Context:
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report on global trends highlighted the record-high forced displacement in 2023.
More on the news
- The United Nations refugee agency says the number of people forcibly displaced stood at a record 117.3 million as of the end of 2023.
- It constitutes a rise of 8 per cent or 8.8 million people compared to the end of 2022 and continues a series of year-on-year increases over the last 12 years.
- One in every 69 people, or 1.5 per cent of the entire world’s population, is now forcibly displaced.
- These forced people are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, people being forced away by conflict, persecution, by different and increasingly complex forms of violence.
- UNHCR estimates that forced displacement has continued to increase in the first four months of 2024,
- The number of those displaced is likely to have exceeded 120 million by the end of April 2024.
- In 2023 the global refugee population increased by 7 per cent to reach 43.4 million.
Major reasons for displacement
- The conflicts that have driven displacement include the war in Sudan, more than 9 million people have been internally displaced and another 2 million have fled to neighbouring countries including Chad, Egypt and South Sudan.
- In Gaza, Israel’s bombardment and ground campaign have caused around 1.7 million people – nearly 80% of the Palestinian enclave’s population – to become internally displaced, many of them multiple times.
- More than 1.3 million people have been displaced within Myanmar in 2023 by escalating violence following the military takeover in February 2021