New Delhi (NVI): Forced displacement is now affecting more than one percent of humanity. Nearly 80 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence and persecution, according to a report by UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report, which comes two days ahead of 20 June World Refugee Day, found that by the end of last year, a record 79.5 million people were living either as refugees, asylum seekers or in so-called internal displacement within their own countries, marking a dramatic increase of nearly nine million from a year earlier.
By the end of 2019, one out of every 97 people in the world was living uprooted and displaced, the report states.
The report also highlights that swelling displacement are from conflicts in places like Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“One percent of the world population cannot go back to their homes because there are wars, persecution, human rights violations, and other forms of violence,” UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said.
He further added, “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.”
Reportedly, 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.
The agency 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 report also notes diminishing prospects for refugees when it comes to hopes of any quick end to their plight. 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.
-CHK
