(Source: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
In Depth
Refugees
After five quiet years, an explosion of refugees in 2006
Last Updated June 19, 2007
CBC News
At the end of 2005, there were roughly 21 million people in the world on the move — refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons — forced from their homes because of war, famine or persecution. A year later that number had spiked to 33 million, an increase of 56 per cent, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in a just-published report.
The sudden surge is a surprise for several reasons but even it understates the full story. The UNHCR acknowledges that its reams of statistics do not include several prime categories. Among them, the 4.3 million Palestinians in refugee camps that fall under the auspices of a different UN agency. Or, say, the number of displaced Afghanis living in impromptu camps just inside the Pakistan border.
By virtue of neighbourhood, Pakistan has become the top host country in the world for refugees, courtesy of the long-running Afghan conflict. But it's official number of just over a million refugees in UN-sponsored camps is likely less than half the true story, which is why agencies like Amnesty International place the number of worldwide refugees last year at just over 36 million.
The vast majority of these — 75 per cent — come from Asia and Africa.
(Source: UNCHR 2006 report; refers strictly to refugees)
Changing trend line
This sudden upswing in refugees may be especially worrying because it comes at a time when the world, the industrialized world in particular, has been bobbing along almost complacently, watching the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers decline over the past five or six years.
Now, there may be new demands on its ability to absorb a new round of impoverished migrants as well as new demands on its willingness to intervene in the troubled countries that seem to be at the centre of the growing problem.
Broadly speaking, the UN says there are three main reasons for the upsurge in refugees in 2006. One is the Iraq war, which has sent something like 1.5 million refugees spilling out into neighbouring Arab countries and provoked a flurry of asylum-seeking — 9,000 claims alone in Sweden in 2006 — in the industrialized West.
Another is a readjustment of the U.S. figures, with the realization that refugee and asylum claims are taking closer to a decade to resolve, not the five-year average that was previously the case.
The third is that the single largest proportion of the increase can be attributed to what the UNHCR calls internally displaced persons, referring to those cast into camps within their own countries as a result of civil wars and other internal conflicts in places like Sudan, Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This group has been creeping up steadily since 2003. But last year also saw a rise for the first time since 2002 in the global refugee population. It is now broaching 10 million people.
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Audio
Video
External Links
- Virtual refugee camp, from Doctors Without Borders
- Basic facts about refugees, from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
- 1951 Refugee Convention
- Country by country information, from the U.S. Committee for Refugees
- UN World Refugee Day
- Virtual refugee camp, from Doctors Without Borders
- Country by country information, from the U.S. Committee for Refugees
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