Refugee Week 2026 – Courage Under Conditional Protection

The theme of this year’s Refugee Week is courage. It is a word that has its deepest origins in that which stands at the core of us all. Rooted in the old French corage, it means heart in the sense of our innermost feelings or spirit; and further back in the Latin cor, the heart, that most vital organ itself.

Before courage took on the more popular parlance it carries today – meaning valour in the face of danger – it meant something more intrinsic. It was a condition of the heart, the temper of the soul, the disposition from which action flows. Forced from their home, moved by the threat or reality of persecution to flee across borders, and faced with adversity, refugees both embody the challenge to the heart demanded by courage and demonstrate the valour with which it is often associated.

A refugee, by definition, possesses courage.

When we think of this courage, our minds often turn first to the moment of flight: the persecution at home, the tumultuous journey across borders, perhaps across continents and oceans. The images that burn themselves into the retina – electric fences, overcrowded dinghies, concrete grey detention centres – are the images the world has learned to recognise as the refugee experience. From there, we imagine the tranquillity of safety and sanctuary, and the chance to live without needing courage to push through each moment.

Yet life as a refugee requires continual courage. Stoically building new lives in new lands; learning new languages; absorbing new customs and routines; recovering from trauma; navigating unfamiliar legal systems.

I have always understood that refugee recognition and protection should offer refugees, so far as is possible, a horizon beyond perpetual uncertainty. That, while life will always have its difficulties, and the life of a refugee more than most, once a refugee reaches a place of sanctuary they should be entitled to build a stable home like the rest of us. That much seems to me affirmed in the most basic principle, cited in the preamble to the Refugee Convention, that “human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination”.

Those freedoms are contingent, however, on security.

If a refugee is forever asking whether now, or next month, or next year, they will be torn away from their new life and find themselves suddenly evicted, how can they fully enjoy those freedoms? Courage becomes a condition of daily life, and as Hannah Arendt puts it, refugees are forced to find their “own way of mastering an uncertain future”.[1] The current UK government’s reforms have the consequential impact of prolonging that uncertain future.

In March, it was announced that refugee status would become temporary, subject to review every 30 months for all adult asylum seekers. That is part of a broader slew of reforms, all motivated by the shift away from the assumption of long-term protection. Where once a refugee could obtain settlement after five years in the UK, now it is to take 20 years, and then only for refugees on ‘core protection’. The horizon recedes even further when citizenship is concerned.

Even when it is eventually acquired, still it may not provide peace of mind by allowing a refugee to call the UK ‘home’. The Home Office’s expanding deprivation powers have created what a June 2026 report, Will I Always Be British?[2], describes as a two-tier system in which the citizenship of those from migrant backgrounds (where a person also retains the nationality of their country or origin) remains permanently conditional and dependent upon certain behaviour – a reality that, as Adrian Berry KC has warned, is already having a chilling effect on freedom of expression and assembly in those communities.

So, safety and stability become precarity and insecurity.

The Home Secretary, justifying these changes to Parliament, described the new system as “firm but fair”[3] – but what of the human impact? In real terms, most refugees now have no guarantee of safety beyond the next 30 months. How does a person plan for their future, knowing that in 30 months it may all be taken away? How does that person secure stable employment, or pursue education or training? How can they recover from trauma (experienced by so many refugees, yet conveniently left out of the broader discussion), or rebuild their family life, with the prospect of return to the place of persecution constantly looming? Just as fundamentally, how can they truly feel a welcomed part of, or contribute to, a community that is seeking to ‘review’ whether they truly belong? Refugees are then forced to embody what James Baldwin describes as the “hard kind of courage”[4]; an existence of endurance under institutional hostility.

And that institutional hostility does not exist in a vacuum. Negative stereotypes – the refugee as burden, as threat, as queue-jumper – have been administered so steadily, for so long, that they have entered the bloodstream of public life intravenously.

Every practitioner knows that the asylum system is far from perfect. Even where the right outcome is ultimately reached, that is often only by an appeal to the Tribunal, itself a lengthy and uncertain process. That process requires refugees to re-tell experiences too painful to speak about: during asylum interviews, before a judge at a hearing, in the writing of further submissions. Each review becomes its own ordeal; the fear of removal, refusal and separation administered at regular intervals, and with no end in sight.

This will affect whole households. The government’s announcement focussed on adult refugees, but how can a child feel secure when their parent’s status is temporary and the future is provisional? The Home Secretary, speaking to Parliament, decried “pull factors”[5] encouraging refugees to come to the UK. The solution to this, it appears, is to make the UK somewhere people do not want to come. The changes above are only one manifestation of this. Another is the suspension of family reunion, that vital lifeline enabling refugee families to reunite in safety.

Refugee law, at its very core, is about human dignity. It seeks to advance the safety of people who have no other means of security; to protect the unity of families; to assist the displaced person to integrate into a new life in a new state; and to do all this under the guiding hand of the rule of law, prioritising order and consistency.

It is, to say the least, hard to square our current trajectory with those ideals.

I began by speaking about the courage shown by refugees, a courage we are increasingly demanding of them long after they ought to have reached safe ground. But what courage is required by governments? Our law should offer real protection: stability rather than prolonged uncertainty; respect for family life; and meaningful routes to settlement, refusing to treat insecurity as a tool of immigration control.

Maya Angelou reminds us that history, “despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived”, but if faced with courage, “need not be lived again”.[6]  Refugee law exists because history has already shown us what happens when states turn away from those in need of protection.

The courage required now is not only the courage to remember that history, but the courage to refuse to repeat it.

Notes

• [1] Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Marc Robinson ed, Faber and Faber 1994) p.111.
• [2] Fiona Bawdon, ‘Will I Always Be British?’: An Investigation into the Impact of UK Citizenship-Stripping Policies on Feelings of Belonging, Security and Britishness in Migrant Communities (Impact – Law for Social Justice and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, June 2026)
• [3] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2026-03-02/hcws1373
• [4] James Baldwin, ‘A Fly in Buttermilk’ in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (Dial Press 1961).
• [5] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2026-03-02/hcws1373
• [6] Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning (Random House 1993).