Bangladesh is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention or its 1967 Protocol and does not have national legislation or policy framework on asylum. With no comprehensive legal framework dedicated to asylum-seekers and refugees, Bangladesh does not provide established provisions for alternative or complementary protections like subsidiary or temporary status within its laws. However, the Government of Bangladesh generously hosts 1,139,433 Rohingya refugees (as of 31 May 2025) from Myanmar. The Government’s officially declared position is that Rohingya refugees are allowed into Bangladesh only on a humanitarian ground and temporarily. 

The legal status of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is a complex issue. 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. However, neither the government nor the legal framework approach indicates that they were lawfully staying in the country. 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. The legal status of these documented refugees who arrived after the 1990s remains ambiguous.