Published in Inside Stories. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), UK for UNHCR, Summer 2026
Last month, I sat in Westminster Abbey listening to Filippo Grandi give what turned out to be one of his final major speeches as UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It wasn’t what I expected. Instead of statistics, he talked about music, poetry, and scripture, and about how humanity has always carried its most important messages through art. This resonated deeply with me and honestly, it made me want to understand his decade in the role a lot more than I did walking in.
Grandi became High Commissioner in 2016, and throughout his tenure, he has repeatedly challenged the narrative we often hear about rich countries being overwhelmed by refugees. He pointed to countries like Chad, facing its own climate and food crises, yet still hosting nearly a million refugees, more than double the number who reached the entire EU last year. Or Uganda. Turkey. Jordan. Colombia. This list is not made up of the richest countries in the world by a long shot, yet they host roughly 75% of the world’s refugees. That reversal of the usual story is something Grandi has spent a decade trying to make people actually see.
His speech made me reflect that beyond each statistic we see in the news is a real person, mothers fleeing violence, teenagers who’ve lost everything, kids like me who just want to go to school. One of the things that stuck with me was how he talked about the 1951 Refugee Convention which came into being as legal protections because of the failure to protect Jewish people fleeing Nazi persecution. We learned the hard way what happens when we turn people away. And yet, funding and political will for refugees has shrunk. The protections that exist on paper are increasingly ignored in practice.
He quoted a 12th-century Sufi poet who wrote that the world is one body, and when one part suffers, everything feels it. It’s a beautiful idea. But what I keep thinking about is how difficult it is to continue the work. UNHCR has already lost over 5,000 posts and seen its budget drop by around 20%. While the need hasn’t shrunk, the money has.
Which is part of why the appointment of his successor, Barham Salih, feels like such a significant moment. Mr Salih, former President of Iraq and, crucially, a former refugee himself, took over in January 2026, and he’s already signalling a different kind of ambition. His goal is to cut the number of refugees stuck in long-term, protracted displacement by half by 2035. That means pushing harder on voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement, linking humanitarian aid with actual development and peace efforts rather than just keeping people alive indefinitely in camps.
“When emergency tools become the long-term default,” Mr Salih has said, “we are not building sustainability. We must measure success by whether people can rebuild their lives.” It’s a courageous vision, and one that feels like the natural next step. Mr Salih, having lived displacement himself, brings to the role something no amount of policy experience alone can provide: a deep, personal understanding of what it means to be forced from your home and what it means to rebuild.
Leaving Westminster Abbey, I felt the full weight of Mr Grandi’s legacy. He never stopped making the moral case for why refugees mattered. Now, with Mr Salih at the helm, there is real reason for hope. His goal of dramatically reducing long-term displacement within a decade is exactly the kind of bold, solutions-focused thinking this moment calls for. As someone who will inherit the world these leaders are shaping, I find that genuinely inspiring.
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