The Principle
The international refugee protection regime - centred on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the 1967 Protocol, and the work of UNHCR - represents the most important development in international humanitarian law since the Geneva Conventions. Its foundational principle, non-refoulement (no return of refugees to places of persecution), embodies a duty to protect the vulnerable stranger that has deep roots in biblical law. The biblical command to welcome the ger (resident alien) and protect the vulnerable outsider is one of the densest statutory themes in the Pentateuch, and the Christian organisations that drove the post-World War II development of refugee law explicitly grounded their advocacy in these texts.
Biblical Foundation
Deuteronomy 10:17-19 is the theological ground of the obligation: "For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." The command is grounded in the character of God - he loves the stranger - and in historical memory - Israel was once in the stranger's position. Leviticus 19:33-34 repeats: "the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself." Deuteronomy 23:15-16 provides a specific refugee protection statute: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee... thou shalt not oppress him." This is perhaps the world's earliest non-refoulement statute, prohibiting the return of a fugitive slave to the authority from which he fled. Matthew 25:35 - "I was a stranger, and ye took me in" - made refugee hospitality a criterion of eschatological judgment, giving Christian communities an existential motivation for refugee protection.
Historical Transmission
The Christian tradition of sanctuary - the right of a fugitive to claim protection in a church building - was directly grounded in Deuteronomy 23:15-16 and the cities of refuge legislation of Numbers 35. Canonised in the Corpus Juris Canonici, the right of sanctuary provided a form of refugee protection throughout medieval Europe. The International Committee of the Red Cross, founded by Henri Dunant (1828-1910) after witnessing the Battle of Solferino, drew on Dunant's evangelical faith and the biblical imperative to protect the wounded and vulnerable. Caritas, Catholic Relief Services, and Church World Service were among the founding members of the international refugee support network that lobbied for the 1951 Refugee Convention. The convention's drafting involved figures including Renée Cassin, whose Jewish and Hebraic background informed his advocacy for the universal human rights framework that grounded refugee protection.
Modern Application
The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol bind 149 states and provide the legal framework for protecting approximately 100 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. The non-refoulement principle has been extended by the International Court of Justice and regional human rights courts to cover persons not formally defined as refugees but facing grave harm upon return. UNHCR's operations are supported by a coalition of faith-based organisations - World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief, Islamic Relief - whose motivation is explicitly grounded in their respective scriptures' commands to protect the vulnerable stranger. Contemporary debates about burden-sharing, refugee quotas, and the rights of climate refugees engage directly with the foundational question first posed in Deuteronomy 10: what obligation does a prosperous settled community owe to the desperate outsider at its border?
Scholarly Debate
Scholars debate how much of the 1951 Refugee Convention's moral force derives from biblical-Christian tradition versus universal human rights philosophy. Michael Marrus's The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century traces the development of refugee protection from its humanitarian ad hoc origins to its legal codification, emphasising the secular political context. Philip Orchard's A Right to Flee engages the theoretical foundations of refugee law, including the tension between state sovereignty and the duty to protect. Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang's Welcoming the Stranger is the most comprehensive evangelical engagement with the biblical argument for generous refugee policy, while theologians including Luke Bretherton in Hospitality as Holiness argue for a theologically rich account of hospitality to strangers that exceeds the minimum demands of legal obligation.