title: Too big to fail

text: In contrast to depository banks, investment banks generally obtain funds from sophisticated investors and often make complex, risky investments with the funds, speculating either for their own account or on behalf of their investors. They also are "market makers" in that they serve as intermediaries between two investors that wish to take opposite sides of a financial transaction. The Glass–Steagall Act separated investment and depository banking until its repeal in 1999. Prior to 2008, the government did not explicitly guarantee the investor funds, so investment banks were not subject to the same regulations as depository banks and were allowed to take considerably more risk.


title: Too big to fail

text: Investment banks, along with other innovations in banking and finance referred to as the shadow banking system, grew to rival the depository system by 2007. They became subject to the equivalent of a bank run in 2007 and 2008, in which investors (rather than depositors) withdrew sources of financing from the shadow system. This run became known as the subprime mortgage crisis. During 2008, the five largest U.S. investment banks either failed (Lehman Brothers), were bought out by other banks at fire-sale prices (Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch) or were at risk of failure and obtained depository banking charters to obtain additional Federal Reserve support (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley). In addition, the government provided bailout funds via the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008.


title: Too big to fail

text: Fed Chair Ben Bernanke described in November 2013 how the Panic of 1907 was essentially a run on the non-depository financial system, with many parallels to the crisis of 2008. One of the results of the Panic of 1907 was the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.


title: Too big to fail

text: Before 1950, U.S. federal bank regulators had essentially two options for resolving an insolvent institution: 1) closure, with liquidation of assets and payouts for insured depositors; or 2) purchase and assumption, encouraging the acquisition of assets and assumption of liabilities by another firm. A third option was made available by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act of 1950: providing assistance, the power to support an institution through loans or direct federal acquisition of assets, until it could recover from its distress.


title: Too big to fail

text: The statute limited the "assistance" option to cases where "continued operation of the bank is essential to provide adequate banking service". Regulators shunned this third option for many years, fearing that if regionally or nationally important banks were thought generally immune to liquidation, markets in their shares would be distorted. Thus, the assistance option was never employed during the period 1950–1969, and very seldom thereafter. Research into historical banking trends suggests that the consumption loss associated with National Banking Era bank runs was far more costly than the consumption loss from stock market crashes.


title: Too big to fail

text: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act was passed in 1991, giving the FDIC the responsibility to rescue an insolvent bank by the least costly method. The Act had the implicit goal of eliminating the widespread belief among depositors that a loss of depositors and bondholders will be prevented for large banks. However, the Act included an exception in cases of systemic risk, subject to the approval of two-thirds of the FDIC Board of Directors, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the Treasury Secretary.


title: Too big to fail

text: Bank size, complexity, and interconnectedness with other banks may inhibit the ability of the government to resolve (wind-down) the bank without significant disruption to the financial system or economy, as occurred with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008. This risk of "too big to fail" entities increases the likelihood of a government bailout using taxpayer dollars.


title: Too big to fail

text: The largest U.S. banks continue to grow larger while the concentration of bank assets increases. The largest six U.S. banks had assets of $9,576 billion as of year-end 2012, per their 2012 annual reports (SEC Form 10K). The top 5 U.S. banks had approximately 30% of the U.S. banking assets in 1998; this rose to 45% by 2008 and to 48% by 2010, before falling to 47% in 2011.


title: Too big to fail

text: This concentration continued despite the subprime mortgage crisis and its aftermath. During March 2008, JP Morgan Chase acquired investment bank Bear Stearns. Bank of America acquired investment bank Merrill Lynch in September 2008. Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia in January 2009. Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley obtained depository bank holding company charters, which gave them access to additional Federal Reserve credit lines.


title: Too big to fail

text: Bank deposits for all U.S. banks ranged between approximately 60–70% of GDP from 1960 to 2006, then jumped during the crisis to a peak of nearly 84% in 2009 before falling to 77% by 2011.


title: Too big to fail

text: The number of U.S. commercial and savings bank institutions reached a peak of 14,495 in 1984; this fell to 6,532 by the end of 2010. The ten largest U.S. banks held nearly 50% of U.S. deposits as of 2011.


title: Too big to fail

text: Since the full amount of the deposits and debts of "too big to fail" banks are effectively guaranteed by the government, large depositors and investors view investments with these banks as a safer investment than deposits with smaller banks. Therefore, large banks are able to pay lower interest rates to depositors and investors than small banks are obliged to pay.


title: Too big to fail

text: A study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the difference between the cost of funds for banks with more than $100 billion in assets and the cost of funds for smaller banks widened dramatically after the formalization of the "too big to fail" policy in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2008. This shift in the large banks' cost of funds was in effect equivalent to an indirect "too big to fail" subsidy of $34 billion per year to the 18 U.S. banks with more than $100 billion in assets.


title: Too big to fail

text: The editors of Bloomberg View estimated there was an $83 billion annual subsidy to the 10 largest United States banks, reflecting a funding advantage of 0.8 percentage points due to implicit government support, meaning the profits of such banks are largely a taxpayer-backed illusion.


title: Too big to fail

text: Another study by Frederic Schweikhard and Zoe Tsesmelidakis estimated the amount saved by America's biggest banks from having a perceived safety net of a government bailout was $120 billion from 2007 to 2010. For America's biggest banks the estimated savings was $53 billion for Citigroup, $32 billion for Bank of America, $10 billion for JPMorgan, $8 billion for Wells Fargo, and $4 billion for AIG. The study noted that passage of the Dodd–Frank Act—which promised an end to bailouts—did nothing to raise the price of credit (i.e., lower the implicit subsidy) for the "too-big-to-fail" institutions.


title: Too big to fail

text: One 2013 study (Acharya, Anginer, and Warburton) measured the funding cost advantage provided by implicit government support to large financial institutions. Credit spreads were lower by approximately 28 basis points (0.28%) on average over the 1990–2010 period, with a peak of more than 120 basis points in 2009. In 2010, the implicit subsidy was worth nearly $100 billion to the largest banks. The authors concluded: "Passage of Dodd–Frank did not eliminate expectations of government support."


title: Too big to fail

text: Economist Randall S. Kroszner summarized several approaches to evaluating the funding cost differential between large and small banks. The paper discusses methodology and does not specifically answer the question of whether larger institutions have an advantage.


title: Too big to fail

text: During November 2013, the Moody's credit rating agency reported that it would no longer assume the eight largest U.S. banks would receive government support in the event they faced bankruptcy. However, the GAO reported that politicians and regulators would still face significant pressure to bail out large banks and their creditors in the event of a financial crisis.


title: Too big to fail

text: Some critics have argued that "The way things are now banks reap profits if their trades pan out, but taxpayers can be stuck picking up the tab if their big bets sink the company." Additionally, as discussed by Senator Bernie Sanders, if taxpayers are contributing to rescue these companies from bankruptcy, they "should be rewarded for assuming the risk by sharing in the gains that result from this government bailout".


title: Too big to fail

text: In this sense, Alan Greenspan affirms that, "Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system." Thereby, although the financial institutions that were bailed out were indeed important to the financial system, the fact that they took risk beyond what they would otherwise, should be enough for the Government to let them face the consequences of their actions. It would have been a lesson to motivate institutions to proceed differently next time.


title: Too big to fail

text: The political power of large banks and risks of economic impact from major prosecutions has led to use of the term "too big to jail" regarding the leaders of large financial institutions.


title: Too big to fail

text: On March 6, 2013, then United States Attorney General Eric Holder testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the size of large financial institutions has made it difficult for the Justice Department to bring criminal charges when they are suspected of crimes, because such charges can threaten the existence of a bank and therefore their interconnectedness may endanger the national or global economy. "Some of these institutions have become too large," Holder told the Committee. "It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate." In this he contradicted earlier written testimony from a deputy assistant attorney general, who defended the Justice Department's "vigorous enforcement against wrongdoing". Holder has financial ties to at least one law firm benefiting from "de facto" immunity to prosecution, and prosecution rates against crimes by large financial institutions are at 20-year lows.


title: Too big to fail

text: Four days later, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard W. Fisher and Vice-President Harvey Rosenblum co-authored a "Wall Street Journal" op-ed about the failure of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to provide for adequate regulation of large financial institutions. In advance of his March 8 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Fisher proposed requiring breaking up large banks into smaller banks so that they are "too small to save", advocating the withholding from mega-banks access to both Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve discount window, and requiring disclosure of this lack of federal insurance and financial solvency support to their customers. This was the first time such a proposal had been made by a high-ranking U.S. banking official or a prominent conservative. Other conservatives including Thomas Hoenig, Ed Prescott, Glenn Hubbard, and David Vitter also advocated breaking up the largest banks, but liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias questioned their motives and the existence of a true bipartisan consensus.


title: Too big to fail

text: In a January 29, 2013, letter to Holder, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) had criticized this Justice Department policy citing "important questions about the Justice Department's prosecutorial philosophy". After receipt of a DoJ response letter, Brown and Grassley issued a statement saying, "The Justice Department's response is aggressively evasive. It does not answer our questions. We want to know how and why the Justice Department has determined that certain financial institutions are 'too big to jail' and that prosecuting those institutions would damage the financial system."


title: Too big to fail

text: Kareem Serageldin pleaded guilty on November 22, 2013, for his role in inflating the value of mortgage bonds as the housing market collapsed, and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. As of April 30, 2014, Serageldin remains the "only Wall Street executive prosecuted as a result of the financial crisis" that triggered the Great Recession. The much smaller Abacus Federal Savings Bank was prosecuted (but exonerated after a jury trial) for selling fraudulent mortgages to Fannie Mae.


title: Too big to fail

text: The proposed solutions to the "too big to fail" issue are controversial. Some options include breaking up the banks, introducing regulations to reduce risk, adding higher bank taxes for larger institutions, and increasing monitoring through oversight committees.


title: Too big to fail

text: More than fifty economists, financial experts, bankers, finance industry groups, and banks themselves have called for breaking up large banks into smaller institutions. This is advocated both to limit risk to the financial system posed by the largest banks as well as to limit their political influence.


title: Too big to fail

text: For example, economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2009 that: "In the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, large banks have been responsible for the bulk of the [bailout] cost to taxpayers. America has let 106 smaller banks go bankrupt this year alone. It's the mega-banks that present the mega-costs ... banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist. If they continue to exist, they must exist in what is sometimes called a 'utility' model, meaning that they are heavily regulated." He also wrote about several causes of the crisis related to the size, incentives, and interconnection of the mega-banks.


title: Too big to fail

text: The United States passed the Dodd–Frank Act in July 2010 to help strengthen regulation of the financial system in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007. Dodd–Frank requires banks to reduce their risk taking, by requiring greater financial cushions (i.e., lower leverage ratios or higher capital ratios), among other steps.


title: Too big to fail

text: Banks are required to maintain a ratio of high-quality, easily sold assets, in the event of financial difficulty either at the bank or in the financial system. These are liquidity requirements.


title: Too big to fail

text: Since the 2008 crisis, regulators have worked with banks to reduce leverage ratios. For example, the leverage ratio for investment bank Goldman Sachs declined from a peak of 25.2 during 2007 to 11.4 in 2012, indicating a much-reduced risk profile.


title: Too big to fail

text: The Dodd–Frank Act includes a form of the Volcker Rule, a proposal to ban proprietary trading by commercial banks. Proprietary trading refers to using customer deposits to speculate in risky assets for the benefit of the bank rather than customers. The Dodd–Frank Act as enacted into law includes several loopholes to the ban, allowing proprietary trading in certain circumstances. However, the regulations required to enforce these elements of the law were not implemented during 2013 and were under attack by bank lobbying efforts.


title: Too big to fail

text: Another major banking regulation, the Glass–Steagall Act from 1933, was effectively repealed in 1999. The repeal allowed depository banks to enter into additional lines of business. Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren proposed bringing back Glass–Steagall during 2013.


title: Too big to fail

text: Economist Willem Buiter proposes a tax to internalize the massive costs inflicted by "too big to fail" institution. "When size creates externalities, do what you would do with any negative externality: tax it. The other way to limit size is to tax size. This can be done through capital requirements that are progressive in the size of the business (as measured by value added, the size of the balance sheet or some other metric). Such measures for preventing the New Darwinism of the survival of the fittest and the politically best connected should be distinguished from regulatory interventions based on the narrow leverage ratio aimed at regulating risk (regardless of size, except for a de minimis lower limit)."


title: Too big to fail

text: On November 16, 2021, a policy research and development entity, called the Financial Stability Board, released a list of 32 banks worldwide that they considered "systemically important financial institutions"—financial organisations whose size "and role" meant that any failure could cause serious systemic problems.


title: Too big to fail

text: More than fifty notable economists, financial experts, bankers, finance industry groups, and banks themselves have called for breaking up large banks into smaller institutions. (See also Divestment.)


title: Too big to fail

text: Some economists such as Paul Krugman hold that bank crises arise from banks being under regulated rather than their size in itself. Krugman wrote in January 2010 that it was more important to reduce bank risk taking (leverage) than to break them up.


title: Too big to fail

text: Economist Simon Johnson has advocated both increased regulation as well as breaking up the larger banks, not only to protect the financial system but to reduce the political power of the largest banks.


title: Too big to fail

text: One of the most vocal opponents in the United States government of the "too big to fail" status of large American financial institutions in recent years has been Elizabeth Warren. At her first U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing on February 14, 2013, Senator Warren pressed several banking regulators to answer when they had last taken a Wall Street bank to trial and stated, "I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial'." Videos of Warren's questioning, centering on "too big to fail", became popular on the internet, amassing more than 1 million views in a matter of days.


title: Too big to fail

text: On March 6, 2013, United States Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department faces difficulty charging large banks with crimes because of the risk to the economy. Four days later, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard W. Fisher wrote in advance of a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference that large banks should be broken up into smaller banks, and both Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve discount window access should end for large banks. Other conservatives including Thomas Hoenig, Ed Prescott, Glenn Hubbard, and David Vitter also advocated breaking up the largest banks.


title: Too big to fail

text: On April 10, 2013, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde told the Economic Club of New York "too big to fail" banks had become "more dangerous than ever" and had to be controlled with "comprehensive and clear regulation [and] more intensive and intrusive supervision".


title: Too big to fail

text: Ron Suskind claimed in his book "Confidence Men" that the administration of Barack Obama considered breaking up Citibank and other large banks that had been involved in the financial crisis of 2008. He said that Obama's staff, such as Timothy Geithner, refused to do so. The administration and Geithner have denied this version of events.


title: Too big to fail

text: Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England during 2003–2013, called for cutting "too big to fail" banks down to size, as a solution to the problem of banks having taxpayer-funded guarantees for their speculative investment banking activities. "If some banks are thought to be too big to fail, then, in the words of a distinguished American economist, they are too big. It is not sensible to allow large banks to combine high street retail banking with risky investment banking or funding strategies, and then provide an implicit state guarantee against failure."


title: Too big to fail

text: Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling disagreed: "Many people talk about how to deal with the big banks – banks so important to the financial system that they cannot be allowed to fail, but the solution is not as simple, as some have suggested, as restricting the size of the banks". Additionally, Alan Greenspan said that "If they're too big to fail, they're too big", suggesting U.S. regulators to consider breaking up large financial institutions considered "too big to fail". He added, "I don't think merely raising the fees or capital on large institutions or taxing them is enough ... they'll absorb that, they'll work with that, and it's totally inefficient and they'll still be using the savings."


title: Too big to fail

text: Gallup reported in June 2013 that: "Americans' confidence in U.S. banks increased to 26% in June, up from the record low of 21% the previous year. The percentage of Americans saying they have 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in U.S. banks is now at its highest point since June 2008, but remains well below its pre-recession level of 41%, measured in June 2007. Between 2007 and 2012, confidence in banks fell by half—20 percentage points." Gallup also reported that: "When Gallup first measured confidence in banks in 1979, 60% of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in them—second only to the church. This high level of confidence, which hasn't been matched since, was likely the result of the strong U.S. banking system established after the 1930s Great Depression and the related efforts of banks and regulators to build Americans' confidence in that system."


title: Too big to fail

text: In the US, the banking industry spent over $100 million lobbying politicians and regulators between January 1 and June 30, 2011. Lobbying in the finance, insurance and real estate industries has risen annually since 1998 and was approximately $500 million in 2012.


title: Too big to fail

text: Prior to the 2008 failure and bailout of multiple firms, there were "too big to fail" examples from 1763 when Leendert Pieter de Neufville in Amsterdam and Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky in Berlin failed, and from


title: Too big to fail

text: An early example of a bank rescued because it was "too big to fail" was the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company during the 1980s.


title: Too big to fail

text: The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company experienced a fall in its overall asset quality during the early 1980s. Tight money, Mexico's default (1982) and plunging oil prices followed a period when the bank had aggressively pursued commercial lending business, Latin American syndicated loan business, and loan participation in the energy sector. Complicating matters further, the bank's funding mix was heavily dependent on large certificates of deposit and foreign money markets, which meant its depositors were more risk-averse than average retail depositors in the US.


title: Too big to fail

text: The bank held significant participation in highly speculative oil and gas loans of Oklahoma's Penn Square Bank. When Penn Square failed in July 1982, the Continental's distress became acute, culminating with press rumors of failure and an investor-and-depositor run in early May 1984. In the first week of the run, the Fed permitted the Continental Illinois discount window credits on the order of $3.6 billion. Still in significant distress, the management obtained a further $4.5 billion in credits from a syndicate of money center banks the following week. These measures failed to stop the run, and regulators were confronted with a crisis.


title: Too big to fail

text: The seventh-largest bank in the nation by deposits would very shortly be unable to meet its obligations. Regulators faced a tough decision about how to resolve the matter. Of the three options available, only two were seriously considered. Even banks much smaller than the Continental were deemed unsuitable for resolution by liquidation, owing to the disruptions this would have inevitably caused. The normal course would be to seek a purchaser (and indeed press accounts that such a search was underway contributed to Continental depositors' fears in 1984). However, in the tight-money financial climate of the early 1980s, no purchaser was forthcoming.


title: Too big to fail

text: Besides generic concerns of size, contagion of depositor panic and bank distress, regulators feared the significant disruption of national payment and settlement systems. Of special concern was the wide network of correspondent banks with high percentages of their capital invested in the Continental Illinois. Essentially, the bank was deemed "too big to fail", and the "provide assistance" option was reluctantly taken. The dilemma then became how to provide assistance without significantly unbalancing the nation's banking system.


title: Too big to fail

text: To prevent immediate failure, the Federal Reserve announced categorically that it would meet any liquidity needs the Continental might have, while the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave depositors and general creditors a full guarantee (not subject to the $100,000 FDIC deposit-insurance limit) and provided direct assistance of $2 billion (including participations). Money center banks assembled an additional $5.3 billion unsecured facility pending a resolution and resumption of more-normal business. These measures slowed, but did not stop, the outflow of deposits.


title: Too big to fail

text: In a United States Senate hearing afterwards, the then Comptroller of the Currency C. T. Conover defended his position by admitting the regulators will not let the largest 11 banks fail.


title: Too big to fail

text: Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a hedge fund management firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, that utilized absolute-return trading strategies combined with high financial leverage. The firm's master hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Portfolio L.P., collapsed in the late 1990s, leading to an agreement on September 23, 1998, among 14 financial institutions for a $3.6 billion recapitalization (bailout) under the supervision of the Federal Reserve.


title: Too big to fail

text: LTCM was founded in 1994 by John W. Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. Members of LTCM's board of directors included Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a "new method to determine the value of derivatives". Initially successful with annualized returns of over 40% (after fees) in its first years, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months following the Russian financial crisis requiring financial intervention by the Federal Reserve, with the fund liquidating and dissolving in early 2000.


title: Too big to fail

text: In March 2013, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions announced that Canada's six largest banks, the Bank of Montreal, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank, were too big to fail. Those six banks accounted for 90% of banking assets in Canada at that time. It noted that "the differences among the largest banks are smaller if only domestic assets are considered, and relative importance declines rapidly after the top five banks and after the sixth bank (National)."


title: Too big to fail

text: Despite the government's assurances, opposition parties and some media commentators in New Zealand say that the largest banks are too big to fail and have an implicit government guarantee.


title: Too big to fail

text: George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer under David Cameron (2010–2016), threatened to break up banks which are too big to fail.


title: Too big to fail

text: The too-big-to-fail idea has led to legislators and governments facing the challenge of limiting the scope of these hugely important organisations, and regulating activities perceived as risky or speculative—to achieve this regulation in the UK, banks are advised to follow the UK's Independent Commission on Banking Report.


title: Mark Bonnar

text: Richard Mark Bonnar (born 19 November 1968) is a Scottish actor. He is known for his roles as Max in "Guilt", Duncan Hunter in "Shetland", Bruno Jenkins in "Casualty", Detective Finney in "Psychoville", DCC Mike Dryden in "Line of Duty", Colin Osborne in "Unforgotten", Townsend in "Battlefield 1 and " Field in "Summer of Rockets".


title: Mark Bonnar

text: On television, Bonnar has appeared as Peter Mayhew in BBC One's "New Blood" and Chris in the Channel 4 comedy "Catastrophe", a role which he reprised in the following series. He also portrays the Rev. Adam Collingbourne in ITV's "Home Fires", John Halliday in "Undercover", as well as regular Duncan Hunter in "Shetland" for BBC One. Other television credits include "Vera", "Grantchester", "Case Histories", "The Paradise", "Doctor Who", "Psychoville", "Taggart", "Phoneshop" and "Paradox". In 2005, he portrayed regular Bruno Jenkins in the BBC One series "Casualty". In 2018, he portrayed Dr Neil Sommer in the Channel 4 series "Humans".


title: Mark Bonnar

text: His theatre performances include Bosola in "The Duchess of Malfi" at the Old Vic, London in 2012, "Philistines" at the Lyttelton, National Theatre in May 2007, Phil in "Mammals" in a national tour in 2006, David in "A Girl in a Car with a Man" at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in December 2004, Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" at the Salisbury Playhouse in September 2004, "Cyrano de Bergerac" at the National Theatre in 2004 and "Parade" at the Donmar Warehouse in September 2007.


title: Mark Bonnar

text: Bonnar provides the voice and motion capture of Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch in the 2013 video game "". He also provides the voice and motion capture for Townsend in the 2016 game "Battlefield 1". He also features in the Doctor Who series "Doom Coalition" from Big Finish Productions, where he portrays the Eleven, a villainous Time Lord who retains the personalities of his past incarnations in his mind.


title: Mark Bonnar

text: Bonnar was born in Edinburgh to environmental artist Stan and his wife Rosi. Stan's job as town artist for the Scottish New Towns meant the family moved around and Mark spent his childhood in Stonehouse, South Lanarkshire, attending Stonehouse Primary School. By 1981 the family had moved to Edinburgh and Mark attended Leith Academy. He married actress Lucy Gaskell on 28 December 2007. Their first child, Martha, was born in July 2011, and their second, Samuel, in June 2015.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: 2 States is a 2014 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy-drama film directed by Abhishek Varman and produced by Karan Johar and Sajid Nadiadwala. Based on Chetan Bhagat's 2009 novel of the with story written by Varman and Bhagat, the film stars Arjun Kapoor and Alia Bhatt with Amrita Singh, Ronit Roy, Revathi and Shiv Kumar Subramaniam in supporting roles.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Distributed by UTV Motion Pictures, "2 States" opened in global cinemas on 18 April 2014. Praised for its music, cast performances, story and direction, the film earned in worldwide markets, thus emerging as a critical and commercial success. It is Kapoor's biggest commercial success to date. At the 60th Filmfare Awards, "2 States" received 8 nominations, including Best Film, Best Director (Varman), Best Supporting Actor (Roy) and Best Supporting Actress (Singh), and won 2 awards – Best Music Director (Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy) and Best Debut Director (Varman).


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Krish Malhotra, a fresh Engineer from IIT Delhi, now a student pursuing his MBA at the IIM Ahmedabad, Gujarat, comes from a troubled, rich family of Punjabi Hindu origin based in New Delhi. His mother, Kavita, is often shown having a troubled relationship with his father, Vikram Malhotra, who is an alcoholic . He meets his classmate Ananya Swaminathan, an economics topper in her college, who comes from a conservative Tamil Brahmin family. Krish and Ananya initially quarrel, but soon become friends and start studying together. Ananya, though an economics topper, is unable to answer a simple question by her professor who chides her in turn. Ananya finds that Krish is a genius and starts taking his help in academics. Krish is attracted to Ananya and can not control himself, so one day, he tells Ananya that they should end their friendship because while close to her, Krish is distracted too much by her for him to focus on studies, however she kisses him. Soon they begin dating and stay together for their next 22 months on the IIM campus. Krish confides in Ananya that his real passion is writing, which he wants to pursue a career in. They both have become close to each other and fall for each other during the stay in IIM. Krish gets selected in the campus drives for Yes Bank. He immediately rushes to the next room and proposes to Ananya, in the middle of her interview. She accepts and then gets selected for Sunsilk.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: When they complete their graduation, Krish and Ananya decide to get married. They introduce their parents to each other at the convocation ceremony. To their dismay, Krish's loud Punjabi mother Kavita, does not get along with Ananya's reserved Tamil parents Radha and her husband, Shiv. After graduation, Ananya begins her marketing job in her hometown Chennai, and Krish goes back to his own hometown New Delhi, with the choice of the workplace in his own hands. Krish's brash family urge him to stay in New Delhi and try to discourage him from his interest in writing. They also criticize his relationship with Ananya and tell him to get into an arranged marriage with a Punjabi girl. It is also evident that there is tension between Krish and his alcoholic father.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Krish, unable to get over Ananya, leaves his dysfunctional family and shifts his job to Chennai. During this time, he tries very hard to win over Ananya's family. He initially steps on the rangoli at the entrance of their house and, unintentionally, messes it up, which upsets Ananya's father. Gradually, he builds a rapport with the family. He tutors her younger brother for the IIT entrance, gets her mother an opportunity to sing for an event at his workplace, and helps Ananya's father create his first PowerPoint presentation.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: With his efforts, when Krish symbolically proposes to each member of the family, Ananya's family agrees to the marriage. Krish and Ananya then travel to New Delhi to win over Krish's family. Initially, Kavita and her family are hostile towards Ananya but slowly come to like her after she saves Krish's cousin's wedding from being canceled due to a dispute over an excessive dowry.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Krish and Ananya decide to take a vacation in Mumbai with their families before the wedding. The vacation does not go as planned when Kavita makes continuous snide remarks about Tamilian culture. Furthermore, Ananya and her parents overhear Krish falsely assuring his mother that she can treat Ananya however she wants after they are married. Having had enough of the insults Ananya breaks up with Krish, and both go their separate ways.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Krish and Ananya find it hard to live without each other. Krish becomes a workaholic and becomes depressed and starts writing about his story with Ananya. He also visits her in Chennai, where she warns him to stop communication. Sometime later, he gets a call from Ananya, who reveals that Krish's father had secretly come down to Chennai to speak to her parents, apologizing for his wife's shallow behavior in an effort to change their decision. This allows for Krish and Ananya to finally get married, with Krish and his Punjabi family traveling by train to Chennai for the wedding. His father initially says that he will not attend the wedding to prevent any further embarrassment, but at the last minute, he flies down to Chennai with Krish seeing his rental car outside of the hotel, and to the surprise of his mother, announcing that his father has come to the wedding, before the ceremony began the priests suggest that in absence of the father , a senior male member of the family can sit with his mother. Krish reveals that his father is there, to the pleasant surprise of his mom and her family. Krish's father apologizes to his mother for his abusive behavior over the years.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: After getting married, Ananya gives birth to twin boys. Krish resigns from his job at the bank and publishes his book "2 States" based on his and Ananya's life.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: The first choice for the lead pair in the film had been Saif Ali Khan and Priyanka Chopra and the film was to be directed by Siddharth Anand. Later, it was announced that Shah Rukh Khan and Asin Thottumkal would play lead roles and the film was to be directed by Vishal Bhardwaj. The role of Krish Malhotra was also offered to Imran Khan, who instead chose to work on "Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola" (2013). Finally, Arjun Kapoor was cast as the lead. The female lead was then offered to Anushka Sharma, who rejected it as she didn't find the role interesting enough, and later Alia Bhatt signed on. Amrita Singh and Ronit Roy were cast as Arjun Kapoor's parents, and Revathi and Shiv Kumar Subramaniam were cast as Alia Bhatt's parents.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Principal photography commenced on 29 January 2013 with the shooting of a song. Parts of the film were shot at Chennai, Delhi, IIM-A and Gol Limda Bhajiya House near Astodia Darwaza, Ahmedabad Railway Station to Police commissioner office in Ahmedabad in August 2013. Alia sported an Indian Fusion look in the film and her costumes were designed by Manish Malhotra. Speaking about her character, Alia said that she is a City Girl who speaks Tamil only with her parents. It was given a U/A certificate by the censor board


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: The song "Offo" was choreographed and conceptualized by Remo D'Souza as a celebration of several Indian festivals in a time lapse of almost one year. It was shot over four days at IIM Ahmedabad campus and Filmistan Studio in Mumbai.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: The film score was composed by Tubby-Parik while the songs were composed by Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy, while the lyrics for the songs were penned by Amitabh Bhattacharya. The first song, "Offo", sung by Aditi Singh Sharma and Amitabh Bhattacharya, released on 7 March 2014. The second song, "Locha-E-Ulfat", sung by Benny Dayal, released on 13 March 2014. The soundtrack of the film released on 16 March 2014. The medley song "Isaiyin Alai" at the concert was sung by Mahalaxmi Iyer. Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy won the Filmfare Award for Best Music Director and the IIFA Award for Best Music Director for the film's soundtrack. The songs "Offo", "Mast Magan", "Uski Uski","Locha E Ulfat", "Chandaniya" were declared chartbusters.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: According to Box Office India, "2 States" had "excellent" first day figures of . The collections for second day were around taking its two-day total to , receiving a "fantastic" response in circuits like Mumbai, Mysore, Delhi-UP, CP Berar, CI, Nizam and Rajasthan. The film was declared a "Super Hit" by Box Office India in light of its first two days' performance. With a very good run in multiplexes and single screens alike, it managed a three-day nett of . "2 States" had a final domestic net of .


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: According to Box Office India, "2 States" grossed US$5.85 million internationally, and was the second highest overseas grosser of 2014 in Bollywood after "Jai Ho" at that point.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: Taran Adarsh of "Bollywood Hungama" awarded the film 4.5 out of 5 stars, and noted, "On the whole, "2 States" is one of the finest movies to come out of the Hindi film industry of late. This is one of those rare Hindi movies that commands a repeat viewing. Strongly recommended!" Critic Saurabh Dwivedi, writing for "India Today", gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, and published, ""2 States" can be a good mirror for parents to understand their children. So take along your parents and enjoy the film." Meena Iyer of "The Times of India" gave the film 3.5 out of 5 stars, and wrote, "What makes "2 States" work is the simple narrative told humorously. Adapted as it is, from one of author Chetan Bhagat's best-selling works, the film, just like the book before it, is light-hearted. Chetan's funny one-liners and life-view are studiously borrowed by the director for his screen outing. And though there is a sense of deja-vu, for those who have read the book, the movie still manages to charm and surprise." Paloma Sharma of "Rediff.com" gave the movie 3.5 out of 5 stars and opined, "There's nothing that should keep you from watching "2 States"". Mohar Basu of Koimoi gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, and wrote, ""2 States" is barely unwatchable but misses the magic of Chetan Bhagat's novel. As a stand-alone, it is endearingly done with Alia and Arjun's scorching chemistry coming off as adorable. The Bhagat fan in me is disappointed, but the cinemagoer isn't." "DNA" posted, the first half of the film is light and breezy and the second dramatic and emotional, perhaps a better balance would have helped the post-interval portion which seems heavy.


title: 2 States (2014 film)

text: "Hindustan Times" Anupama Chopra gave the film 2.5 stars out of 5, and said, "In "2 States", the story is the weakest link. The film is bolstered by talented actors, gorgeous songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, nice styling, sumptuous production design, and a few sparkling moments. But in the second half, "2 States" falls apart. At almost two-and-a-half hours, it's also stretched so thin that by the time Krish and Ananya walk into the sunset, you are long past caring". Concerning Kapoor and Bhatt, she said, "Arjun, departing from his earlier violent roles, makes a nicely goofy and later subdued lover boy, but it's Alia who lights up the screen." Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV gave the film 2.5 out of 5 stars, and wrote, ""2 States" is a cross-culture love story that strives to be sweet, funny and emotionally wrenching all at once. It is occasionally funny and sweet in parts all right, but the family drama at the film's core has a severely stultified feel. The trouble is that the impending wedding remains impending far too long to sustain interest... it sets out to be a slice-of-life drama about a real couple grappling with the politics of inter-community marriage, but it fails to generate enough energy and warmth to draw the audience into a tight clinch". Shubra Gupta of "The Indian Express" gave the film 2.5 out of 5 stars, and said, ""2 States"... sets out to be a solid, emotionally satisfying rom-com, and goes well for a bit but then turns into a too-stretched-out 'jhagda' between the two sets of North-South parents. The smooth, engaging first half descends, post-interval, into mopey melodrama, and I got impatient waiting for the inevitable resolution." She praised Bhatt's performance, saying, "...Alia Bhatt is a surprise. She leaves behind her earlier films, and gets into her character: she may not be an authentic 'Southie' in terms of body language, but she is all girl, easy and fresh and natural."


title: Clytemnestra

text: Clytemnestra (; , "Klytaimnḗstrā", ), in Greek mythology, was the wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and the twin sister of Helen of Troy. In Aeschylus' "Oresteia", she murders Agamemnon – said by Euripides to be her second husband – and the Trojan princess Cassandra, whom Agamemnon had taken as a war prize following the sack of Troy; however, in Homer's "Odyssey", her role in Agamemnon's death is unclear and her character is significantly more subdued.


title: Clytemnestra

text: Her Greek name "Klytaimnḗstra" is also sometimes Latinized as Clytaemnestra. It is commonly glossed as "famed for her suitors". However, this form is a later misreading motivated by an erroneous etymological connection to the verb "mnáomai" (, "woo, court"). The original name form is believed to have been "Klytaimḗstra" () without the "-n-". The present form of the name does not appear before the middle Byzantine period. Homeric poetry shows an awareness of both etymologies. Aeschylus, in certain wordplays on her name, appears to assume an etymological link with the verb "mḗdomai" (, "scheme, contrive"). Thus given the derivation from κλῠτός ("klutós" "celebrated") and μήδομαι ("mḗdomai" "to plan, be cunning"), this would result in the quite descriptive "famous plotter".


title: Clytemnestra

text: Clytemnestra was the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, the King and Queen of Sparta, making her a Spartan Princess. According to the myth, Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan, seducing and impregnating her. Leda produced four offspring from two eggs: Castor and Clytemnestra from one egg, and Helen and Polydeuces (Pollux) from the other. Therefore, Castor and Clytemnestra were fathered by Tyndareus, whereas Helen and Polydeuces were fathered by Zeus. Her other sisters were Philonoe, Phoebe and Timandra.


title: Clytemnestra

text: Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus were in exile at the home of Tyndareus; in due time Agamemnon married Clytemnestra and Menelaus married Helen. In a late variation, Euripides's "Iphigenia at Aulis", Clytemnestra's first husband was Tantalus, King of Pisa; Agamemnon killed him and Clytemnestra's infant son, then made Clytemnestra his wife. In another version, her first husband was King of Lydia.


title: Clytemnestra

text: After Helen was taken from Sparta to Troy, her husband, Menelaus, asked his brother Agamemnon for help. Greek forces gathered at Aulis. However, consistently weak winds prevented the fleet from sailing on the ocean. Through a subplot involving the gods and omens, the priest Calchas said the winds would be favorable if Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. Agamemnon persuaded Clytemnestra to send Iphigenia to him, telling her he was going to marry her to Achilles. When Iphigenia arrived at Aulis, she was sacrificed, the winds turned, and the troops set sail for Troy.


title: Clytemnestra

text: The Trojan War lasted ten years. During this period of Agamemnon's long absence, Clytemnestra began a love affair with Aegisthus, her husband's cousin. Whether Clytemnestra was seduced into the affair or entered into it independently differs according to the version of the myth.


title: Clytemnestra

text: Nevertheless, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus began plotting Agamemnon's demise. Clytemnestra was enraged by Iphigenia's murder (and presumably the earlier murder of her first husband by Agamemnon, and her subsequent rape and forced marriage). Aegisthus saw his father Thyestes betrayed by Agamemnon's father Atreus (Aegisthus was conceived specifically to take revenge on that branch of the family).


title: Clytemnestra

text: In old versions of the story, on returning from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife, Clytemnestra. In some later versions Clytemnestra helps him or does the killing herself in his own home. The best-known version is that of Aeschylus: Agamemnon, having arrived at his palace with his concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra, in tow and being greeted by his wife, entered the palace for a banquet while Cassandra remained in the chariot. Clytemnestra waited until he was in the bath, and then entangled him in a cloth net and stabbed him. Trapped in the web, Agamemnon could neither escape nor resist his murderer.


title: Clytemnestra

text: Meanwhile, Cassandra saw a vision of herself and Agamemnon being murdered. Her attempts to elicit help failed (she had been cursed by Apollo that no one would believe her prophecies). She realized she was fated to die, and resolutely walked into the palace to receive her death.


title: Clytemnestra

text: After the murders, Aegisthus replaced Agamemnon as king and ruled for seven years with Clytemnestra as his queen. In some traditions they have three children: a son Aletes, and daughters Erigone and Helen. Clytemnestra was eventually killed by Orestes, her son by Agamemnon. The infant Helen was also killed. Aletes and Erigone grow up at Mycenae, but when Aletes comes of age, Orestes returns from Sparta, kills his half-brother, and takes the throne. Orestes and Erigone are said to have had a son, Penthilus.


title: Graduate diploma

text: A graduate diploma (GradD, GDip, GrDip, GradDip) is generally a qualification taken after completion of a first degree, although the level of study varies in different countries from being at the same level as the final year of a bachelor's degree to being at a level between a master's degree and a doctorate. In some countries the graduate diploma and postgraduate diploma are synonymous, while in others (particularly where the graduate diploma is at undergraduate degree level) the postgraduate diploma is a higher qualification.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma is normally taken following a bachelor's degree, and some master's degree programs have graduate diploma as a nested (interim) award. The qualification is at level 8 of the Australian Qualifications Framework, the same as an honours degree. This qualification is at the same level as the post graduate diploma qualifications awarded in New Zealand institutions and Australian graduate diplomas should not be confused with New Zealand graduate diplomas as they belong to two different qualification levels.


title: Graduate diploma

text: Graduate diplomas offered in Canada (French: "Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées") are typically taken following a bachelor's degree and a successful award allows progression to a master's degree. Depending on the institution, a graduate diploma in Canada may be at graduate level or bachelor's level. Similar courses at other Canadian institutions may be termed postgraduate diplomas at graduate level and post-baccalaureate diploma at bachelor's level.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In Denmark there are two forms of master's degree. The master's degree or candidatus is a FQ-EHEA second-cycle qualification worth 120 ECTS credits. These degrees are research-based and offered through universities (e.g. University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School). The second form is the Graduate Diploma within the adult further education system, which is worth 60 ECTS credits and is taught part-time. The graduate diploma is normally taken following a bachelor's degree. Diplomas (in Danish: HD) are studied in business-related fields such as Business Administration and Innovation Management. Programs are normally split into Part 1 (graduate certificate) and Part 2 (graduate diploma), each being 60 ECTS Credits (one year of full-time-equivalent study).


title: Graduate diploma

text: In India the graduate diploma, comes one level before a master's degree–level qualification which are usually is a 1/2-year specialized programs. Certain institutes provide master's level programs with increased number lower credit courses for two years. At times for transnational equivalency the same is casually noted as graduate diplomas. Advanced diplomas provided are equivalent to a post-baccalaureate diploma; this is a one to three-year course.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In the Republic of Ireland, the graduate diploma or post-graduate diploma is a level 9 award on the National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ) which is the same level as a masters degree. The higher diploma is an award at level 8, the same level as an honours bachelor's degree. These programmes generally consist of one year of full-time study and are usually taken after, and/or in a different subject from, an earlier bachelor's degree. A wide variety of courses are offered; it is also possible to progress to a master's degree.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma (GradDip) is offered by University College Dublin, the Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin City University, HETAC and the University of Limerick. The higher diploma (HDip) is offered by HETAC, NUI institutions, and Trinity College, Dublin.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma forms part of the lifelong education pathway on the Malaysian Qualifications Framework. They are qualifications at the level of a bachelor's degree but with half of the credit value.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In New Zealand, a graduate diploma is an advanced undergraduate qualification normally completed after a bachelor's degree or done at the same time as the bachelors study, and can be used as a bridging qualification to prove a student's ability to undertake postgraduate studies for a completely different field. A graduate diploma (e.g., Graduate Diploma in Education etc.) is different from a postgraduate diploma, which is a course of study at postgraduate level (e.g., Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Psychology etc.). In universities and learning institutes, a graduate diploma is commonly studied by students who have already graduated in a different field and allows them to pursue a new profession. It mainly involves undertaking courses in an accelerated undergraduate level (e.g., normally a mixture of second and third year courses from the bachelor's degree) in order for the student to attain the requirements equivalent to a student who studied towards an undergraduate degree.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma is an academic or vocational qualification; as an academic qualification it is often taken after a bachelor's degree although sometimes only a foundation degree is required. It is usually awarded by a university or a graduate school and usually takes two terms of study to complete. It is also possible for academic graduate diploma holders to progress to a master's degree on an accelerated pathway compared to first embarking on a 3- or 4-year degree program. To ensure that the graduate diploma qualification is recognised, the awarding body must be registered with the Singapore Ministry of Education, like SUSS, NUS, JCU, SIPMM, etc.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma is generally a professional conversion qualification to reskill a graduate with new specialised skills, for instance the "GDipPsy - Graduate Diploma in Psychology" is aimed at offering specialised skills in psychology. See also postgraduate diploma.


title: Graduate diploma

text: The graduate diploma is offered at different levels by different institutions. The National University of Singapore requires study at master's level, but the graduate diplomas at the Singapore University of Social Sciences are UK (i.e. bachelor's-level) graduate diplomas awarded by the University of London and similarly the Ngee Ann - Adelaide Education Centre offers Australian graduate diplomas (i.e. Australian honours degree level) awarded by the University of Adelaide. The Graduate Diploma of Singapore Raffles Music College is a post-foundation degree qualification rather than post-bachelor's. Graduate diplomas from Aventis School of Management are part-time courses that is accredidated by The Association of Psychotherapists and Counsellors Singapore (APACS) or registered with European Foundation for Management Development and the European Council for Business Education (ECBE)


title: Graduate diploma

text: The WSQ Graduate Diploma is the highest qualification in Singapore's vocational Workforce Skills Qualifications framework, administered by the Singapore Workforce Development Agency. This is not tied to the levels of academic degrees.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In the UK, a graduate diploma is a short course, with a value of 80–120 UK credits (equivalent to 40–60 ECTS credits), that is normally studied by students who have already graduated in another field. Graduate diplomas are distinguished from graduate certificates by having a longer period of study, equivalent to two thirds of an academic year or more. Until the 1990s, the British conservatoires of music offered three year undergraduate courses to some of their students, leading the award of the Graduate Diploma, e.g. GRSM, GTCL, equivalent to a university first degree in music. When a number of conservatoires became affiliated to or constituent colleges of universities, the graduate diplomas were gradually replaced by the award of the BMus degree to all successful students.


title: Graduate diploma

text: A graduate diploma should not be confused with a postgraduate diploma, which is a master's degree-level qualification in the UK. Historically, this has not always been the case, with postgraduate diploma and graduate diploma used interchangeably, but the Quality Assurance Agency now makes a clear distinction between these titles. Some institutions have renamed courses as a result, e.g. The College of Law renamed the official title for its law conversion course from "Postgraduate Diploma in Law" to "Graduate Diploma in Law" as, although the law conversion course is studied postgraduately, the contents of the course are only undergraduate in nature.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In 2018, the Royal College of Art launched a new Graduate Diploma in Art and Design programme aimed at preparing graduate students for its master's degree programmes in Art and Design.


title: Graduate diploma

text: In the US, graduate diplomas are "Intermediate Graduate Qualifications" involving study beyond master's level but not reaching doctoral level. They are generally found in professional, rather than academic, fields. Other qualifications at this level include advanced graduate certificates, specialist certificates and specialist degrees.


title: Refugee

text: A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for asylum.


title: Refugee

text: The lead international agency coordinating refugee protection is the United Nations Office of the UNHCR. The United Nations has a second office for refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is solely responsible for supporting the large majority of Palestinian refugees.


title: Refugee

text: Similar terms in other languages have described an event marking migration of a specific population from a place of origin, such as the biblical account of Israelites fleeing from Assyrian conquest (), or the asylum found by the prophet Muhammad and his emigrant companions with helpers in Yathrib (later Medina) after they fled from persecution in Mecca. In English, the term "refugee" derives from the root word "refuge", from Old French "refuge", meaning "hiding place". It refers to "shelter or protection from danger or distress", from Latin "fugere", "to flee", and "refugium", "a taking [of] refuge, place to flee back to". In Western history, the term was first applied to French Protestant Huguenots looking for a safe place against Catholic persecution after the first Edict of Fontainebleau in 1540. The word appeared in the English language when French Huguenots fled to Britain in large numbers after the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau (the revocation of the 1598 Edict of Nantes) in France and the 1687 Declaration of Indulgence in England and Scotland. The word meant "one seeking asylum", until around 1916, when it evolved to mean "one fleeing home", applied in this instance to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in World War I.


title: Refugee

text: The first modern definition of international refugee status came about under the League of Nations in 1921 from the Commission for Refugees. Following World War II, and in response to the large numbers of people fleeing Eastern Europe, the UN 1951 Refugee Convention defined "refugee" (in Article 1.A.2) as any person who:


title: Refugee

text: owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.


title: Refugee

text: In 1967, the definition was basically confirmed by the UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.


title: Refugee

text: The Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa expanded the 1951 definition, which the Organization of African Unity adopted in 1969:Every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.


title: Refugee

text: persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.


title: Refugee

text: who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence and unable to return there owing to serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order.


title: Refugee

text: European Union's minimum standards definition of refugee, underlined by Art. 2 (c) of Directive No. 2004/83/EC, essentially reproduces the narrow definition of refugee offered by the UN 1951 Convention; nevertheless, by virtue of articles 2 (e) and 15 of the same Directive, persons who have fled a war-caused generalized violence are, at certain conditions, eligible for a complementary form of protection, called subsidiary protection. The same form of protection is foreseen for displaced people who, without being refugees, are nevertheless exposed, if returned to their countries of origin, to death penalty, torture or other inhuman or degrading treatments.


title: Refugee

text: Refugee resettlement is defined as "an organized process of selection, transfer and arrival of individuals to another country. This definition is restrictive, as it does not account for the increasing prevalence of unmanaged migration processes."


title: Refugee

text: The term refugee relocation refers to "a non‐organized process of individual transfer to another country."


title: Refugee

text: Refugee settlement refers to "the process of basic adjustment to life ‒ often in the early stages of transition to the new country ‒ including securing access to housing, education, healthcare, documentation and legal rights [and] employment is sometimes included in this process, but the focus is generally on short‐term survival needs rather than long‐term career planning."


title: Refugee

text: Refugee integration means "a dynamic, long‐term process in which a newcomer becomes a full and equal participant in the receiving society... Compared to the general construct of settlement, refugee integration has a greater focus on social, cultural and structural dimensions. This process includes the acquisition of legal rights, mastering the language and culture, reaching safety and stability, developing social connections and establishing the means and markers of integration, such as employment, housing and health."


title: Refugee

text: Refugee workforce integration is understood to be "a process in which refugees engage in economic activities (employment or self‐employment) which are commensurate with individuals' professional goals and previous qualifications and experience, and provide adequate economic security and prospects for career advancement."


title: Refugee

text: The idea that a person who sought sanctuary in a holy place could not be harmed without inviting divine retribution was familiar to the ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians. However, the right to seek asylum in a church or other holy place was first codified in law by King Æthelberht of Kent in about AD 600. Similar laws were implemented throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. The related concept of political exile also has a long history: Ovid was sent to Tomis; Voltaire was sent to England. By the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, nations recognized each other's sovereignty. However, it was not until the advent of romantic nationalism in late 18th-century Europe that nationalism gained sufficient prevalence for the phrase "country of nationality" to become practically meaningful, and for border crossing to require that people provide identification.


title: Refugee

text: The term "refugee" sometimes applies to people who might fit the definition outlined by the 1951 Convention, were it applied retroactively. There are many candidates. For example, after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 outlawed Protestantism in France, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled to England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany and Prussia. The repeated waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries prompted mass Jewish emigration (more than 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in the period 1881–1920). Beginning in the 19th century, Muslim people emigrated to Turkey from Europe. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 caused 800,000 people to leave their homes. Various groups of people were officially designated refugees beginning in World War I. However, when the First World War began, there were no rules in international law specifically dealing with the situation of refugees.


title: Refugee

text: The first international co-ordination of refugee affairs came with the creation by the League of Nations in 1921 of the High Commission for Refugees and the appointment of Fridtjof Nansen as its head. Nansen and the commission were charged with assisting the approximately 1,500,000 people who fled the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war (1917–1921), most of them aristocrats fleeing the Communist government. It is estimated that about 800,000 Russian refugees became stateless when Lenin revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921.


title: Refugee

text: In 1923, the mandate of the commission was expanded to include the more than one million Armenians who left Turkish Asia Minor in 1915 and 1923 due to a series of events now known as the Armenian genocide. Over the next several years, the mandate was expanded further to cover Assyrians and Turkish refugees. In all of these cases, a refugee was defined as a person in a group for which the League of Nations had approved a mandate, as opposed to a person to whom a general definition applied.


title: Refugee

text: The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey involved about two million people (around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece) most of whom were forcibly repatriated and denaturalized from homelands of centuries or millennia (and guaranteed the nationality of the destination country) by a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).


title: Refugee

text: The U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924. The Immigration Act of 1924 was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, Italians and Slavs, who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. Most European refugees (principally Jews and Slavs) fleeing the Nazis and the Soviet Union were barred from going to the United States until after World War II.


title: Refugee

text: In 1930, the Nansen International Office for Refugees (Nansen Office) was established as a successor agency to the commission. Its most notable achievement was the Nansen passport, a refugee travel document, for which it was awarded the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nansen Office was plagued by problems of financing, an increase in refugee numbers, and a lack of co-operation from some member states, which led to mixed success overall.


title: Refugee

text: However, the Nansen Office managed to lead fourteen nations to ratify the 1933 Refugee Convention, an early, and relatively modest, attempt at a human rights charter, and in general assisted around one million refugees worldwide.


title: Refugee

text: The rise of Nazism led to such a very large increase in the number of refugees from Germany that in 1933 the League created a high commission for refugees coming from Germany. Besides other measures by the Nazis which created fear and flight, Jews were stripped of German citizenship by the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935. On 4 July 1936 an agreement was signed under League auspices that defined a refugee coming from Germany as "any person who was settled in that country, who does not possess any nationality other than German nationality, and in respect of whom it is established that in law or in fact he or she does not enjoy the protection of the Government of the Reich" (article 1).


title: Refugee

text: The mandate of the High Commission was subsequently expanded to include persons from Austria and Sudetenland, which Germany annexed after 1 October 1938 in accordance with the Munich Agreement. According to the Institute for Refugee Assistance, the actual count of refugees from Czechoslovakia on 1 March 1939 stood at almost 150,000. Between 1933 and 1939, about 200,000 Jews fleeing Nazism were able to find refuge in France, while at least 55,000 Jews were able to find refuge in Palestine before the British authorities closed that destination in 1939.


title: Refugee

text: On 31 December 1938, both the Nansen Office and High Commission were dissolved and replaced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees under the Protection of the League. This coincided with the flight of several hundred thousand Spanish Republicans to France after their defeat by the Nationalists in 1939 in the Spanish Civil War.


title: Refugee

text: The conflict and political instability during World War II led to massive numbers of refugees (see World War II evacuation and expulsion). In 1943, the Allies created the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to provide aid to areas liberated from Axis powers, including parts of Europe and China. By the end of the War, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. UNRRA was involved in returning over seven million refugees, then commonly referred to as displaced persons or DPs, to their country of origin and setting up displaced persons camps for one million refugees who refused to be repatriated. Even two years after the end of War, some 850,000 people still lived in DP camps across Western Europe. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Israel accepted more than 650,000 refugees by 1950. By 1953, over 250,000 refugees were still in Europe, most of them old, infirm, crippled, or otherwise disabled.


title: Refugee

text: After the Soviet armed forces captured eastern Poland from the Germans in 1944, the Soviets unilaterally declared a new frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland approximately at the Curzon Line, despite the protestations from the Polish government-in-exile in London and the western Allies at the Teheran Conference and the Yalta Conference of February 1945. After the German surrender on 7 May 1945, the Allies occupied the remainder of Germany, and the Berlin declaration of 5 June 1945 confirmed the unfortunate division of Allied-occupied Germany according to the Yalta Conference, which stipulated the continued existence of the German Reich as a whole, which would include its eastern territories as of 31 December 1937. This did not impact on Poland's eastern border, and Stalin refused to be removed from these eastern Polish territories.


title: Refugee

text: In the last months of World War II, about five million German civilians from the German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia fled the advance of the Red Army from the east and became refugees in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Saxony. Since the spring of 1945, the Poles had been forcefully expelling the remaining German population in these provinces. When the Allies met in Potsdam on 17 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, a chaotic refugee situation faced the occupying powers. The Potsdam Agreement, signed on 2 August 1945, defined the Polish western border as that of 1937, (Article VIII) Agreements of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference placing one fourth of Germany's territory under the Provisional Polish administration. Article XII ordered that the remaining German populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary be transferred west in an "orderly and humane" manner. Agreements of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference (See Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50).)


title: Refugee

text: Although not approved by Allies at Potsdam, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans living in Yugoslavia and Romania were deported to slave labour in the Soviet Union, to Allied-occupied Germany, and subsequently to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). This entailed the largest population transfer in history. In all 15 million Germans were affected, and more than two million perished during the expulsions of the German population. (See Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950).) Between the end of War and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, more than 563,700 refugees from East Germany traveled to West Germany for asylum from the Soviet occupation.


title: Refugee

text: During the same period, millions of former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated against their will into the USSR. On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR. The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets regardless of their wishes. When the war ended in May 1945, British and United States civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union millions of former residents of the USSR, including many persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship decades before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947.


title: Refugee

text: At the end of World War II, there were more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union in Western Europe. About 3 million had been forced laborers (Ostarbeiters) in Germany and occupied territories. The Soviet POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies). Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. The survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see Order No. 270). Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis were sent to the Gulag.


title: Refugee

text: Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges following the imposition of a new Poland-Soviet border at the Curzon Line in 1944. About 2,100,000 Poles were expelled west of the new border (see Repatriation of Poles), while about 450,000 Ukrainians were expelled to the east of the new border. The population transfer to Soviet Ukraine occurred from September 1944 to May 1946 (see Repatriation of Ukrainians). A further 200,000 Ukrainians left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily between 1944 and 1945.


title: Refugee

text: According to the report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees (1995), 10 to 15 percent of 7.5 million Azerbaijani population were refugees or displaced people. Most of them were 228,840 refugee people of Azerbaijan who fled from Armenia in 1988 as a result of deportation policy of Armenia against ethnic Azerbaijanis.


title: Refugee

text: The International Refugee Organization (IRO) was founded on 20 April 1946, and took over the functions of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was shut down in 1947. While the handover was originally planned to take place at the beginning of 1947, it did not occur until July 1947. The International Refugee Organization was a temporary organization of the United Nations (UN), which itself had been founded in 1945, with a mandate to largely finish the UNRRA's work of repatriating or resettling European refugees. It was dissolved in 1952 after resettling about one million refugees. The definition of a refugee at this time was an individual with either a Nansen passport or a "certificate of identity" issued by the International Refugee Organization.


title: Refugee

text: The Constitution of the International Refugee Organization, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 15 December 1946, specified the agency's field of operations. Controversially, this defined "persons of German ethnic origin" who had been expelled, or were to be expelled from their countries of birth into the postwar Germany, as individuals who would "not be the concern of the Organization." This excluded from its purview a group that exceeded in number all the other European displaced persons put together. Also, because of disagreements between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, the IRO only worked in areas controlled by Western armies of occupation.


title: Refugee

text: With the occurrence of major instances of diaspora and forced migration, the study of their causes and implications has emerged as a legitimate interdisciplinary area of research, and began to rise by mid to late 20th century, after World War II. Although significant contributions had been made before, the latter half of the 20th century saw the establishment of institutions dedicated to the study of refugees, such as the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem, which was closely followed by the founding of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In particular, the 1981 volume of the "International Migration Review" defined refugee studies as "a comprehensive, historical, interdisciplinary and comparative perspective which focuses on the consistencies and patterns in the refugee experience." Following its publishing, the field saw a rapid increase in academic interest and scholarly inquiry, which has continued to the present. Most notably in 1988, the "Journal of Refugee Studies" was established as the field's first major interdisciplinary journal.


title: Refugee

text: The emergence of refugee studies as a distinct field of study has been criticized by scholars due to terminological difficulty. Since no universally accepted definition for the term "refugee" exists, the academic respectability of the policy-based definition, as outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, is disputed. Additionally, academics have critiqued the lack of a theoretical basis of refugee studies and dominance of policy-oriented research. In response, scholars have attempted to steer the field toward establishing a theoretical groundwork of refugee studies through "situating studies of particular refugee (and other forced migrant) groups in the theories of cognate areas (and major disciplines), [providing] an opportunity to use the particular circumstances of refugee situations to illuminate these more general theories and thus participate in the development of social science, rather than leading refugee studies into an intellectual cul-de-sac." Thus, the term "refugee" in the context of refugee studies can be referred to as "legal or descriptive rubric", encompassing socioeconomic backgrounds, personal histories, psychological analyses, and spiritualities.


title: Refugee

text: Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established on 14 December 1950. It protects and supports refugees at the request of a government or the United Nations and assists in providing durable solutions, such as return or resettlement. All refugees in the world are under UNHCR mandate except Palestinian refugees, who fled the current state of Israel between 1947 and 1949, as a result of the 1948 Palestine War. These refugees are assisted by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNHCR also provides protection and assistance to other categories of displaced persons: asylum seekers, refugees who returned home voluntarily but still need help rebuilding their lives, local civilian communities directly affected by large refugee movements, stateless people and so-called internally displaced people (IDPs), as well as people in refugee-like and IDP-like situations. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and to resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another state or territory and to offer "durable solutions" to refugees and refugee hosting countries.


title: Refugee

text: Unlike other refugee groups, the UN created a specific entity called the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the aftermath of the Al-Nakba in 1948, which led to a serious refugee crisis in the Arab region responsible for the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian refugees. This number has gone up to at least 5 million refugees in the last 70 years. The United Nations defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Descendants of this generation also fall under the status of Palestinian refugee. Another refugee wave started in 1967 after the Six-day-War, where mostly Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank were victims of displacement. According to the United Nations, Palestinian refugees struggle with access to health care, food, clean water, sanitation, environmental health and infrastructure, education, and technology. According to the report, food, shelter, and environmental health are a human's basic needs. United Nations agency UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) focuses on addressing these issues to relieve Palestinians from any harm. UNWRA was established as a temporary agency that would carry out a humanitarian response mandate for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The responsibilities for the assistance for protection for Palestinian refugees and human development were originally left to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). This agency failed to function, which led the agency to stop working. UNRWA took over these responsibilities and expanded their mandate from just humanitarian emergency relief to including human development and protection of the Palestinian society. Communication with host countries where UNRWA is operating (Syria, Jordan and Lebanon) is very important as the agency's mandate changes per region. UNRWA's Medium Term Strategy is a report that lists all the issues that the Palestinians are facing and UNRWA's plan to mitigate the severeness of the issues. The report shows that UNRWA focusses mostly on food assistance, health care, education and shelter for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA has succeeded in placing over 700 schools with over 500,000 students, 140 health centers, 113 women community centers, and has awarded over 475,000 loans. UNRWA's funding relies mostly on voluntary donations. Fluctuations in these donations result in constraints in carrying out the mandate.


title: Refugee

text: A refugee camp is a place built by governments or NGOs (such as the Red Cross) to receive refugees, internally displaced persons or sometimes also other migrants. It is usually designed to offer acute and temporary accommodation and services and any more permanent facilities and structures often banned. People may stay in these camps for many years, receiving emergency food, education and medical aid until it is safe enough to return to their country of origin. There, refugees are at risk of disease, child soldier and terrorist recruitment, and physical and sexual violence. There are estimated to be 700 refugee camp locations worldwide.


title: Refugee

text: Not all refugees who are supported by the UNHCR live in refugee camps. A significant number, actually more than half, live in urban settings, such as the ~60,000 Iraqi refugees in Damascus (Syria), and the ~30,000 Sudanese refugees in Cairo (Egypt).


title: Refugee

text: The residency status in the host country whilst under temporary UNHCR protection is very uncertain as refugees are only granted temporary visas that have to be regularly renewed. Rather than only safeguarding the rights and basic well-being of refugees in the camps or in urban settings on a temporary basis the UNHCR's ultimate goal is to find one of the three durable solutions for refugees: integration, repatriation, resettlement.


title: Refugee

text: Local integration is aiming at providing the refugee with the permanent right to stay in the country of asylum, including, in some situations, as a naturalized citizen. It follows the formal granting of refugee status by the country of asylum. It is difficult to quantify the number of refugees who settled and integrated in their first country of asylum and only the number of naturalisations can give an indication. In 2014 Tanzania granted citizenship to 162,000 refugees from Burundi and in 1982 to 32,000 Rwandan refugees. Mexico naturalised 6,200 Guatemalan refugees in 2001.


title: Refugee

text: Voluntary return of refugees into their country of origin, in safety and dignity, is based on their free will and their informed decision. In the last couple of years parts of or even whole refugee populations were able to return to their home countries: e.g. 120,000 Congolese refugees returned from the Republic of Congo to the DRC, 30,000 Angolans returned home from the DRC and Botswana, Ivorian refugees returned from Liberia, Afghans from Pakistan, and Iraqis from Syria. In 2013, the governments of Kenya and Somalia also signed a tripartite agreement facilitating the repatriation of refugees from Somalia. The UNHCR and the IOM offer assistance to refugees who want to return voluntarily to their home countries. Many developed countries also have Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes for asylum seekers who want to go back or were refused asylum.


title: Refugee

text: Third country resettlement involves the assisted transfer of refugees from the country in which they have sought asylum to a safe third country that has agreed to admit them as refugees. This can be for permanent settlement or limited to a certain number of years. It is the third durable solution and it can only be considered once the two other solutions have proved impossible. The UNHCR has traditionally seen resettlement as the least preferable of the "durable solutions" to refugee situations. However, in April 2000 the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, stated "Resettlement can no longer be seen as the least-preferred durable solution; in many cases it is the "only" solution for refugees."


title: Refugee

text: UNHCR's mandate has gradually been expanded to include protecting and providing humanitarian assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) and people in IDP-like situations. These are civilians who have been forced to flee their homes, but who have not reached a neighboring country. IDPs do not fit the legal definition of a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention, 1967 Protocol and the 1969 Organization for African Unity Convention, because they have not left their country. As the nature of war has changed in the last few decades, with more and more internal conflicts replacing interstate wars, the number of IDPs has increased significantly.


title: Refugee

text: In the United States, the term refugee is defined under the Immigration of Nationality Act (INA). In other countries, it is often used in different contexts: in everyday usage it refers to a forcibly displaced person who has fled his or her country of origin; in a more specific context it refers to such a person who was, on top of that, granted refugee status in the country the person fled to. Even more exclusive is the Convention refugee status which is given only to persons who fall within the refugee definition of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol.


title: Refugee

text: To receive refugee status, a person must have applied for asylum, making them—while waiting for a decision—an asylum seeker. However, a displaced person otherwise legally entitled to refugee status may never apply for asylum, or may not be allowed to apply in the country they fled to and thus may not have official asylum seeker status.


title: Refugee

text: Once a displaced person is granted refugee status they enjoy certain rights as agreed in the 1951 Refugee convention. Not all countries have signed and ratified this convention and some countries do not have a legal procedure for dealing with asylum seekers.


title: Refugee

text: An asylum seeker is a displaced person or immigrant who has formally sought the protection of the state they fled to as well as the right to remain in this country and who is waiting for a decision on this formal application. An asylum seeker may have applied for Convention refugee status or for complementary forms of protection. Asylum is thus a category that includes different forms of protection. Which form of protection is offered depends on the legal definition that best describes the asylum seeker's reasons to flee. Once the decision was made the asylum seeker receives either Convention refugee status or a complementary form of protection, and can stay in the country—or is refused asylum, and then often has to leave. Only after the state, territory or the UNHCR—wherever the application was made—recognises the protection needs does the asylum seeker "officially" receive refugee status. This carries certain rights and obligations, according to the legislation of the receiving country.


title: Refugee

text: Quota refugees do not need to apply for asylum on arrival in the third countries as they already went through the UNHCR refugee status determination process whilst being in the first country of asylum and this is usually accepted by the third countries.


title: Refugee

text: To receive refugee status, a displaced person must go through a Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process, which is conducted by the government of the country of asylum or the UNHCR, and is based on international, regional or national law. RSD can be done on a case-by-case basis as well as for whole groups of people. Which of the two processes is used often depends on the size of the influx of displaced persons.


title: Refugee

text: There is no specific method mandated for RSD (apart from the commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention) and it is subject to the overall efficacy of the country's internal administrative and judicial system as well as the characteristics of the refugee flow to which the country responds. This lack of a procedural direction could create a situation where political and strategic interests override humanitarian considerations in the RSD process. There are also no fixed interpretations of the elements in the 1951 Refugee Convention and countries may interpret them differently (see also refugee roulette).


title: Refugee

text: However, in 2013, the UNHCR conducted them in more than 50 countries and co-conducted them parallel to or jointly with governments in another 20 countries, which made it the second largest RSD body in the world The UNHCR follows a set of guidelines described in the "Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status" to determine which individuals are eligible for refugee status.


title: Refugee

text: Refugee rights encompass both customary law, peremptory norms, and international legal instruments. If the entity granting refugee status is a state that has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention then the refugee has the right to employment. Further rights include the following rights and obligations for refugees:


title: Refugee

text: Even in a supposedly "post-conflict" environment, it is not a simple process for refugees to return home. The UN Pinheiro Principles are guided by the idea that people not only have the right to return home, but also the right to the same property. It seeks to return to the pre-conflict status quo and ensure that no one profits from violence. Yet this is a very complex issue and every situation is different; conflict is a highly transformative force and the pre-war status-quo can never be reestablished completely, even if that were desirable (it may have caused the conflict in the first place). Therefore, the following are of particular importance to the right to return:


title: Refugee

text: Refugees who were resettled to a third country will likely lose the indefinite leave to remain in this country if they return to their country of origin or the country of first asylum.


title: Refugee

text: Non-refoulement is the right not to be returned to a place of persecution and is the foundation for international refugee law, as outlined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The right to non-refoulement is distinct from the right to asylum. To respect the right to asylum, states must not deport genuine refugees. In contrast, the right to non-refoulement allows states to transfer genuine refugees to third party countries with respectable human rights records. The portable procedural model, proposed by political philosopher Andy Lamey, emphasizes the right to non-refoulement by guaranteeing refugees three procedural rights (to a verbal hearing, to legal counsel, and to judicial review of detention decisions) and ensuring those rights in the constitution. This proposal attempts to strike a balance between the interest of national governments and the interests of refugees.


title: Refugee

text: Family reunification (which can also be a form of resettlement) is a recognized reason for immigration in many countries. Divided families have the right to be reunited if a family member with permanent right of residency applies for the reunification and can prove the people on the application were a family unit before arrival and wish to live as a family unit since separation. If application is successful this enables the rest of the family to immigrate to that country as well.


title: Refugee

text: Those states that signed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees are obliged to issue travel documents (i.e. "Convention Travel Document") to refugees lawfully residing in their territory. It is a valid travel document in place of a passport, however, it cannot be used to travel to the country of origin, i.e. from where the refugee fled.


title: Refugee

text: Once refugees or asylum seekers have found a safe place and protection of a state or territory outside their territory of origin they are discouraged from leaving again and seeking protection in another country. If they do move onward into a second country of asylum this movement is also called ""irregular movement"" by the UNHCR (see also asylum shopping). UNHCR support in the second country may be less than in the first country and they can even be returned to the first country.


title: Refugee

text: World Refugee Day has occurred annually on 20 June since 2000 by a special United Nations General Assembly Resolution. 20 June had previously been commemorated as "African Refugee Day" in a number of African countries.


title: Refugee

text: In the United Kingdom World Refugee Day is celebrated as part of Refugee Week. Refugee Week is a nationwide festival designed to promote understanding and to celebrate the cultural contributions of refugees, and features many events such as music, dance and theatre.


title: Refugee

text: In the Roman Catholic Church, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees is celebrated in January each year, since instituted in 1914 by Pope Pius X.


title: Refugee

text: Displacement is a long lasting reality for most refugees. Two-thirds of all refugees around the world have been displaced for over three years, which is known as being in 'protracted displacement'. 50% of refugees—around 10 million people—have been displaced for over ten years.


title: Refugee

text: Protracted displacement can lead to detrimental effects on refugee employment and refugee workforce integration, exacerbating the effect of the canvas ceiling. Protracted displacement leads to skills to atrophy, leading qualifications and experiences to be outdated and incompatible to the changing working environments of receiving countries by the time refugees resettle.


title: Refugee

text: The Overseas Development Institute has found that aid programmes need to move from short-term models of assistance (such as food or cash handouts) to more sustainable long-term programmes that help refugees become more self-reliant. This can involve tackling difficult legal and economic environments, by improving social services, job opportunities and laws.


title: Refugee

text: Refugees typically report poorer levels of health, compared to other immigrants and the non-immigrant population.


title: Refugee

text: Apart from physical wounds or starvation, a large percentage of refugees develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and show post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) or depression. These long-term mental problems can severely impede the functionality of the person in everyday situations; it makes matters even worse for displaced persons who are confronted with a new environment and challenging situations. They are also at high risk for suicide.