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UNHCR’s future is at risk – and so is its past
_By Jane McAdam and Maja Janmyr_
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_Budget cuts are forcing the UN Refugee Agency to cull its archives, threatening the world’s memory of displacement and undermining future protection._
When people think of cuts to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), they imagine fewer refugee tents, less food and closed clinics. They do not usually picture cardboard boxes, hard drives or linear kilometres of shelving disappearing.
Yet, as UNHCR faces unprecedented funding shortfalls, it is not only present and future refugee protection that is at risk. The past is under threat too. UNHCR’s institutional archives – the record of more than 70 years of global displacement – are now an easy target in a brutal round of downsizing.
As scholars of international refugee law, we argue that this is a dangerous mistake. Destroying or neglecting these archives will not save lives in the long term. It will undermine future humanitarian responses, erase refugees’ histories and make accountability harder.
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In 2025, UNHCR faced a $1.3 billion shortfall and a 25% reduction of its budget. Around 30% of staff – some 5,000 people – lost their jobs. A total of 185 offices were closed or merged, and UNHCR’s Southern Africa bureau was shut. Further cuts and job losses were announced in May 2026.
In reality, this means many ‘lifesaving and life-changing activities’ can no longer proceed. In South Sudan, for example, 75% of UNHCR spaces for women and girls no longer offer services, leaving around 80,000 survivors of rape or violence without medical care, legal assistance or economic support.
Both the former and current High Commissioners have said funding losses left them with ‘no choice’ but to make such drastic decisions. In this environment, everything that cannot be easily labelled ‘lifesaving’ is vulnerable.
That includes UNHCR’s archives.
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Set against access to protection, shelter, education or health care, preserving boxes of documents and hard drives can look like a luxury. Archivists and data-preservation specialists may seem like a lower priority.
As others have observed,
> in a system where every budget line must be justified against the ever-lingering imperative of ‘saving lives,’ the argument for a data preservation specialist is a difficult one. The irony, of course, is that the lives being saved tomorrow often depend on the files being preserved today.
UNHCR’s archives are not just dusty shelves of internal paperwork. Within around 10 kilometres of shelving lie official records, file notes, testimonies and images dating back to UNHCR’s creation in 1950, documenting global displacement from the aftermath of the Second World War through the Cold War and decolonization to today’s conflicts and climate-driven crises. Alongside this sits a vast digital archive: websites and social media content amounting to around 5–6 terabytes, and a dedicated Digital Preservation System holding almost 90 terabytes of material.
Once destroyed, these records cannot be reconstructed. There is no backup copy of this history of global displacement.
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Our work on the history of international refugee law shows that the current practices derive from much longer historical principles and operations. Institutional archives allow us to trace those processes and to understand why refugee protection looks the way it does today.
UNHCR’s archives show international refugee law ‘in action’ – how it has been interpreted, described and implemented by humanitarian actors on the ground, in camps and border zones, in negotiations with governments and in individual refugee status determinations.
This is not merely an academic exercise. Archival records can underpin refugee status and resettlement decisions, and document how states and international agencies responded – or failed to respond – to displacement. They can also later serve as evidence in processes of accountability.
As historian Alison Bashford, has put it:
> If we don’t understand how political ideas have been shaped by past contexts, if we don’t understand why or how particular cultural ideas have been shaped or influenced from the past, … how do we understand what’s going on now? How do we understand where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve come from?
If we allow UNHCR’s archives to be hollowed out, we lose not only an institutional history, but a history of global displacement over the past 75 years. We risk erasing refugees’ own experiences and voices from the official record.
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Expert archivists are essential to all this. UNHCR’s records are organized according to an original filing system that can be baffling to modern researchers. Specialist staff understand how that system works, what is where, and why.
The way material is classified – what is kept, what is discarded and how it is described – also tells us something important about the past. It shows what the institution once considered relevant or irrelevant, what was screened out of the formal record and who had the power to decide.
Archives are not neutral places. The material they hold has been consciously and unconsciously curated. That is exactly why they are so valuable for understanding how refugee protection has actually been practised.
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The threat is not just to paper files from decades ago. Without specialist staff, processes and training to archive and preserve digital records – emails, databases, messaging platforms and more – are also at risk of falling by the wayside.
Digital material is more fragile than paper. Systems are upgraded or shut down, file formats become obsolete, servers fail. Without proper management, systems are being wiped out or closed – and with them the only record of crucial decisions.
If evidence is to inform research, policy and practice in future, we need to ensure that evidence is preserved in the first place. When materials are lost, we lose knowledge and foreclose possibilities for accountability.
We understand that around a third of UNHCR’s archived material is scheduled to be culled this year. Appraising what to keep and what to discard is, in itself, a normal part of professional archival practice. The problem is doing this under extreme time pressure, with a skeleton staff that is already stretched to maintain the existing collection, respond to researcher queries from around the world, find additional resources to preserve the archive and absorb material arriving from recently closed offices.
As UNHCR’s archivists themselves have explained: ‘Like a family moving house, sorting out what needs to be kept from the rest is no small task, and catching crucial knowledge for preservation before it’s lost is a time-critical exercise’.
Done in haste, such a cull risks irreversible loss.
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UNHCR is actively seeking capacity-building partnerships to preserve its archives and to capture information for the future. The agency cannot, and should not, have to shoulder this burden alone in the current funding climate. States, universities, philanthropic foundations and private donors all have a role to play. They can fund dedicated archivist and digital preservation posts, support large‑scale digitization and secure, mirrored storage.
At the same time, the responsibility cannot rest only with external partners. UNHCR itself needs to recognize its archives as a core protection infrastructure and to reflect this in internal priorities, staffing decisions and how cuts are sequenced.
These are modest investments compared to overall humanitarian budgets. But they would pay long‑term dividends in better‑informed policy, more effective protection and a fuller historical record of one of the defining issues of our time.
Without such urgent support, the warning from within the sector is stark: the humanitarian system is ‘losing its memory.’
_**Jane McAdam AO** is Scientia Professor of Law, an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and the Director of the Evacuations Research Hub at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney. She publishes widely in the areas of international refugee law and forced migration, with a particular focus on evacuations and mobility in the context of climate change and disasters._
_**Maja Janmyr** is Professor of International Migration Law at the University of Oslo and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Lebanese American University (LAU). She is Principal Investigator on the European Research Council Starting Grant project BEYOND (‘Protection without Ratification? International Refugee Law beyond States Parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention’)._
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_The views expressed in this article belong to the author/s and do not necessarily reflect those of theRefugee Law Initiative. We welcome comments and contributions to this blog – please comment below and see here for contribution guidelines._
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