A record 65.3 million people were uprooted worldwide last year, many of
them fleeing wars only to face walls, tougher laws and xenophobia as
they reach borders, the United Nations refugee agency said on June 20
for the occasion of the World Refugee Day.
The figure,
which jumped from 59.5 million in 2014 and by 50 percent in five years,
means that 1 in every 113 people on the planet is now a refugee,
asylum-seeker or internally displaced in a home country.
This figure was 1 in every 122 people in 2014.
“On
average 24 people worldwide were displaced from their homes every
minute of every day during 2015 – some 34,000 people per day,” the
report said.
Fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi and South
Sudan has driven the latest exodus, bringing the total number of
refugees to 21.3 million, half of them children, the UNHCR said in its
“Global Trends” report marking World Refugee Day.
“The refugees
and migrants crossing the Mediterranean and arriving on the shores of
Europe, the message that they have carried is that if you don’t solve
problems, problems will come to you,” U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees Filippo Grandi told a news briefing.
“It’s painful that
it has taken so long for people in the rich countries to understand
that,” he said. “We need action, political action to stop conflicts that
would be the most important prevention of refugee flows.”
A
record 2 million new asylum claims were lodged in industrialized
countries in 2015, the report said. Nearly 100,000 were children
unaccompanied or separated from their families, a three-fold rise on
2014 and a historic high.
Germany, where one in three applicants
was Syrian, led with 441,900 claims, followed by the United States with
172,700, many of them fleeing gang and drug-related violence in Mexico
and Central America.
Asylum-seekers fleeing conflicts or
persecution are increasingly confronted with walls or anti-foreigner
sentiment, Grandi said. “The rise of xenophobia is unfortunately
becoming a very defining feature of the environment in which we work.
“Barriers
are rising everywhere – and I’m not just talking of walls. But I’m
talking about legislative barriers that are coming up, including in
countries in the industrialized world that have been for a long time
bastions of principle in defending the fundamental rights linked to
asylum.”
After Balkan countries closed borders, Turkey and the European Union struck a deal in March to stem an influx that brought a million refugees and migrants to Europe in 2015.
“The
fact that that flow has stopped does not mean the problem of
displacement has ended. It may have ended for some countries that don’t
have to deal with it anymore, for now,” Grandi said.
Progress has lagged on a scheme to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece
and Italy to other EU states to alleviate pressure on the two frontline
countries. Only 2,406 people have been relocated, EU figures show.
Grandi, asked about stalled relocation, said: “There is no Plan B for Europe. Europe will continue to receive people seeking asylum.”
“Everybody has to share responsibility now,” he said.
Turkey once again country hosting most refugees: UN
Turkey
is host to the highest number of refugees worldwide for a second
consecutive year, with some 2.5 million people in the country, according
to a report published by the UNHCR on June 20 to mark World Refugee
Day.
The report said that developing regions across the world
still hosted 86 percent of the world’s refugees, led by Turkey with 2.54
million Syrians.
“This was the second consecutive year that Turkey has hosted the world’s largest refugee population,” the report said.
The
U.N. report said that conflicts in Syria and Iraq have significantly
contributed to the rise in the number of displaced people globally.
“By
the end of 2015 there were close to 5 million Syrian refugees
worldwide, an increase of 1 million men, women, and children within a
year,” it said, adding that the vast majority of these newly displaced
Syrians – some 946,800 individuals – were registered in Turkey.
Pakistan with 1.6 million refugees inside the country and Lebanon with 1.1 million refugees followed Turkey.
Turkey and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
have said Turkey hosted around 2.7 million Syrian refugees and around
another 300,000 people from different countries, thus totaling some 3
million refugees inside Turkey.