BBC World Service, this is James Fletcher with The Inquiry.

This week, would a new international convention help refugees?

25 years ago, Abdullahi Abdihasan fled Somalia.

The government had collapsed, his father had been killed, and his mother decided to take her

children to neighbouring Kenya. Abdullahi was just seven years old.

For the past 25 years he's lived in Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp.

It's a place that Abdullahi says tests human resilience,

a place of hopelessness, helplessness and harassment. But it's all these refugees have and now the

Kenyan government wants to shut Dadaab down. Something Abdullah he says will cause even more suffering.

As the world grapples with the largest numbers of displaced people since World War II, from Africa to the Middle East

to the shores of the Mediterranean, there's no shortage of suffering like Abdullahis.

And for many, this is a sign that the UN's 65 year old refugee convention

isn't working. So we're asking is it time for a new international agreement?

Part 1. An enduring idea.

I think what I was most moved by was that a huge amount of humanitarian need

it was being generated. So 4,000 people a day arriving on a Greek island.

This is Catherine Costello remembering when a trip to the

Mediterranean last year, brought her face-to-face with the region's refugee and

migrant crisis. I think it was just that acute sense of the I don't know the madness of it that people were being

placed in this situation I think that was the thing that stayed with me and the sort of

everyday small hardships that people were experiencing.

Catherine Costello is a professor at the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University

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