UN refugee agency rejects expression "refugees".

The UN refugee agency UNHCR does not believe in replacing the word "refugees" with the term "refugees". "We regard the word 'refugee' as derogatory and do not use it," UNHCR spokesman in Germany Chris Melzer told the German Press Agency. The German name of the UN refugee agency will not be shaken either. The head of the UN organization, Filippo Grandi, remains the high commissioner for refugees, not for refugees, stressed Melzer.

The organization Pro Asyl also sticks to “refugees”. “In the legal sense, a refugee is someone who has rights,” she wrote back in 2016. The federal government uses both “refugees” and “war refugees” on its websites.

Melzer considers the term “refugee” to be too banal. "We've all fled from something at some point, whether it was a downpour, an unpleasant duty or something else," he says. A refugee, for example, is also a criminal who flees from the police or who has escaped from prison. “Refugee”, on the other hand, is “quasi a protected term”. "It has been firmly defined by the Geneva Refugee Convention for more than 70 years and has a sharpness and strength that protects people."

The convention is called in German "Agreement on the Legal Status of Refugees". Regarding the definition of the term “refugee”, Article 1 states that the term “refugee” applies to any person “who, out of a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or because of his political opinion is outside the country of which he is a national and cannot, or because of these fears, does not wish to benefit from the protection of that country”.

“It is inappropriate to lump criminals or people who have fled from a downpour in the same category as people who had to flee from a regime or a war to flee because they were resisting a regime, in order to save their lives,” says Melzer. He does not accept the argument that words ending in "ling" are derogatory because cowards or fools also end in the same way. After all, there is also “darling”.