Nansen International Office for Refugees
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The Nansen International Office for Refugees was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having carried on the relief work of Fridtjof Nansen to the benefit of refugees across Europe.
Full name: Nansen International Office for Refugees
Native name: Office international Nansen pour les Réfugiés
Founded: 1921, in Geneva, Switzerland
Date awarded: 17 November 1938
The Legacy of Fridtjof Nansen
The Nansen International Office for Refugees was established by the League of Nations in 1930. From its headquarters in Geneva, the Office continued the relief efforts of Fridtjof Nansen, who had served as the first High Commissioner for Refugees. In the early 1930s, the Nansen Office focused its activities on providing aid to Armenians who had been driven out of Turkey, and it spearheaded the drafting of the Refugee Convention of 1933, the first of its kind. Subsequently the Office provided aid to refugees living in China, France, Syria and central and southeastern Europe. It built and operated refugee camps, issued travel documents and provided food, medicine and jobs. The Nansen Office was closed in 1938, but its work was carried on by the new High Commission for Refugees in London.
"Through its efforts, through its representatives and offices in so many countries, the Nansen International Office for Refugees has landed amidst the people, and has on behalf of the League of Nations reached down into the public, and especially amongst those most impoverished and unhappy, to those who are completely lacking in rights."
- Michael Hansson, letter to Adviser Jacob Worm-Müller, 9 October 1938.
The first Refugee Convention
The Nansen International Office for Refugees worked diligently to design a set of international regulations that protected people forced to flee their homes. In 1933 the League of Nation’s Refugee Convention was completed. The signatory nations agreed not to expel refugees as long as they did not pose a security risk or threaten the public order. At the close of 1938, only eight nations had signed the convention, but after WWII, the UN continued this pioneering effort set in motion by the Nansen International Office for Refugees. In 1951 the UN adopted the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.
"Experience has shown that immigration, especially when it takes place gradually, far from harming a country, has instead after a time provided a new source of energy and wealth in many ways."
- Michael Hansson, president of the Nansen International Office for Refugees, Nobel Lecture, 10 December 1938.
Striking back at the Soviet Union
The 1938 Nobel Peace Prize represented a conscious foreign-policy move on the part of Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Halvdan Koht. Koht himself nominated the Nansen Office for the peace prize and worked together with the Office’s Norwegian director to influence the Nobel Committee’s decision. Koht needed the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize to combat Soviet opposition to the League of Nations’ refugee relief efforts. The communists sought to close the Nansen Office because it gave assistance to refugees who opposed the Soviet regime.
"The Nansen International Office for Refugees has an implacable enemy, and that is the very state whose persecution of its own citizens has made the enterprise of this office so necessary: the Soviet Union."
- Victor Mogens, 'Det farlige året' (The Perilous Year), Oslo 1938.
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