Over 60 Million People Displaced Global In 2015: UN
MEP: The U.N. refugee agency says persecution and conflict in places like Syria and Afghanistan has hit a new record, with 65.3 million people displaced from their home as of the end of 2015.
This represents one in every 113 people on the planet, the UN agency added.
“An unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18,” UNHCR writes in remarks to its Global Trends report for 2015.
A little under 1% of the earth’s population is either “an asylum-seeker, internally displaced or a refugee” according to the UNHCR report, which was released Monday.
Conflict + persecution cause forced displacement to escalate sharply in 2015 – new data https://t.co/9Nx9AfIJBn pic.twitter.com/xQHY0mzqIU
— UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) June 20, 2016
The Geneva-based agency urged leaders from Europe and elsewhere to do more to end the wars that are fanning the exodus of people from their homelands.
“I hope that the message carried by those forcibly displaced reaches the leaderships: We need action, political action, to stop conflicts,” said Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “The message that they have carried is: ‘If you don’t solve problems, problems will come to you.'”
“At sea, a frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem,” he noted.
Grandi said that anti-refugee sentiment was also standing in the way of those seeking asylum in some countries.
On average, 24 people were being displaced any given minute in 2015, amounting to 34,000 people per day. In 2005 that figure was only six per minute. And the number has doubled since 1997. The Syria war raised that by another 50 percent alone when it started in 2011.
