What does the UN 1951 Refugee Convention say – and can you change it?
The home secretary has suggested the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention needs updating to stop “simply being gay or a woman” being a reason for people to claim asylum in the UK.
In a speech to a right-wing thinktank in New York today, Suella Braverman will ask whether the 1951 convention is “fit for our modern age” or “whether it is in need of reform”.
She cites the rising number of refugees across the world and those arriving in the UK in small boats as proof we “now live in a completely different time” to when the convention was written.
Here Sky News looks at what the convention says and how difficult it would be to change.
What does it say?
The UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was originally signed by 28 countries, including the UK, in Geneva in July 1951.
As a “post-Second World War instrument” it was “originally limited in scope to persons fleeing events occurring before 1 January 1951 and within Europe”, namely the Holocaust.
But it has since expanded and updated with more than 100 countries now signatories.
It defines what a refugee is, what rights they have and what obligations states have to them when they arrive.
According to the convention, a refugee is “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.
With the development of international human rights law, the convention says it should now be applied “without discrimination as to sex, age, disability, sexuality, or other prohibited grounds of discrimination”.
Analysis:
The city of immigrants is being ‘destroyed’ by migration
Braverman’s rhetoric risks backfiring
It gives refugees the right to “non-discrimination, non-penalisation and non-refoulement”.
The “non-penalisation” section means refugees “should not be penalised for their illegal entry or stay” in the country they flee to and recognises that “seeking asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules”.
The “non-refoulement” part bans countries from “expelling or returning a refugee against his or her will, in any manner whatsoever, to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom”.
According to the convention, countries are also obliged to give asylum seekers access to “courts, primary education, work, and documentation, including a refugee travel document in passport form”.
The convention does not apply to refugees who benefit from another specific UN or equivalent humanitarian programme, for example people from Palestine who fall under the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman
What does Suella Braverman want?
The home secretary says that while after the Second World War, the convention conferred protection on around two million refugees, some data analysis suggests that in the current context, this number is now 780 million.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) puts the original figure at one million and the current one at 35.3 million, as of the end of 2022.
Suella Braverman argues that the provisions on having a “well-founded fear of persecution” have been watered down to just “discrimination”.
She says this has created an asylum system where “simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin is sufficient to qualify for protection”.
Can you change the convention?
The original 1951 convention was updated in 1967 to remove the “geographical and temporal limitations” and give it “universal coverage”.
Since then it has been “supplemented” according to the “progressive development of international human rights law”.
Although the convention itself hasn’t changed – the way courts have interpreted it to rule on cases has – providing new case law for their own and other countries.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
‘Would a female Afghan interpreter for the British army be allowed to stay in the UK?’
Natasha Tsangarides, associate director of advocacy for the charity Freedom from Torture, says Ms Braverman is wrong to say case law now defines a refugee as facing discrimination – not persecution.
“That’s incorrect, there’s no case law to support that,” she told Sky News.
“People, whether they are LGBT or not, need a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ to be able to seek asylum.”
On the growing numbers of migrants globally, which some estimate could reach a quarter of a billion due to the climate crisis and other conflicts, Ms Tsangarides stresses that isn’t the issue.
“It’s correct to say that more people are on the move than they were before. But of those displaced people, two thirds stay in their country and just move to a different part.
“Of that third who leave, seven out of ten stay in their region, which means only a small fraction of them come to Europe and try to seek asylum in the UK.
“The asylum system is in chaos, not because more people are coming, but because the Home Office has been presided over by chaotic governments that have neglected the system.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Labour: ‘There’s a migration system crisis’
Immigration lawyer Harjap Bhangal also says changing the convention or the way it’s interpreted by judges and Home Office decision makers won’t solve the UK asylum crisis.
Out of 78,768 asylum applications for the year ending June 2023, 71% were approved.
Only six return agreements have been struck in recent years and there is still a Home Office backlog of more than 130,000 cases.
“The problem here is the government isn’t sending as many people back as they used to,” Mr Bhangal said.
“The removals numbers have been whittled down. That isn’t the fault of the convention – it’s the machinery and a case of a bad workman blaming his tools.”
Official changes, like the one in 1967, have to be approved by all 149 member states, Mr Bhangal added, which with Ms Braverman’s lack of success on returns agreements, would be near impossible.
“I don’t think she’s going to get the support,” he said. “At the moment she can’t even get EU countries to sign return agreements, so it’s not even workable.
“Changing the wording of the convention isn’t going to stop the boats – people smugglers don’t care about what the official definition of a refugee is.”
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
Source: Summer Meng
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Source: jmhorp
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
Related: Bitcoin mining using coal energy down 43% since 2011 — Report
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
Magazine: Bitcoin ATH sooner than expected? XRP may drop 40%, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 23 – 29
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
OKX was among the first crypto exchanges to receive a license under Europe’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation via its Malta hub in January 2025.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.
Magazine: Stablecoin for cyber-scammers launches, Sony L2 drama: Asia Express
Authorities in the US state of Massachusetts continue targeting unlawful cryptocurrency market practices, with a local court fining crypto financial services firm CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston on April 2 sentenced CLS Global on criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volume, according to an announcement from the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office.
In addition to a $428,059 fine, the court prohibited CLS Global from offering services in the US for a probation period of three years.
CLS Global, a crypto market maker registered in the United Arab Emirates, in January pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and one count of wire fraud.
CLS agreed to manipulate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundAI
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving NexFundAI, a token created by the FBI as part of a sting operation in May 2024.
CLS Global was among at least three firms that took the FBI’s bait and agreed to provide “market maker services” for NexFundAI, including a fraudulent scheme to attract investors to purchase the token.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee, Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other NexFundAI manipulators, Hong Kong-linked ZM Quant Investment and Russia-linked Gotbit Consulting.
CLS Global’s profile
According to CLS Global CEO Filipp Veselov, the company was founded in 2017 to fill in a “huge gap in the market for high-quality market-making solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked at the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken, which is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and has about 370,000 followers on X.
The CLS team also includes chief revenue officer Pavel Singaevskii, who previously served as sales manager at Stex, a crypto platform that reportedly ceased operations without warning in 2023.
Source: CLS Global
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform continues operating and has more than 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How much wash trading is in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice involving artificially inflating trading volume by repeatedly buying and selling the same asset, generating a misleading perception of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by the US blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the crypto market has at least $2.6 billion in estimated wash traded volumes, or just about 2% of total daily crypto trading volumes, as reported by CoinGecko.
Estimated wash trade volume in crypto. Source: Chainalysis
Related: Russian Gotbit founder strikes $23M plea deal with US prosecutors
Some studies indicate that wash trading makes up a bigger share of the crypto market.
In 2022, the US National Bureau of Economic Research reported that illegal wash trading may account for as much as 70% of average trading volumes on unregulated exchanges.
Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports12 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway