – toward needy foreigners, and toward the citizens asked to absorb them.

Opinion The UN’s Refugee Convention finds itself at a crossroads 75 years later – because of how it’s being interpreted