Rohingya refugees

South Asian region witnessed partition, liberation war, foreign domination, ethnic conflicts, and political unrest, which have resulted in large-scale and cross-border population displacement. ¹ The partition of the Indian subcontinent (including present-day Bangladesh) in 1947 along religious lines led to the mass influx and further displacement in consecutive years. ² East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, hosted around 822,000 “refugees” by the 1950s. ³ The mass exodus continued during the 1960s as well. ⁴ The legal status of these migrant groups as “refugee” and the applicable legal framework to regulate them was an issue of foreign policy debates. ⁵ The liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971 resulted in the mass movement of around 9 million people to India as refugees. ⁶ The post-independence Bangladesh had been grappling with several episodes of Rohingya mass influx from Myanmar. Currently, Bangladesh is hosting more than a million Rohingya refugees. ⁷ Despite Bangladesh’s historical involvement with refugees– both as a host state and as a state of origin – the country has neither ratified the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its Protocol nor developed any comprehensive domestic law to address the issue.