UN: Over 80 million people displaced

DESPITE calls for ceasefires and compassion amid the Covid-19 pandemic, violence and persecution have continued to force people from their homes, with record numbers now displaced, the UN said on December 9.

By the end of last year, 79.5 million people were living uprooted and displaced, including nearly 30 million refugees – more than one per cent of the world’s population.

And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) s a i d pr e l i mi n a r y f i g u r e s showed more people had been forced to f lee t his year, pushing the number past 80 million.

UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said in a statement: “We are now surpassing another bleak milestone t hat will continue to grow unless world leaders stop wars.”

UN secretar y-general Antonio Guterres ca lled in March for a g loba l ceasef i re while the world fights the pandemic, which has now killed more t han 1.5 million people.

But whi le some f ac t ion s heeded the call, UNHCR said preliminar y figures through t he f i r st ha l f of t h i s yea r showed that violence in Syria, t he Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Somal ia a nd Yemen d rove f resh displacement.

Africa’s central Sahel region also saw significant new displacement due to brutal violence, including rape and executions, UNHCR said.

“With forced displacement doubling in the last decade, the international community is failing to safeguard peace,” Grandi lamented.

The UN agency pointed out that instead of calming conflict, the coronavirus crisis had “disrupted every aspect of human life and severely worsened existing challenges for the forcibly displaced and stateless”.

It said some of the measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 had made it more difficult for refugees to reach safety.

At the peak of the first wave of transmission back in April, for instance, 168 countries fully or partially closed their borders, including 90 that made no exception for people seeking asylum.

Since then though, 111 countries have found “pragmatic solutions” to ensure asylum processes can remain functional, UNHCR said.

Despite this, new asylum applications dropped by a third during the first half of this year compared to the same period last year.

At the same time, the number of vulnerable refugees resettled to third countries was slashed in half, to just 17,400 in the first half of this year.