GENEVA, Switzerland
Some 110 million people have had to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution, or human rights violations, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says. 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,” Filippo Grandi, who leads the U.N. refugee agency,
told reporters in Geneva ahead of the publication Wednesday of UNHCR’s Global
Trends Report for 2022.
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 added, arguing that the war in Sudan fell off most front pages after
Western citizens were evacuated.
Conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Myanmar were
also responsible for displacing more than 1 million people within each country
in 2022.
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, according to
the UNHCR report. 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
currently 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. But there are also 5.7 million
Ukrainian refugees scattered across countries in Europe and beyond. The number
of stateless people has also risen in 2022 to 4.4 million, according to UNHCR
data, but this is believed to be an underestimate.
Regarding asylum claims, the
U.S. was the country to receive the most new applications in 2022 with 730,400
claims. It’s 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 United States, 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-U.S. 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.
Last week European
leaders renewed
financial promises to North African nations in the hopes of stemming
migration across the Mediterranean while the British government insists on a
so-far failed plan to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, something UNHCR is opposed
to. But there were also some wins, Grandi said, pointing to what he described
as a positive sign in the European Union’s negotiations for a new
migration and asylum pact, despite criticism from human rights groups.
Grandi also celebrated the
fact that the number of refugees resettled in 2022 doubled to 114,000 from the
previous year. But he admitted this was “still a drop in the ocean.”
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