2023-06-14 09:38:02
Some 110 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict, persecution or human rights violations, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The war in Sudan, which has displaced nearly two million people since April, is just the latest in a long line of crises that has led to this record.
“It’s quite a denunciation of the state of our world,” Filippo Grandi, who heads the UN refugee agency, told reporters in Geneva ahead of the release of UNHCR’s Global Trends Report 2022 on Wednesday.
Last year alone, another 19 million people were forced to flee their homes, including the more than 11 million who fled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the largest and fastest exodus since World War II.
“We are constantly faced with emergency situations,” Grandi said. Last year, UNHCR recorded 35 emergencies, three to four times more than in previous years.
“Very few make the headlines,” he added, claiming that the war in Sudan disappeared from most front pages following the evacuation of Western citizens.
Conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Myanmar were also responsible for the displacement of more than one million people within each country last year.
Most of the displaced have sought refuge within their country’s borders, but a third — 35 million — fled to other nations, making them refugees, according to the UNHCR report. Most of the refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa, rather than the rich in Europe or North America, Grandi said.
Turkey is currently the nation with the most refugees, with 3.8 million, mostly Syrian citizens who fled the civil war. Iran is behind, with 3.4 million, mainly Afghans. But there are also 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees spread across European countries and elsewhere.
The number of stateless people also increased in 2022 to 4.4 million, according to UNHCR data, but this is believed to be an underestimate.
Regarding asylum requests, the United States was the country that received the most new applications last year, with 730,400. But it is also the nation with the longest wait in that process, Grandi said.
“One of the things that must be done is to reform that asylum system to make it faster, more efficient,” he said.
The United States, Spain and Canada recently announced plans to create asylum processing centers in Latin America that will reduce the number of people heading north to reach the US-Mexican border.
As the number of asylum seekers increases, so do the challenges they face. “We see automatic returns. We see increasingly strict migratory measures or admission of migrants. In many countries we see the criminalization of migrants and refugees, blaming them for everything that happened,” Grandi said.
Last week, European Union leaders renewed their financial pledges to North African nations, with which they hope to curb migration across the Mediterranean, while the British government insisted on a hitherto failed plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, something UNHCR opposes.
But there were also some victories, Grandi said, citing the European Union’s negotiations for a new migration and asylum pact, which he described as a positive sign, despite criticism from human rights groups.
Grandi also celebrated that the number of resettled refugees doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year, to 114,000, but admitted that this is still “a drop in the bucket”.
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