Why the UN Must Let Refugees Speak for Themselves

I was born in Cuba and raised in exile.

Like millions of others, I crossed borders not for adventure but for survival, to escape repression. As a child, I didn’t have the words to describe the injustice I was running from. But I never forgot the feeling: that what had happened to my family would never be recorded, never prosecuted, and never truly heard.

Years later, working within the United Nations system, I realized something disturbing: I wasn’t wrong.

Despite the vast global architecture dedicated to refugee protection, there is no formal mechanism within the United Nations for displaced persons to report the human rights violations that caused their displacement. Resettlement processes gather logistical details. Asylum procedures evaluate legal thresholds. But nowhere in the system are refugees systematically asked, What happened to you? Why did you run? Who harmed you?

This silence is not a technical oversight. It is a structural flaw with profound legal consequences.

International criminal law claims to center survivors. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide with reference to the suffering of civilians. Yet the Court’s jurisdiction is strictly limited: it cannot reach crimes in non-member states unless referred by the Security Council—a body where politics, not justice, dictates outcomes.

Universal jurisdiction, in theory, allows states to prosecute grave crimes regardless of where they occurred. But in practice, cases are rare, slow, and heavily reliant on civil society-led documentation or ad hoc witness testimony. There is no global system to collect, verify, or safeguard refugee accounts at scale. Survivors often fall between legal and geographic cracks: their stories are either undocumented, discounted as anecdotal, or too politically sensitive to trigger action.

The result is a global justice system that lacks what it most needs, evidence at the source, from those who fled first.

That is why I launched the “Universal Justice for All” campaign, calling for a UN General Assembly resolution to establish a Refugee Universal Complaint Mechanism. This mechanism would allow refugees to confidentially and voluntarily report the abuses they suffered prior to fleeing, trauma-informed, legally grounded, and integrated into the UN’s existing resettlement and protection architecture.

It would not create new legal burdens. It would not require new courts or tribunals. What it would do is systematically gather information that could later support universal jurisdiction prosecutions, truth commissions, or reparations processes, whatever form accountability may take.

This proposal is also about dignity. It says to the survivor of torture, of rape, of political persecution: your experience is not just an eligibility criterion. It is evidence. And it matters.

Too often, refugee policy focuses on where we go, not why we left. This mechanism flips that lens. It reclaims refugee testimony as a source of international legal truth. It allows the UN to finally practice what it preaches: that justice begins with listening.

I have sat in the rooms where decisions are made, where diplomats speak of atrocity prevention while ignoring the lived experiences of the displaced. I have seen resolutions passed in our name that never asked us what we needed. This campaign is my quiet defiance of that silence. A refusal to allow refugee voices to be written out of the justice story once again.

The UN was built to ensure that what happened once would never happen again. But for that promise to mean anything, it must start by asking the right question.

What happened to you?

And it must finally be ready to listen.