Protection or prevention? The global refugee system is at a crossroads

Across borders and oceans, refugee journeys continue – driven by conflict, persecution, and a lack of safety. Yet global responses are increasingly focused not on ensuring protection, but on preventing movement. While the rhetoric remains humanitarian, the reality is a growing investment in containment, deterrence, and control. The infrastructure of refugee protection is being retooled to stop people from moving, not to help them survive displacement. 

This shift isn’t just policy drift – it’s a political choice. One that reflects a deeper problem: Refugees are wrongly treated as a crisis, while the real crisis is a system that approaches protecting human life as optional and stopping movement across borders as essential.

This shift is playing out across multiple arenas, but recent developments at the 2024 and 2025 Consultations on Resettlement and Complementary Pathways (CRCP) in Geneva offer a stark illustration of how rapidly the global approach to refugee protection is being reshaped. 

The CRCP is a key annual forum where governments, UN agencies, and civil society gather to shape global resettlement and pathway programmes for refugees – discussions that influence policy, funding, and practice worldwide. We were participating as representatives of R-SEAT, the organisation we co-lead that advocates for refugee inclusion in decision making processes to enhance the effectiveness of global responses to displacement. 

At the CRCP in June 2024, the idea of the “route-based approach” – a collaboration between the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), the UN’s migration agency (IOM), and several states – was introduced in an unscheduled session added just the morning before. Many of us walked in unsure of what to expect. It was presented as a way to reduce the risk of trafficking and death for refugees on the move. But despite the protective framing, the tone sparked concern that it was more about deterrence than safety.

One of the panelists – an insider to the system but not a refugee – captured the unease in the room with a painfully honest remark: “Most refugees believe IOM wants to send them back home, and UNHCR wants to keep them where they are.” Sarcastic? Yes, but also heartbreakingly accurate. That it came from the stage, not the floor, only underlined how deep the disillusionment runs, even within the system.

R-SEAT’s reflection during that session was rooted in common sense: If the route-based approach is to have any real value, it must involve refugee-led organisations (RLOs) as central partners, not afterthoughts. RLOs are trusted by people on the move, rooted in communities, and best placed to share accurate information about risks, realities, and alternatives. Without them, efforts to protect refugees risk becoming hollow campaigns, or worse, they risk being seen as tools to control and deter rather than protect.

Fast forward to 2025, and the shift towards control and deterrence was undeniable. At this year’s CRCP in June, the session on the route-based approach wasn’t tucked into the margins. It was on the main stage, promoted as one of the headline discussions. But instead of signalling progress, the spotlight only exposed deeper issues.

A troubling shift

This year, the language of the session was sharper – strategic, but more concerning. While resettlement and complementary pathways were mentioned, they no longer felt central. Instead, the focus had shifted towards state collaboration with UNHCR and IOM to prevent onward movement, tighten borders, and invest in so-called “stability” measures in transit countries. 

Refugees themselves were barely mentioned until someone from the floor asked why refugee-led groups were completely absent from the discussion, reminding both the audience and the panellists of last year’s pointed remark about the necessity of involving refugee groups as key partners in such an approach.

Then came the most troubling moment: A representative from the European Union asked how more host countries could be brought on board with the approach. Many in the room heard the question for what it was: How do we get more countries in the Global South to help us stop refugees from reaching the Global North?

Let’s be honest: This approach will not stop refugees from moving. It will only make their journeys more dangerous, costly, and exploitative.

The irony is staggering. Western countries host less than 30% of the world’s refugees, while over 70% are hosted by states in the Global South. Yet those same Western governments are cutting humanitarian funding, lowering resettlement quotas, and pushing host countries to become gatekeepers. Now, they’re also urging them to seal their borders and block onward movement.

Let’s be honest: This approach will not stop refugees from moving. It will only make their journeys more dangerous, costly, and exploitative. When safe and legal routes are absent, people will turn to smugglers and traffickers. In that sense, the route-based approach, without alternatives for mobility, becomes a gift to smugglers.

Had smugglers been present at CRCP 2025, they might have sponsored the evening reception. The riskier the journey, the higher their prices and the greater the cost refugees pay – in money, trauma, and lives.

This approach, in its current form, funnels desperate people into the hands of those who exploit them.

A crossroads

Western states spend many times as much on border enforcement than on refugee needs. In 2024, UNHCR appealed for $10.7 billion to support protection and solutions, yet it received less than half that amount. Meanwhile, states like the US and those in the EU invest billions in fences, detention centres, and surveillance.

It’s like spending a fortune on a lock, while letting the house crumble: Fixing the system takes political courage, while deterrence is easier to sell at home, even if it costs far more in the long run.

At the same time, the refugee-led organisations doing the most impactful and locally-trusted work are underfunded, excluded from strategy discussions, and often invisible in major policy processes.

The truth is: No refugee wants to risk drowning at sea or crossing deserts with smugglers. They do it because they have no choice. 

If we are serious about stopping unsafe journeys and trafficking, rather than continue down the current path, states must:

• Expand resettlement quotas
• Create accessible and more responsive legal pathways for labour mobility, education, and family reunification
• Strengthen inclusion policies in countries of first asylum, so refugees can live in dignity not limbo
• Genuinely collaborate with refugee communities and refugee-led organisations, not consult them as a box-ticking exercise
• And most of all, we must shift the mindset: refugee movement isn’t a threat to stop but a fact to manage — humanely and justly

The route-based approach may have started as an effort to save lives, but in its current iteration it risks becoming a tool of containment. Without meaningful alternatives, and without refugees at the centre, it will: fail to provide protection; drive people underground; empower smugglers; and further erode trust in the very institutions that claim to serve the displaced.

The global refugee system is at a crossroads. States can keep building walls while slashing humanitarian support or they can build systems rooted in mobility, inclusion, and dignity.