Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Use of Data
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1.5.2
The UNHCR Records and Archives Section (RAS) is the institutional memory of the United Nations Refugee Agency, holding the world's most comprehensive archive of international refugee protection and humanitarian operations. Located in a sub-basement beneath UNHCR's wedge-shaped headquarters in Geneva, a vast warren of rolling stack shelves contains the physical archives of the UN Refugee Agency's more than 70 years of operation. If the documents were stacked in a single pile, they would tower above Mount Everest at over six miles high.
UNHCR was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 14 December 1950, with its statute entering into force in January 1951 and its operations formally beginning that year. The Records and Archives Section was created in 1996 to bring formal institutional management to holdings that had been accumulating since the agency's founding. Since 2000, the archives have been made available to external researchers in accordance with UNHCR's access to archives policy.
The institutional lineage of the archive extends considerably further back, however, through a chain of predecessor organizations stretching to the interwar period. Since the appointment of Fridtjof Nansen in 1920 as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Prisoners of War, and in 1921 as the High Commissioner for Russian Refugees, the League took his personnel, expenses, and documentation under its authority, and a Refugee Section was created within the Secretariat. The Nansen Office for Refugees operated until 1938, when it was succeeded by the High Commissariat for Refugees under the Protection of the League of Nations (1938–1946), then by the Inter-Governmental Committee for Refugees (1939–1947), then by the International Refugee Organization (IRO, 1947–1952), which itself gave way to UNHCR in 1951. Each of these institutions generated records that have ultimately found their way, in whole or in part, into the UNHCR archive system in Geneva — making the archive a continuous documentary record of international refugee protection spanning more than a century.
The Records and Archives Section is based in Geneva, Switzerland, but has a global responsibility for record-keeping in UNHCR's operations, with colleagues also in Panama City, Pretoria, Bangkok, and Copenhagen to work with records creators and users in the field.
The archive occupies about six miles of shelving space on two basement floors in Geneva. Digital archives, comprising some 10 million documents and growing, are stored and managed on a handful of dedicated, secure servers. Materials of historical interest make up about half of the paper archives. The rest, mostly internal documents such as financial reports, is held for several years before being discarded. The collections are globally and historically unique in scope and content.
The digital archive currently contains over 120 terabytes of data — equivalent to more than 10 times the size of the printed collection of the US Library of Congress.
The archives are organized into "fonds," which are groups of records from a single office or a donation of records from outside UNHCR. The list of fonds is constantly expanding, as records are received from field offices and headquarters.
The UNHCR Central Registry is the backbone of UNHCR's recorded knowledge from the early 1950s to the mid-1990s, and is now entirely cataloged, with records relating to some of the most urgent refugee crises in modern history now more readily accessible for research. Such events include repatriation operations in Central America during the late 1980s, the redrawing of the geopolitical map of Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, returns to Namibia following independence, and responses to refugee movements during the first Gulf War.
The working files of the Division of International Protection include records on the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972, the constitution of a Task Force to work on finding solutions for Vietnamese "Boat People" which later became the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees in the Americas, and the evolution of new protection challenges including responses to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and beyond.
The collection of the Records of the Former Yugoslavia measures over one half mile of linear shelving space and is an astonishingly comprehensive record of the crisis from deep within the conflict zone. From 1991 to 1995, UNHCR was the leading humanitarian organization working throughout the Former Yugoslavia during the Balkans Wars, operating in over 20 offices with thousands of colleagues throughout the region. The collection includes approximately 300,000 pages of fax transmissions — a communications medium never designed for longevity — which archivists have been racing to preserve through advanced scanning before the thermal paper degrades irreversibly.
The Nansen Fonds (1919–1947), formally titled the Refugees Mixed Archival Group, consists of sub-fonds covering Registry files (1920–1947), Commission files (1919–1947), and Section files (1924–1941). It includes files produced by the Registry, Records and Mailing Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, files of the external offices of the High Commissioner for Refugees and later the Nansen Office for Refugees, and files of other external bodies including the International Labour Organisation, the Office of the Liquidator of the Nansen Office in Paris, the Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo, the High Commissioner for German Refugees, and the High Commissioner for Refugees in London.
Other records include millions of individual refugee case files, in which UNHCR staff verified the refugee status of people fleeing war, persecution, and other forms of violence. These confidential files provide primary accounts of many of the major global upheavals since World War II, including the Vietnam War and its aftermath, decolonization, the 1990s Balkans Wars, the Rwandan Genocide, and more recent conflicts in Syria and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Alongside the millions of paper-based documents stored in acid-free boxes are an array of other materials including photo and video archives, publicity posters, UNHCR's two original Nobel Prize diplomas — UNHCR has received the Nobel Peace Prize twice, in 1954 and 1981 — and a collection of drawings by refugee children from around the world. The archive also holds the original of the letter sent by the late Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba, seeking international help for refugees fleeing the conflict in neighboring Algeria in 1957 — the first plea to UNHCR for help by a country outside Europe.
The operational significance of the archive extends beyond historical scholarship into active humanitarian work. Besides their historical value, archived case files are still used to help refugees today. Recent examples include verifying the protection needs of Iraqi and other refugees formerly registered in Syria after they were forced to flee for a second time to countries including Türkiye and Jordan, and using archival records to confirm the historical refugee status of an individual facing wrongful deportation. The accounts recorded in case files have even provided vital clues to researchers to help locate the graves of people who went missing during the Balkans conflicts.
In 2022, staff coordinating UNHCR's response to rising numbers of deadly sea journeys in the Central Mediterranean requested archival details of initiatives taken in the 1970s and 1980s to save the lives of Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the aftermath of the war, to assess whether any could be applied today.
Records of intractable situations where UNHCR has been working for decades, such as southern Sudan, are drawn on to brief staff as they head out into the field. In this way the archive functions as an active operational resource, not only a repository.
The archive has faced distinctive preservation challenges that are unusual even among major international institutions. When militants overran camps in what was then eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) back in 1997, staff jammed what papers they could into the backs of trucks as they were evacuated. Some material was saved, but not all of it. The rescued files were later shipped to Geneva, where they now reside in the central archive.
The UNHCR Archives Access Policy opens research files that are more than 20 years old. Before research is possible, UNHCR must review each file to ensure there is no risk of releasing personal information related to refugees or to other people of concern to UNHCR.
Consultation is by appointment only, which must be booked in advance. Researchers should submit a request form to access the archives and a research application.
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Research facilities are open Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 13:00. Researchers may also request up to five files at a time for remote digitization, which are placed in a queue for confidentiality review, digitization, and quality control. The online catalog at adlib-ras.unhcr.org provides searchable access to holdings described to date, organized hierarchically by fonds, sub-fonds, series, and file. The catalog is continually expanding and does not yet represent the full extent of holdings.
The Records and Archives Section is responsible for making sure UNHCR's recorded memory in all media is well organized, well secured, and maintained in sustainable formats and environments. The Records Management programme guides and assists UNHCR's global workforce with their physical and digital record-keeping needs in headquarters, regional, country, and field offices — in short, wherever UNHCR is working.
The Records and Archives Section archives many of UNHCR's main websites and runs special projects to capture institutional websites and social media accounts, as well as the websites and social media accounts of specific countries and staff members.
The archive has undertaken collaborative cataloging projects with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and participates in the ITHACA Project (Horizon 2020), a consortium of eleven partner institutions working together on digital accessibility to researchers, with an online multilingual, multinational, and interdisciplinary platform hosting selected digital content accessible through the ITHACA website. The archive also maintains an active blog — the UNHCR Records and Archives Blog — publishing research findings, preservation case studies, and reflections on archival practice in a humanitarian context.
UNHCR Records and Archives Section (RAS) 94 Rue de Montbrillant CH-1202 Geneva, Switzerland
Email: archives@unhcr.org
Reading Room: Monday–Friday, 09:00–13:00 (by appointment)
Website: unhcr.org/about-unhcr/overview/history-unhcr/archives-and-records
Online Catalog: adlib-ras.unhcr.org
Web Archive: webarchive.archive.unhcr.org
Blog: unhcr.org/blogs/category/records-and-archives
Parent organization: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
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