Hardship and xenophobia face record 65 million displaced people, UN refugee agency says

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A newly-born Bru baby sleeps in a refugee camp with his family on Saturday, the eve of World Refugee Day, in Tripura state, India. The Bru tribe fled to Tripura in 1997 to escape atrocities committed against them in their home state and remain too frightened to return. Photo: EPA

Published: 1:44pm, 20 Jun 2016Updated: 1:44pm, 20 Jun 2016

A record 65.3 million people were uprooted worldwide last year, many of them fleeing wars only to face walls, tougher laws and xenophobia as they reach borders, the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday.

The figure, which jumped from 59.5 million in 2014 and by 50 per cent in five years, means that 1 in every 113 people on the planet is now a refugee, asylum-seeker or internally displaced in a home country.

“This is the first time that the threshold of 60 million has been crossed,” the UN refugee agency noted.

Fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi and South Sudan has driven the latest exodus, bringing the total number of refugees to 21.3 million, half of them children, the UNHCR said in its “Global Trends” report marking World Refugee Day.

“The refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean and arriving on the shores of Europe, the message that they have carried is that if you don’t solve problems, problems will come to you,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told a news briefing.

Asylum-seekers protest for better conditions and faster processing of their refugee claims as armed security guards and a Hungarian police officer look on at a reception centre near the Serbian border in Kiskunhalas, Hungary, on June 1. Photo: EPA

“It’s painful that it has taken so long for people in the rich countries to understand that,” he said. “We need action, political action to stop conflicts, that would be the most important prevention of refugee flows.”

A record 2 million new asylum claims were lodged in industrialised countries in 2015, the report said. Nearly 100,000 were children unaccompanied or separated from their families, a three-fold rise on 2014 and a historic high.