The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has remained at the center of the global refugee regime with a clear mandate responsibility for refugees. Therefore, the refugee regime is the most institutionalized with the greatest degree of multilateral collaboration and coordination as states committed through 1951 Convention on the Status of refugees to provide asylum to refugees and to have their asylum policies monitored by UNHCR. .
The concept of a refugee was expanded by the Convention's 1967 Protocol to include persons who had fled war or other violence in their home country. Under this UN Convention a refugee is a person outside of their country of origin who is unable or unwilling to return for fear of persecution based on race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation or opinion. Since refugees have fled their home country and no longer enjoy the legal protections afforded to citizens of a state, the Convention stipulated that the refugees should have access to employment, or other social services on par with nationals of the host country. In addition, given the status of principle of non-refoulement (the right of refugees not to be returned to a country where they risk persecution), states are generally understood to have a duty to offer temporary protection to the refugees on their territory. Nevertheless, this creates an uneven distribution of refugees between countries, which results in unequal share of refugee burden. .
Therefore, even with coordination at a multilateral level to ensure states offer the same standards of protection to refugees, there are no binding norms on burden-sharing to ensure that states contribute to supporting protection and durable solutions for refugees who are on the territory of another state. Among refugees, there are Asylum seekers who have left their homeland in seeking international protection but whose claim for refugee status has not yet been determined.
