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.
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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.
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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”.
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.
Image: 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.
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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.”
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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.”
German law enforcement seized 34 million euros ($38 million) in cryptocurrency from eXch, a cryptocurrency platform allegedly used to launder funds stolen after Bybit’s record-breaking $1.4 billion hack.
The seizure, announced on May 9 by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Frankfurt’s main prosecutor’s office, involved multiple crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Dash (DASH). The move marks the third-largest crypto confiscation in the BKA’s history.
The authorities also seized eXch’s German server infrastructure with over eight terabytes of data and shut down the platform, the announcement added.
eXch exchanged crypto without AML
In the statement, the BKA described eXch as a “swapping” service that allowed users to exchange various crypto assets without implementing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures.
The platform had operated since 2014 and reportedly facilitated about $1.9 billion in crypto transfers, some of which were believed to be of “criminal origin,” including assets laundered during the Bybit hack.
Example of flow of Bybit exploit funds moving through eXch and bridging back and forth between Ether and Bitcoin. Source: TRM Labs
“Among other things, a portion of the $1.5 billion stolen from the Bybit crypto exchange, which was hacked on Feb. 21, 2025, is said to have been exchanged via eXch,” the authorities wrote.
Multisig, FixedFloat among laundering cases
According to a post by crypto sleuth ZachXBT, eXch was also involved in laundering millions of funds from other crypto thefts and exploits, including Multisig, FixedFloat and the $243 million Genesis creditor theft.
Those were in addition to “countless phishing drainer services over the past few years with refusal to block addresses and freeze orders,” ZachXBT said.
Source: ZachXBT
ZachXBT was among the first security analysts to report on eXch’s links to laundering $35 million of crypto assets stolen from Bybit soon after the hack was confirmed.
“Lazarus Group transferred 5K ETH from the Bybit Hack to a new address and began laundering funds via eXch (a centralized mixer) and bridging funds to Bitcoin via Chainflip,” ZachXBT wrote in a Telegram post on Feb. 22.
“Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure […], we don’t see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] simply because some people misinterpret our goals,” it wrote.
Addressing the seizure, senior public prosecutor Benjamin Krause stressed the importance of action against “quick and anonymous opportunities for money laundering for any amount.”
“Crypto swapping is an essential component of the underground economy, used to conceal incriminated funds from illegal activities such as hacking or trading in stolen payment card data, thus making them available to perpetrators,” he said.
With Ruth away, Beth and Harriet are joined by Salma Shah, a former Conservative special adviser from 2014-2018 and now a political commentator.
They unpack Donald Trump’s surprise UK trade deal announcement and what it means for Sir Keir Starmer, who’s also landed a deal with India and is gearing up for key EU negotiations.
But while the global optics look strong, the domestic mood is tense. Harriet has some advice for the Labour backbenchers who are unhappy over welfare cuts and the winter fuel allowance policy.
Red Wall MPs should push for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted rather than a reversal of the winter fuel payment policy, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Baroness Harman, the former Labour Party chair, told Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this would hand the group a “progressive win” rather than simply “protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer” over winter fuel.
Earlier this week, a number of MPs in the Red Wall – Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north of England – reposted a statement on social media in which they said the leadership’s response to the local elections had “fallen on deaf ears”.
They singled out the cut to the winter fuel allowance as an issue that was raised on the doorstep and urged the government to rethink the policy, arguing doing so “isn’t weak, it takes us to a position of strength”.
But Baroness Harman said a better target for the group could be an overhaul of George Osborne’s two-child benefit cap.
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The cap, announced in 2015 as part of Lord David Cameron’s austerity measures, means while parents can claim child tax credit or Universal Credit payments for their first and second child, they can’t make claims for any further children they have.
Labour faced pressure to remove the cap in the early months of government, with ministers suggesting in February that they were considering relaxing the limit.
Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby that this could be a sensible pressure point for Red Wall MPs to target.
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She said: “It could be that they have a kind of progressive win, and it might not be a bad thing to do in the context of an overall strategy on child poverty.
“Let’s see whether instead of just protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer, they can build a bridge to a new progressive set of policies.”
Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Red Wall group, suggested that her party’s “connection” to a core group of voters “died” with the decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
“We need to reset the government,” she told Electoral Dysfunction. “The biggest way to do that is by tackling issues such as winter fuel payments.
“I think we should raise the thresholds so that people perhaps who are paying a higher level of tax are the only people who are exempt from getting it.”
Image: Pic: AP
A group of MPs in the Red Wall, thought to number about 40, met on Tuesday night following the fallout of local election results in England, which saw Labour lose the Runcorn by-electionandcontrol of Doncaster Council to Reform UK.
Following the results, Sir Keir said “we must deliver that change even more quickly – we must go even further”.
Some Labour MPs believe it amounted to ignoring voters’ concerns.
One of the MPs who was present at the meeting told Sky News there was “lots of anger at the government’s response to the results”.
“People acknowledged the winter fuel allowance was the main issue for us on the doorstep,” they said.
“There is a lack of vision from this government.”
Another added: “Everyone was furious.”
Downing Street has ruled out a U-turn on means testing the winter fuel payment, following newspaper reports earlier this week that one might be on the cards.