UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency has appealed to countries worldwide to do far more to find homes for millions of refugees and others displaced by conflict, persecution or events seriously disturbing public order.
The appeal follows the release of a report by the Agency which showed that forced displacement is now affecting more than one percent of humanity, meaning one in every 97 people – and with fewer of those who flee being able to return home.
The UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report, which comes two days ahead of World Refugee Day, showed an unprecedented 79.5 million people were displaced as at the end of 2019.
The report also noted the diminishing prospects for refugees when it comes to hopes of any quick end to their plight. For instant, in the 1990s, on average 1.5 million refugees were able to return home each year. Over the past decade that number has fallen to around 385,000, meaning that growth in displacement is today far outstripping solutions, said the report.
“We are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
“People cannot be expected to live in a state of upheaval for years on end, without a chance of going home, nor a hope of building a future where they are. We need a fundamentally new and more accepting attitude towards all who flee, coupled with a much more determined drive to unlock conflicts that go on for years and that are at the root of such immense suffering,” he added.
UNHCR’s Global Trends report shows that of the 79.5 million who were displaced at the end of last year, 45.7 million were people who had fled to other areas of their own countries.
The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2 million of them being people awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6 million were refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their country.
The UN Agency said the annual increase, from a figure of 70.8 million at the end of 2018, is a result of two main factors.
First is worrying new displacement in 2019, particularly in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel, Yemen and Syria – the latter now in its tenth year of conflict and accounting on its own for 13.2 million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people, fully a sixth of the world’s total.
Second is a better presentation of the situation of Venezuelans outside their country, many of whom are not legally registered as refugees or asylum-seekers, but for whom protection-sensitive arrangements are required.
“And within all of these numbers is a multitude of individual and very personal crises. As many children (estimated at 30-34 million, tens of thousands of them unaccompanied) are among the displaced than, for example, the entire populations of Australia, Denmark and Mongolia combined.
Meanwhile, the proportion of displaced aged 60 and above (4 percent) is far below that of the world population (12 percent) – a statistic that speaks to immeasurable heartbreak, desperation, sacrifice and being torn apart from loved ones,” the report said.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri