Bangladesh is not a state party to the 1951 Convention or its 1967 Protocol and does not have national legislation on asylum. As such, the question regarding adherence to international and/or regional standards on the refugee definition is irrelevant. Without national asylum legislation, UNHCR conducts mandate Refugee Status Determination (RSD) for non-Rohingya asylum-seekers and follows internal core standards and procedures as presented in UNHCR’s Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status. 

Rohingyas refugees who arrived in the 1990s were registered jointly by the Government of Bangladesh and UNHCR, and the joint documents issued to them identifies them as refugees. Rohingyas refugees who arrived in Bangladesh in subsequent influxes were not registered by the Government up until the latest influx of August 2017. Those previously unregistered and those who arrived in the influx of August 2017 were then registered in a joint registration exercise under the provisions of a 2018 UNHCR-Government of Bangladesh Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the Exchange of Personal Data of Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals/Refugees. This group is identified by the Government as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN) while UNHCR identifies them as refugees under its mandate.