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ABSTRACT A quarter billion people worldwide live outside their country of nationality. Most of them are migrants, people who opt to leave their countries seeking greater opportunity. One-tenth of them, though, are refugees. They are fleeing political persecution and other acute threats. Most refugees go to countries neighboring their own, in part so that they can return home when circumstances change. The work of protecting refugees is carried out by a vast array of organizations. Some are public, others private; some are global, others grassroots. States, however, are the ultimate arbiters of their work. The international refugee regime, under the guiding hand of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has proven adept at providing life-saving assistance in response to emergencies but has been challenged to provide meaningful opportunities for the long-term displaced or support the communities hosting them. Compounding the challenges, it faces is the retreat of many advanced democracies amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Established by the 1951 convention and its 1967 protocol, the regime envisioned refugee status as a temporary one for people who fear or have suffered persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion and who as a result require protection until they can return to their countries of origin; gain permanent residency in the country to which they have fled; or be resettled in a third country. The current state of the international refugee regime provides us with tried and tested tools to address them. What is needed now is to put our collective resources and capacities to their most effective use. We are already seeing this in the recent move towards creating a proposed Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees, as set out in the UN secretary-general�s report, In Safety and Dignity: Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants. We are also seeing this with innovative directions in protection, assistance, and solutions for refugees that are helping us to operationalize long-standing principles of protection, transforming them into tangible results for refugees. New forms of group determination, combined with community-based protection and other measures, can help to ensure an appropriate legal status while at the same time identifying specific protection needs. Protection strategies can inform frameworks for governing migration and meeting the needs of the most vulnerable migrants. The integration of services to refugees within national systems and the expansion of cash-based programming can meet essential needs for assistance more effectively. The Humanitarian-Obligation of World at Large realization of Rights of the Refugees can provide the building for achieving a long-term solution, which remain, as ever, the ultimate aspiration of the international refugee protection regime. Thus, viewing the refugee problem in the context of humanitarian rights has assumed unprecedented importance today. The present article considers some of the basic human rights of refugees and their implications in the area of refugee protection. It also surveys the human rights of refugees in India and gives a brief account of the impact which human rights principles have made on the current programs and policies of UNHCR and the increasing involvement of human rights bodies in matters relating to refugees. Humanitarian emergencies are becoming increasingly frequent and thus, for want of better protection of human rights in these circumstances, humanitarian policy-making and emergency response need to take an integrated approach combining needs-based and rights-based approaches.