Monday, August 01, 2011
Developing Countries Host Overwhelming Majority of Refugees, says UN Report
“Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialized countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile, it’s poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden.”
These were the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, following the release of a UN report on Global Trends among the world’s displaced population in 2010.
Speaking on World Refugee Day, the Commissioner called for a new deal in the way the world shares responsibility for assisting refugees, condemning the imbalance between host countries’ capacities and their contributions.
This imbalance is most strikingly demonstrated by the ratio of refugees to GDP per capita, highest in Pakistan at 710 refugees per US dollar per capita and the Democratic Republic of Congo at 475, whilst falling in the UK to a mere 6.8. The UK also hosts only 3.8 refugees per thousand of its inhabitants, compared to 72.9 in Jordan and 43.9 in Syria.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s refugee population (four-fifths) continues to reside in developing countries, as most prefer to remain near their country of origin or are unable to seek refuge elsewhere. Pakistan again tops the list, hosting 1.9 million refugees, with around a million more each in Syria and Iran, coming mainly from Afghanistan and Iraq. Between them, these two countries are the source of almost half of the 10.55 million refugees under the UNHCR’s jurisdiction.
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It is the drawn-out nature of these conflicts and others, particularly the civil war in Somalia, that makes the tragedy of forced migration so intractable. The Somali refugee population grew over the course of last year by 14 percent to 770,200 as the situation in the country deteriorated, whilst tens of thousands more were displaced internally. Meanwhile, the number of people living in “protracted refugee situations” (where 25,000 people or more have been in exile from the same country for more than five years) increased to 7.2 million last year, the highest since 2001, as another year passed with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria unable to return home. At the same time, just 197,600 refugees worldwide were able to return to their country of origin, the lowest number in 20 years.
In response to this, the UNHCR has called on countries like the UK to increase the numbers of refugees they take for resettlement from camps. The UK accepts no more than 750 refugees for resettlement each year, compared to the 71,400 taken in by the United States, and it does not even fulfil this quota. Meanwhile, the shortfall of places predicted by the UNHCR over the next three to five years stands in the hundreds of thousands.
Though millions of refugees continue to be housed in UN-run camps, there were also 846,000 applications for asylum made worldwide last year (down 11 per cent from 2009), among them 15,500 by unaccompanied or separated children, most of them from Somalia or Afghanistan. One-fifth of all asylum applications were made in South Africa, almost entirely from neighbouring Zimbabwe, the main source of asylum seekers worldwide. By contrast, the United Kingdom saw applications for asylum within its borders fall from 7,225 in January to April 2010 to 6,075 in the same period this year.
“One refugee without hope is too many,” said High Commissioner Guterres. “The world is failing these people, leaving them to wait out the instability back home and put their lives on hold indefinitely. Developing countries cannot continue to bear this burden alone and the industrialized world must address this imbalance.”
The report does not cover displacement seen during 2011, including from Libya, Ivory Coast, and Syria.
Graph taken from UNHCR report.
Pictures reproduced courtesy of the UNHCR
Posted by STAR team on 01/08/2011 at 01:32 PM
