Photo credit: Booking Institution
One hundred twenty million people, or 1 in 69 people, are displaced worldwide.
Aljaxeera reports that 1.5 per cent of the world’s population has been uprooted from their homes. Families are separated, livelihoods are lost, and communities are shattered.
Sixty-eight million of those are internally displaced within their own countries, and the remaining rare refugees need protection and people who are seeking asylum, according to the annual displacement report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
June 20 each year was designated by the UN to raise awareness about refugees worldwide.
At the end of 2023, 117.3 million people worldwide remained forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations.If forcibly displaced people formed a country, it would be the 13th most populated in the world, just behind Japan. About half of them are children.
The UN established the Refugee Convention in 1951 to protect the rights of refugees in Europe after World War II. The convention was expanded in 1967 to address displacement across the world.
In 1951, there were 2.1 million refugees. By 1980, the number had risen to over 10 million. Wars in Afghanistan and Ethiopia during the 1980s caused the number of refugees to double to 20 million by 1990.
For the next two decades, the number of refugees remained consistent.
However, the number rose again when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, together with civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, to over 20 million by the end of 2021.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2023 led to one of the fastest-growing refugee crises since the Second World War. 5.7 million people were forced to flee Ukraine in less than a year. By the end of 2023, six million Ukrainians remained forcibly displaced.
Conflict broke out in 2023 between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. The number of refugees was increased to 1.5 million. Before the war, Sudan had taken in many Syrian refugees. With the beginning of the war, the number of Syrian refugees in Sudan dropped from 93,500 in 2022 to 26,600 in 2023. Many had left for other countries. Thousands are still being displaced daily, more than a year after the conflict started.
Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip has had a devastating effect on the Palestinian population. UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, estimated that from October to December, up to 1.7 million people, which is more than 75 per cent of the population, had been disple=aced within the Gaza Strip, with many having been forced to flee multiple times,
The threat of famine is looming in the Gaza Strip, with all 2.3 million inhabitants facing food shortages.
As of 2024, almost three-quarters of all refugees come from just five countries: Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Palestine.
Almost 70 per cent of refugees and others in need of international protection live in countries next to their countries of origin. Globally, the largest refugee populations are hosted by Iran (3.8 million), Turkey (3.3 million), Colombia (2.9 million), Germany (2.6 million), and Pakistan (2 million).
