The Refugee Convention Turns 75: In Türkiye, Its Promise Is Already Broken – OpEd
Key Takeaways:
- Seventy-five years after the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugee protection in Türkiye is collapsing due to sharp cuts in international humanitarian funding, leaving many Afghan and other refugees without legal aid, social support, or protection services.
- A survey of 193 refugees across more than 30 cities found that 43% reported no active service-providing organizations remaining in their city, forcing families into prolonged legal limbo, fear of deportation, and, in some cases, dangerous irregular journeys to Europe.
- Refugee-led organizations are among the last remaining points of support and are calling for direct funding and inclusion as genuine protection partners rather than last-resort implementers, warning that continued underfunding is already costing lives.
Earlier this year, a family we had been counselling for months disappeared from our caseload. We later learned why: they had tried to reach Europe through an irregular route, and their child did not survive the journey.
We share this not because it is unusual, but because it is becoming less unusual every year.
Seventy-five years ago, the international community agreed on a framework to protect people fleeing persecution. The 1951 Refugee Convention was not an abstract document, it was a promise, built from the rubble of a world that had abandoned millions of people to their fate. This year marks that anniversary. In Türkiye, the promise is not being kept.
Türkiye hosts one of the world’s largest refugee populations. The needs are not shrinking. Families from Afghanistan, many of whom fled the Taliban’s return and belong to ethnic and religious minorities with no safe option of return, have been living with uncertainty for years. Some have been waiting for their applications to be resolved for a decade. In November 2025, we surveyed 193 refugees across more than 30 cities. What we found was not a population waiting for help to arrive. It was a population that had already witnessed help disappear.
The reduction in international humanitarian funding has had direct and measurable consequences on the ground. Organizations that once provided legal aid, social support, and protection services across Türkiye have closed offices or scaled back to a handful of cities. In our research, 43 percent of respondents said there was no active service-providing organization left in the city where they lived. In the Black Sea region — where a significant refugee population continues to live — support has all but disappeared.
This is what funding cuts look like in practice. They do not appear as line items in a budget. They appear as a family with no one to call when they receive a deportation notice. They emerge as a woman fleeing domestic violence with nowhere to be referred to. They appear as a teenager who cannot enroll at university because his legal status was never resolved, and there is no longer a lawyer to help him navigate the system.
We are currently supporting a family in Trabzon who has lived in legal limbo for three years after their asylum application was rejected. The father cannot obtain a work permit. The children cannot continue their education past a certain level. Every knock at the door brings fear of detention. They have not lost their case because their claim was weak — they have lost access to the system because the organizations that once helped them navigate it no longer exist.
At a moment when international institutions are scaling back and UNHCR itself is operating under severe financial constraints in Türkiye, organizations like ours have become one of the last points of contact for thousands of people. In the past year alone, the large NGOs operating in refugee protection across the region have contracted by roughly two-thirds.
Refugees in Türkiye still depend on organizations like ours for tasks any citizen would handle alone: booking a hospital appointment, understanding a letter from the authorities, knowing where to report a rights violation. That level of dependency is itself a structural failure — it reflects how little has been invested in genuine integration over the years. But dismantling the organizations that provide this support, without building any alternative first, is not reform. It is abandonment, and for many of the people we work with, it is what tips the balance toward a dangerous journey.
Refugees travel from Giresun, Ordu, Erzincan, and Samsun to reach us in Trabzon. Our staff and volunteers answer calls on weekends and public holidays. Each month, we follow up on dozens of cases. We do this because there is no one else to do it, not because we have the resources to do it well.
IOM has documented significant deaths among Afghanistan nationals on irregular migration routes. The family who lost their child were not reckless. They were out of options. This is the cost of an underfunded protection system. It is not measured in budget shortfalls. It is measured in lives.
Seventy-five years after the Refugee Convention, we are not asking for declarations of commitment. We are asking for something concrete: fund refugee-led organizations directly, at the scale of the needs we are already meeting. Treat us as protection partners in the rooms where decisions about Türkiye’s refugee response are made, not as last-resort implementers of programmes designed without us. The needs are growing. The system is retreating. We are staying. The question is whether the resources will follow.
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