Number of refugees and displaced people continues to rise despite pandemic

Despite the pandemic, the number of refugees and internally displaced people in the world continued to grow in 2020, reaching a new record high of 82.4 million, according to data released Friday by the UN.

This is the ninth consecutive year of increase, a rise that has more than doubled the number of forcibly displaced people today compared to a decade ago, when the figure was below 40 million.

Over the course of 2020, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons grew by 4 per cent from 79.5 million at the end of 2019, according to the annual report of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), released on the eve of World Refugee Day.

"I think this is a very significant thing, because we are talking about 2020. We're talking about the year of covid-19, the year in which we didn't move, in which we were confined. And despite that, there are three million more people who were forced to flee because of discrimination, persecution and other forms of violence," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi stressed at a press conference.

UNHCR's figures include people in very different situations, including international refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons, as well as millions of Venezuelans who have left their homes and are not officially included in any of these groups.

Among those who have been forced to flee their country, Syrians remain the largest contingent, with some 6.8 million internationally displaced as a result of the war, followed by Palestinians, with some 5.7 million.

Venezuelans constitute the third largest group, with some 4.9 million people, according to UNHCR figures, which also do not include those displaced outside the Latin American and Caribbean region.

Afghanistan (2.8 million international displaced persons) and South Sudan (2.2 million) are next on the list, which also includes Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Sudan.

In terms of host countries, Turkey remains number one, with almost 4 million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Syria.

Colombia, with 1.7 million Venezuelans on its territory, is the second largest host country, followed by Germany, Pakistan, Uganda, the United States, Peru, Sudan and Lebanon.

The report notes that the vast majority of refugees, almost 9 out of 10, are hosted in countries neighbouring conflict zones and are mostly low- and middle-income nations.

In 2020, the number of asylum seekers, meanwhile, fell dramatically, with 1.3 million, down 1 million from the previous year, as a result of travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the number of people internally displaced as a result of conflict, violence or human rights violations increased again in 2020, reaching a new record high of 48 million people.

Colombia, with 8.3 million displaced by the end of 2020 according to government statistics, is the country with the most people officially displaced as a result of decades of conflict in rural areas.

The next largest numbers are in Syria (6.7 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.2 million), Yemen (4 million) and Somalia (3 million).

The largest increases during 2020, however, were concentrated in African countries, especially in East Africa and the Great Lakes area, as a result of conflicts such as the one in Ethiopia's Tigray region and the situation in Sudan and Somalia.

The UNHCR report also devotes a separate chapter to the situation in Mexico and Central America, highlighting the huge increase in the number of displaced persons from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras over the past decade.

By the end of 2020, some 867,800 people from these countries had been forced to leave their homes, mostly as a result of extortion and gang violence, according to testimonies collected by the UN.

The UNHCR report also draws attention to the impact of forced displacement on children, with 42% of all displaced people worldwide being under the age of 18.

New estimates from the agency indicate that nearly one million children were born as refugees between 2018 and 2020, with many of them destined to remain in that situation for years to come.