About 110 million people have had to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution, or human rights violations, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.
The war in Sudan, which has displaced nearly 2 million people since April, is but the latest in a long list of crises that has led to the record-breaking figure.
“It’s quite an indictment on the state of our world,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland, ahead of the publication yesterday of the UNHCR’s Global Trends Report for last year.
Photo: AP
Last year alone, an additional 19 million people were forcibly displaced including more than 11 million who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in what became the fastest and largest displacement of people since World War II.
“We are constantly confronted with emergencies,” Grandi said.
Last year the agency recorded 35 emergencies, three to four times more than in previous years.
“Very few make your headlines,” Grandi said, adding that the war in Sudan fell off most front pages after Western citizens were evacuated.
Conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Myanmar were also responsible for displacing more than 1 million people within each country last year.
The majority of the displaced globally have sought refuge within their nation’s borders.
One-third of them — 35 million — have fled to other countries, making them refugees, the UNHCR report said.
Most refugees are hosted by low to middle-income countries in Asia and Africa, not rich countries in Europe or North America, Grandi said.
Turkey hosts the most refugees with 3.8 million people, mostly Syrians who fled the civil war, followed by Iran with 3.4 million refugees, mostly Afghans.
However, there are also 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees scattered across countries in Europe and beyond.
The number of stateless people also rose last year to 4.4 million, according to UNHCR data, but this is believed to be an underestimate.
Regarding asylum claims, the US was the country to receive the most new applications last year with 730,400 claims.
It is also the nation with the largest backlog in its asylum system, Grandi said.
“One of the things that needs to be done is reforming that asylum system so that it becomes more rapid, more efficient,” he said.
The US, Spain and Canada recently announced plans to create asylum processing centers in Latin America with the goal of reducing the number of people who trek their way north to the Mexico-US border.
As the number of asylum seekers grows, so have the challenges facing them.
“We see pushbacks. We see tougher and tougher immigration or refugee admission rules. We see in many countries the criminalization of immigrants and refugees, blaming them for everything that has happened,” Grandi said.
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