Abstract
This article analyses the status and experiences of refugee seamen following the Second World War in the light of intervention by UNHCR, the United Nations Office for Refugees. UNHCR portrayed them as a distinct group of persons, mainly of East European origin, who wandered the globe without any right or expectation of being allowed to disembark and settle permanently. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention provided little protection, merely inviting signatory states to give refugee seafarers ‘sympathetic consideration’. A breakthrough came about with the 1957 Hague Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen which entered into force in 1961. The article draws upon UNHCR case files to examine what refugee seamen disclosed of their situation during the Cold War and the possible remedies available including from UNHCR. By this means the article contributes to a granular and historically contextualised discussion of refugeedom.
Introduction
“My only address is this ship”. So wrote Rafik Y., a 32-year-old Palestinian-born refugee in July 1965, in a letter to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN Office for Refugees, in Geneva. Rafik explained, “I have been aboard this ship for five years and it is unable to ‘pay off’ because I have no passport”. He held a refugee registration card issued in Gaza by the UN Refugee and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East but had no other papers. Rafik had signed on a Swedish merchant ship in Kiel, and paid Swedish taxes throughout his time on board, but now wished to leave and collect his savings from a Swedish bank. However, the Swedish authorities declined to provide him with a travel document. He ended his letter, As things are now, I have no way of ever leaving this ship and no one seems to care. I am not familiar with what to ask for exactly, but I would appreciate if you could let me know if and what rights I have as a refugee under these circumstances. After five years I’m getting pretty tired of this… I am asking you because I know you will at least try to do something, which is more than Sweden has done.
Rafik was not alone in writing to UNHCR about his plight, although his background was unusual. Other refugee seamen, mostly of eastern European origin, made themselves known to Geneva throughout the 1950s and 1960s. How and why did UNHCR regard them as a particular problem, given that it had responsibility for protecting and assisting a great number of other refugees? How did UNHCR respond to their letters and petitions, including publicising their testimony to keep them in the public eye? What other steps did UNHCR undertake, such as negotiating with governments under whose flags refugee seamen sailed?
The first section of this article examines the post-1945 international refugee regime enshrined in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. The Convention specifically mentioned refugee seamen but left important details unresolved. Accordingly, the second part of this article demonstrates how these refugees wrote to UNHCR and how UNHCR kept refugee seafarers in the public eye by telling stories about their plight. The third section discusses UNHCR's engagement with those governments that had a particular stake in international merchant shipping. The final section is devoted to the significance of the Hague Agreement which entered into force in 1961 and was the culmination of international efforts to address outstanding issues relating to refugee seafarers. 2
In addition to official documents the sources for this article include letters that refugees addressed to UNHCR. Rafik's letter joined thousands more in the confidential individual case files that UNHCR compiled as a record of the decisions it reached as to the eligibility of refugees for its protection. The total collection, now archived, amounts to some 23,000 files organised by family name; a spreadsheet makes it possible to establish countries of origin and relevant dates. 3 These sources enable scholars to re-examine the rules and practice of the international refugee regime as they affected refugees who provided their own perspective on their displacement. 4 Although their present-day engagement with UNHCR is being studied, the historical ramifications of these encounters remain opaque. 5 Unlike Rafik, most of those who sought UNHCR's assistance were not seafarers. However, the arrangement of the case files makes it impossible to identify seamen (or other professions) and only a close reading of several hundred files enabled the author to detect relevant cases. 6
In studying refugee seamen, this article responds to historian Leon Fink's call to “look carefully at the actions not only of the seafarers themselves but of the land-based authorities, national and occasionally supranational, who composed the rules for the floating world”. 7 As will become apparent, the UNHCR case files demonstrate the relationships between seamen and the relevant authorities. Also at stake are methodological issues involving questions “less about movement in and of itself than about understanding the mechanics and meaning of mobility as they were experienced by contemporaries”. 8 The UNHCR case files bring such mechanics and meanings into sharper focus. Not least, they also relate to what Gopalan Balachandran has described as state-imposed restrictions in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century on crews of Indian and Chinese origin who faced the prospect of never-ending transit on ships that became “spaces of confinement” but who nevertheless found ways of circumventing such controls. 9 Like Rafik, refugee seamen in the 1950s and 1960s experienced similar confinement until an international agreement alleviated their plight.
The post-1945 refugee regime and refugee seamen
The onset of the Cold War rivalry formed the backdrop to discussions among UN member states on mass population displacement in the late 1940s. 10 The Refugee Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was signed on 25 July 1951 and entered into force on 22 April 1954. It was originally limited in scope to persons fleeing events occurring before 1 January 1951 and within Europe, until the 1967 Protocol removed these limitations. It defined a refugee as “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”. Signatory states committed to the principle of non-refoulement, that is not to return a refugee without their consent to a country where they risked persecution. Among the rights accorded to recognised refugees were access to employment and provision for a Convention travel document in lieu of a national passport. Article 28 refers to the issue by governments of travel documents to refugees “lawfully staying, unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require”. 11
However, the Refugee Convention said almost nothing when it came to refugees at sea. To be sure, the vulnerability of merchant seamen had previously gained traction beyond the corridors of policymakers. A widely read novel, The Death Ship, first published in 1926 by the mysterious author B. Traven described the plight of undocumented seafarers. It told of a beleaguered American merchant seaman given short shrift by “that soulless beast called the state” because he had lost his papers and could not prove his nationality. He was repeatedly arrested and deported before falling victim to unscrupulous owners who allowed his unseaworthy vessel to sunk along with fellow crew. As Traven put it, “every age has its Inquisition, our age has the passport”. He painted a portrait of the seaman who was no better than a slave. 12 But the conduct of states and shipowners towards refugee seafarers before the Second World War found little expression in the international refugee regime: for example, refugee seamen from Soviet Russia figured only intermittently in the records of the League of Nations, such as when a group of 45 Russian seamen and their dependants in the Tubabao camp in the Philippines lobbied the IRO in 1949 for their resettlement. 13
During its short lifetime from 1946 to 1950, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) had few direct dealings with refugee seamen but its officials nevertheless informed UNHCR that seamen from eastern Europe had been in touch regarding their status and potential resettlement. 14 More to the point, the IRO drew the issue to the attention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). 15 The ILO understood the precarious conditions of merchant seamen – it had engineered a global agreement on a minimum wage and backed a revised Accommodation of Crews Convention in 1949 – but had no statistics on refugee seamen. David Morse, ILO's director-general, suggested that member states facing a labour shortage might wish to engage “refugee bona fide seafarers [but] of course not refugees who were escaping by sea from their countries”. He acknowledged that “refugees did not always enjoy the same working conditions as other members of a ship's crew who benefited by the proper protection of their government” and cited instances where employers reneged on wage agreements. Furthermore, whereas recognised refugees could normally obtain a travel document of some kind, those seamen “having no country of residence or temporary asylum” faced particular difficulties, because government authorities maintained that, if allowed to land, a refugee seaman who would remain on their territory given the “moral obligation” not to deport them. Morse concluded that “it is essential on humanitarian grounds to do everything possible to relieve their lot and to help them acquire a new nationality and protect them against exploitation in the meantime”. 16
In August 1949 an ad hoc UN conference of plenipotentiaries met to hammer out an agreement on the subject. The French delegate acknowledged that the situation of refugee seamen was “precarious … since they were permanently afloat”, although his Norwegian counterpart questioned what was meant by “bona fide seafarers” and “reserved the right to decide each individual case after appropriate investigation”. 17 The outcome was the adoption of Article 11 of the Convention which referred to “refugees regularly serving as crew members on board a ship flying the flag of a Contracting State”. Such states were invited to “give sympathetic consideration to their establishment on its territory and the issue of travel documents to them or their temporary admission to its territory with a view to facilitating their establishment in another country”. What it meant to serve “regularly” or to be granted “sympathetic consideration” was not elaborated. Governments dragged their feet as to whether refugees could count employment on board ship as “residence in the territory of the country whose flag the ship flies” and it took another decade for this proposal to gain assent. A further problem was that refugee seafarers who did manage to obtain travel documents risked forfeiting them if they transferred to a different ship. All the same, Article 11 represented a significant innovation in international refugee law because pre-war conventions were silent on refugee seamen. 18
UNHCR and stories of refugee seamen
As the successor organisation to the IRO, UNHCR had a core responsibility to provide legal protection and assistance to recognised refugees. States signatories to the Convention were expected to cooperate with UNHCR but the UN General Assembly initially agreed only a three-year mandate and it was not expected to become a permanent fixture. Thus its support for refugee seamen may be understood partly as a means to carve a distinctive niche as an operational agency. UNHCR also calculated that efforts on their behalf would draw attention to the fact that many refugees sailed under flags of states that had not signed the Refugee Convention, an issue that Geneva hoped to rectify. UNHCR did not maintain a dedicated section to deal with refugee seamen given the relatively small numbers involved as well as its own limited staff. Instead, individual cases were handled by the legal division with the support of a resettlement team. 19
What resources did UNHCR have at its disposal to demonstrate the plight of refugee seamen? One answer lay in telling stories, particularly of anti-communist refugees. Estonian refugee Georg L. left the country of his birth in 1940 at the age of 26. Having spent several years in a camp for Displaced Persons in Germany, he joined a ship sailing under a Panamanian flag in 1949 and worked as a wireless operator. His initial application in 1951 to move to Canada had been rejected on medical grounds. Georg explained that “as he was not allowed to land anywhere, his wife and daughter joined him on the same ship” where his wife worked as a cook. His daughter had been allowed to leave the ship when it docked in the UK so that she could attend school. He wrote all this down in a plaintive letter to Geneva: I am sailing four years unbroken without any rest at all on a small and old ship between so many continents … I should like to know how many sailors or men on land have worked unbrokenly without any vacancy [i.e., leave] for four years. If I please for the peace of mind where to establish my home, the one which is given a man by God and Nature then the immigration authorities are asking [about] my health. Ridiculous. I have not seen a man born with a land permit in his hand.
The first UNHCR High Commissioner, former Dutch diplomat Gerrit van Heuven Goedhart, devoted an article in 1955 to the “tragic problem” of refugee seamen. In his words, some seafarers “being regular members of the crew of a ship of their country of nationality” decided to “jump ship” rather than return to the Soviet bloc. Others, having been placed in refugee camps at the end of the Second World War, reverted to their previous occupation and enlisted on a new merchant vessel only to discover that their papers, if any, were no longer valid. 21 Goedhart publicised several cases that “passed our desks in the course of the past few years”, including a Polish refugee who worked on a succession of Swedish and Norwegian ships and who was allowed to enter the UK to recover from an accident. After re-joining a Norwegian vessel in Rotterdam, he returned to London without authorisation and was promptly deported. He was then shunted back and forth between different authorities in the Netherlands. UNHCR eventually managed to get Norway to agree to admit him. Others had to jump through various hoops, such as a Yugoslav seaman who spent a decade aboard a succession of British and Italian vessels without being able to renew the papers issued to him in 1945. Thanks to UNHCR prompting and the intervention of an unnamed voluntary agency in Hamburg, the German authorities granted him temporary residence and employment. In short, refugee seafarers were forced to sail the seas for years on end unless one state or another could be persuaded to exercise discretion. 22
Other UN agencies highlighted shortcomings in protection. An article in a popular UNESCO publication drew attention to a Dutch survey in 1954 which found that only two-fifths of a sample of 550 refugee seamen had passports or travel documents allowing them to return to the country where their ship was registered. Some had papers that had expired. More than two-thirds had no papers at all. The author, Louise de Béa, described them as “men who, officially, did not exist”. She referred to “the ancient story of the Flying Dutchman who was doomed to sail the seas eternally”, adding that “this legendary captain was allowed to return to port from time to time to search for a maid whose love could release him from his fate, whereas these are refugee seamen whose world ends at the bottom of a ship's gangplank”. 23 The echoes of The Death Ship were unmistakeable.
Goedhart's successors also deployed the illustrative case study to publicise the situation of refugee seamen. During World Refugee Year (1959–1960), UNHCR publicised the case of Lithuanian-born Walter T., who complained to high commissioner Auguste Lindt that “it seems that a human being is handled just the same as a sack of potatoes or a pile of firewood”. Walter continued, Is there any country in the world which would give me and my fellow refugee seamen a chance to become useful citizens, so that even in our old age we could come to that country and rest at ease after our turbulent wanderings around the world without having a place to call our own?
UNHCR diplomacy and refugee seamen in the Cold War
In addition to the “human interest” stories mentioned above, UNHCR engaged with Western governments in different forums and queried the lack of protection that they afforded refugee seamen. Both administrative and political issues were at stake. Cornelius Brouwer, a former Dutch diplomat who became UNHCR's representative in the Netherlands, set out the position of the Dutch government as early as 1952. Refugees who arrived by sea received little protection from the authorities: “they would prefer seeing the refugees go on”. Brouwer drew particular attention to the determination of Polish seamen whose “desertion is carefully planned”. Although the government regarded them as “illegal entrants”, Brouwer argued they came under UNHCR's mandate and insisted that “there is no proof whatever that they should not be trusted”. 25
UNHCR gave Norway slightly more credit compared to the Netherlands. High Commissioner Goedhart praised the Norwegian authorities for having accepted 50 refugee seamen in 1953 to serve in its merchant navy and providing them with internationally recognised travel documents and full rights of residence in Norway. Oslo also agreed to provide refugee seamen with a special record of service (Fartsoppgave) to certify their length of service on board Norwegian ships. As Goedhart put it, “the basic idea is that this special service document will serve as a help to control and survey refugee seamen and to enable them to apply for a regularisation of their status in Norway after three years of continuous service”. Nevertheless, these provisions did not confer an automatic legal right of residence. 26
Besides, Norway adopted a rigid interpretation of what it meant to serve on a Norwegian ship. A Latvian seaman, 43-year-old Nikolajs L., contacted UNHCR in 1956. He had joined the Latvian merchant navy in 1939. He spent most of the war sailing between Norway and the USA. He catalogued the several merchant ships registered in Latvia, Norway and Sweden on which he had sailed since then without once having been allowed to disembark. Nikolajs was currently serving on a ship flying the Liberian flag but under the command of a Norwegian captain. According to UNHCR's representative in the Netherlands, “it seems to me that according to the present stipulations Norway is under obligation to provide him with the necessary documents as he has sailed on board Norwegian ships as a refugee seaman for over three years, in fact for 15 years with one single exception”. The authorities in Oslo turned him down because “the fact that the ship is owned by a Norwegian is not sufficient, it has to be wearing Norwegian colours to be recognised as a Norwegian ship”. UNHCR advised Nikolajs to apply for a Liberian travel document. But he never received the letter which was returned to Geneva, “not on ship–address unknown”, an indication that some refugee seafarers circumvented government restrictions. 27
Although seamen from eastern Europe who jumped ship attracted attention among Western governments and the news media in the era of the Cold War, it did not follow that they were permitted unhindered entry. One strand of US opinion supported their deportation on the grounds that they were economic migrants who entered the country by the back door. 28
Before and after the Second World War the US authorities tended to treat refugee seamen as “illegal immigrants” who were thought likely to jump ship or otherwise attempt to remain in the country. INS officials operated with a narrow definition of persecution and maintained that most seamen who deserted their ships had weak grounds for asylum. Yael Schacher describes the longstanding suspicion that “alien seamen” were “smugglers, subversives or intending deserters”, a view that persisted into the 1980s. 29 UNHCR's representative in the USA confirmed in 1960 that “INS officers are most careful in interviewing seamen not of the same nationality as the country which has issued them documents”. 30 The INS used discretionary powers to deport those who were deemed to have overstayed, no matter how long they had lived in the USA or whether they had dependants. Those who had married American women were thought to have done as a pretext to be allowed to stay. Lawyers who took on their cases had little room for manoeuvre in the face of bureaucratic intransigence. The INS exercised some discretion in cases where Italian seamen who jumped ship had established family and community ties in the United States, but this seems to have been the exception to the general rule, presumably because of the close relationship between the two countries. 31
The underlying politics were not straightforward and they affected all refugees, seamen included. On the one hand, Cold War refugees (“escapees”) had political value as symbols of communist oppression. 32 There was political capital to be made from the realisation that the world's oceans were “a space of ideological peril”. 33 This “peril” had a particular resonance for refugee seafarers. As will be seen, some governments held that Soviet bloc countries encouraged seafarers to defect as a means of communist infiltration. In fact, communist states took steps including through careful surveillance to deter the defection of Soviet sailors on merchant ships and encouraged those who did to return to the homeland. 34
UNHCR was acutely aware of the issues for individual seamen, as in the case of Ivan L., a Yugoslav refugee who had lived and worked in the USA for some twelve years following his arrival in 1956, leaving his family behind in a refugee camp in Italy. Deemed to be an illegal immigrant, he was threatened with deportation but, rather than wait for his case to be heard, he proposed to visit his sick wife and apply from Italy for entry visas for the entire family. An immigration advice bureau in New York advised him against going to Italy, “as this terminates your status in the United States”. John Woodward, the experienced head of UNHCR's resettlement section, described the instruction to return to Italy after more than a decade of residence in the US as “illogical, cumbersome and expensive” and suggested that “what is needed is amending legislation by the US Congress which would make it possible to regularise the status of seamen who enter illegally or overstay their landing permits”. In the end, the INS agreed to process the admission of his wife and children without requiring him to return to Italy. Thanks to energetic lobbying by its legal division, together with support from the National Catholic Welfare Conference, UNHCR secured a victory, helped by the knowledge that Senator Edward Kennedy was seeking to amend legislation and regularise the status of seaman who entered illegally. 35
UNHCR also learned of European seamen whose status involved it in a diplomatic wrangle with Japan. Latvian-born seaman Karl K. had worked on a series of Dutch and Latvian vessels, returning regularly to independent Latvia before the Second World War to see his widowed mother. She died in 1938, and Karl never returned to Latvia after its incorporation into the Soviet Union. In 1962 he obtained a seaman's papers in the Netherlands after having worked for seven years as a quartermaster on a Liberian-registered vessel. He “put up with bad condition in wages [while] looking forward to seeing his family in Japan” – he had met Kiyo, a Japanese woman in Yokohama in 1953. He regularly sent money to support Kiyo whom he married in 1959. However, the Japanese authorities only allowed him brief shore leave when his ship docked in Japan and remained suspicious of “his nationality of a communist country”. Karl thought that he held Dutch citizenship. The main administrative obstacle to naturalisation was that he needed to apply for a renunciation of his Latvian nationality but he held neither a Latvian passport nor a re-entry permit, both of which were required by the Japanese authorities. Ten years into their relationship, Karl and Kiyo described themselves as “desperate”. In this tangled web, it appeared that no government department in Tokyo was prepared to exercise any discretion. UNHCR's hands were tied by political misgivings and the government's propensity to pass the buck. 36 In short, its engagement with Western states revealed a combination on their part of administrative inflexibility and ambiguity towards refugees from communism.
In its public pronouncements, UNHCR held fast to its non-political and strictly humanitarian mandate. 37 This did not preclude it embarking on broader diplomatic efforts to improve the situation of rank-and-file refugee seaman by revisiting Article 11 of the Refugee Convention in the company of Western governments and to contribute an improvement in their prospects.
The Hague Agreement
Cases accompanied by detailed personal testimony prompted efforts to seek an international agreement to regularise the status of refugee seamen. Three meetings took place between October 1955 and November 1957 involving Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. As observers, UNHCR and ILO officials urged them to hammer out an agreement on the basis that many refugee seamen were “unable to obtain a foothold in any country”, adding that “there are gaps for which a practical solution has to be found”. The gaps included such matters as the health of seamen forced to stay on board and being at risk of sailing through waters where there was a danger of persecution. 38
Discussions were sometimes fraught. Although broadly supportive, the UK government had reservations on its territorial application and did not wish “to accept an obligation to admit to the UK refugees recruited abroad whose service on British registered ships might have been done entirely in some remote corner of the world”. It was also determined not to extend the agreement to territories including Aden, Hong Kong, Malta, Gibraltar, and Singapore, “for reasons connected with their earlier reservations regarding travel documents issued under the 1951 Refugee Convention”. 39 The colonial mindset was very much in evidence in the impulse to limit asylum claims. 40
The Hague Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen, signed on 23 November 1957 by the eight countries mentioned above, came into force in December 1961. It enabled a refugee seaman to obtain travel papers subject to having served at least 600 days on board ship of a contracting state, by virtue of which they would be regarded as “lawfully staying in the territory” of such state. This was, according to one scholar, a “fiction” in so far as it created no “obligation to provide for possibilities to establish oneself on the territory of any contracting state”. It is important to add that no such provision applied to a refugee who had escaped by stowing away. 41 Note that the brief but wide-ranging 1958 Convention on the High Seas stipulated that “there must exist a genuine link between the state and the ship; in particular, the state must effectively exercise its jurisdiction and control in administrative, technical and social matters over ships flying its flag”. 42
UNHCR reiterated the difficulty of calculating the precise global total of refugee seamen but a survey conducted in 1961 estimated the total to be no higher than 2,500, much smaller than the figure mentioned at the Hague where the number of non-European seamen was now thought to have been overestimated. The number of Baltic refugee seamen had fallen (most having been naturalised in Western countries), the number of Polish seamen was more or less static, but Hungarians were in greater evidence as a result of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. The report concluded that around 85 per cent of refugee seamen would be protected by the Hague Agreement, given that “the eight contracting parties were the most important seafaring nations”. Although the USA did not sign, UNHCR “assumed that [refugee seamen] are well protected by [travel] documents”. 43 Another issue concerned the registration of vessels under flags of convenience. Some ships were registered in Panama or Liberia. Paul Weis, UNHCR's senior legal adviser, felt strongly that there should be a solution to the problem of refugees who were serving on ships of states not parties to the Conference. In other words, there was still a gap in protection. 44
Several countries cited political reasons for remaining obdurate. Portugal had signed the Refugee Convention in 1960 but refused to sign the Hague Agreement. The difficulties affected Arnold S., a 34-year-old Latvian seaman, who protested that the Portuguese authorities (a right-wing dictatorship) would not allow him onshore because (in their view) Latvian refugees were communist spies. 45 The Greek government objected on the grounds that its signature “might entail an obligation for Greece to issue documents to former Greeks who had been deprived of their nationality for active participation in the communist rebellion”. 46 UNHCR again found its hands tied, in this case by the determination of conservative governments to play the communist card to the detriment of refugees from eastern Europe.
The Hague Agreement nevertheless held out hope for individual seamen such as 45-year-old Polish-born Jerzy S. who came to the attention of UNHCR in 1962. He was working on a ship registered in Israel. Four years earlier he had signed on a German steamer before changing to a vessel flying a Swedish flag. He held a valid Polish passport which was due to expire. He had no wish to renew it or return to Poland “for political reasons”. Jerzy had been unsuccessful in applying for entry to the USA, presumably because he originated from a communist country. Israel had signed the Refugee Convention but did not issue Convention travel documents to non-Jewish refugees and, like Portugal, was not party to the Hague Agreement. UNHCR decided that “this is not a case on which we could usefully approach the Israel authorities” and advised Jerzy to change to a Swedish ship so as to qualify for the required number of days’ service to qualify under the Hague Agreement. UNHCR had no clout with Israel and no likelihood of changing the minds of American officials and deemed this to be the best option. 47 Another case concerned 19-year-old Hungarian refugee Miklós N., who served on a Norwegian vessel that “frequently goes to the United States and every time we are there I have to stay on board”. He had a Norwegian aliens’ passport which the INS refused to recognise as giving him the right of entry. UNHCR complained privately that it could do nothing about “overzealous” INS officials but informed Miklós that he was now entitled to request a Convention travel document from Norway in accordance with the Hague Agreement, the text of which it enclosed for his information. This travel document would help him go ashore on leave in the United States. 48
As UNHCR admitted, “it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the persons concerned are aware of the existence of the Hague Agreement”. Officials hoped that news would reach the ears of some seafarers by word of mouth and UNHCR sponsored a counselling service in Rotterdam to inform refugee seamen of their rights. 49 They continued to contact Geneva. Lancelot A., a 30-year-old Trinidad-born British seaman, wrote to UNHCR in January 1963 with a simple question: “How can I become a Refugee Seaman?” For the past two and a half years he had worked as a “saloon boy” on Swedish ships. Having read in a Swedish newspaper about the agreement, he asked whether he qualified for assistance: “All my discharges are quite good ones and still I find it difficult at times to land in Sweden only because of that little advice or know-how which I lack, the Swedish Police have been good to me so far, but by getting a permit to take another Swedish ship means having to pay”. He went on, “I am only seeking advice as to how I can become a Refugee Seaman [so that] I can have some priority or the assistance I need as to enable me to land in any friendly country without having as much trouble as in the past”. However, UNHCR's legal division replied that his questions were “not within the scope of this Office”, because he had failed to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution. 50
The Hague Agreement would have benefited Nikolajs L. (see above). Unfortunately, it seems not to have helped Rafik, with whose predicament this article began. In other cases, UNHCR came to the rescue. The parents of Polish-born seaman Lech Z had taken him to France in 1926 when he was just two years old and he grew up there. He joined the Polish navy during the Second World War and after being discharged he worked on a series of Swedish and Norwegian merchant vessels. He signed off in Rotterdam in 1959 and was provided with a valid Norwegian aliens’ passport on joining a Norwegian oil tanker. But Lech needed a Convention travel document to allow him to live in Holland with his Dutch wife. He had no wish to return to communist Poland. Learning of the case in 1965, UNHCR expressed sympathy: “Mr Z. did not realise that his Norwegian travel paper was not a Convention travel document”. UNHCR urged the Dutch authorities to issue the appropriate papers. Its intervention paid off. 51
Conclusion
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, refugee seafarers became a touchstone for UNHCR's role in protecting refugees. By recounting what they said of vulnerability and uncertain status, the agency kept seamen in the public eye. As High Commissioner Goedhart put it, the problem “though it may seem small from the aspect of the numbers of persons involved, is certainly grave in terms of human suffering”. 52 As an institutional newcomer, UNHCR advanced its claims to authority and legitimacy by proactively assisting a number of them. There were mutual benefits.
For their part, refugee seamen were not passive spectators but announced themselves by writing to Geneva. Their testimony, like that of other refugees, was a sine qua non condition of asserting claims to eligibility under the Refugee Convention. 53 In principle, refugees from Eastern Europe embodied political oppression, but in practice they nevertheless had to demonstrate an individual well-founded fear of persecution. Neither Western governments nor UNHCR accepted all such claims or gave them a free pass. This applied to refugee seafarers no less than to others, but the consequences for the former were distressing in so far as they often remained trapped on board in spaces of confinement, living and working in uncertain conditions and unable to disembark unless they evaded restrictions (like the aforementioned Nikolajs). 54
From the outset UNHCR expressed disquiet at the stance of states under whose flags refugee seamen sailed. The momentum that UNHCR maintained, along with cooperation from the ILO, contributed to the Hague Agreement that held states and shipping companies to a higher standard than hitherto and which encompassed a majority of refugee seamen who now enjoyed the same terms and conditions of employment as did fellow crew. 55 UNHCR informed seamen of its provisions while reminding states of their obligations, although this breakthrough did not undermine state sovereignty where questions of asylum were concerned.
The travails of refugee seamen are mostly a thing of the past. With the end of the Cold War, few seafarers from communist countries jumped ship to claim asylum. A lack of traction regarding refugee seamen was already evident by the end of the 1960s. Numbers dwindled once the Hague Agreement made it easier for them to obtain valid travel papers. A more important factor is that shipping companies increasingly hired workers from countries in the Global South, notably the Philippines, besides which employers had less incentive to take on refugees who had greater rights under international refugee law than crew who worked for modest wages. Broader industry trends, notably the trend towards containerisation requiring fewer workers, also had a significant impact. 56 Meanwhile refugees in general are nowadays severely hampered by states in the Global North that restrict asylum claims at the same time as developing anti-trafficking legislation to combat irregular migration. 57
As for UNHCR, it has grown considerably in size and scope and has subsequently taken on new responsibilities, addressing global refugee crises and devoting efforts to crisis management as well as to repatriation and development assistance. The protection issues that commanded so much attention in the 1950s and 1960s now form only one element of its activity. UNHCR continues to engage in institutional self-validation and to wrestle with the dilemma of reconciling refugees’ rights with state sovereignty. But cases of refugee seamen are no longer news items. 58
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Heather Faulkner and other members of the team in UNHCR Records and Archives, Geneva, as well as the data protection division for making its confidential individual case files available to me. I also received helpful suggestions from Ruth Balint, Lena Christoph and Irial Glynn. I am very grateful to the reviewers for their careful and critical engagement with earlier versions of this article. Responsibility for the final version is mine alone.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Professorship [grant EM-2023-003].
