HEADQUARTERS PRESS BRIEFING ON REFUGEES BY NEW YORK OFFICE OF UNHCR

HEADQUARTERS PRESS BRIEFING ON REFUGEES BY NEW YORK OFFICE OF UNHCR

Developing countries that produced 86 per cent of the world’s refugees over the past decade also lead the world in granting asylum to refugees, according to the first annual Statistical Yearbook 2001, produced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Presenting the Yearbook to correspondents this morning at a Headquarters press briefing, Yusuf Hassan, Senior External Relations Officer at the UNHCR New York Office noted that while rich countries voiced increasing concern over the numbers of asylum seekers arriving on their borders, it was mainly poor countries that provided asylum, opening their doors to 72 per cent of the world’s refugees in the past decade.

He said the fact that low-income countries hosted seven of every 10 refugees worldwide underscored both the responsibility of industrialized countries to share in international refugee protection, and the vital importance of investing in solutions for refugees and displaced people in their regions of origin.

Such investment, said Mr. Hassan, should flow not only to humanitarian activities conducted by UNHCR and its partners, but also to the longer-term development sphere, where a lot more could be done to support the often-poor communities that hosted refugees.

The Statistical Yearbook provides an overview of new patterns and trends in global forced displacement over the past decade, including information and comprehensive data on refugee populations worldwide.  Mr. Hassan told correspondents that such statistics enabled the international community to assess the dimensions of human displacement of people and illustrated the challenges countries and the UNHCR faced in the protection of refugees.

Illustrating his argument with statistics from survey, Mr. Hassan said that in 2001 the size of the global refugee population remained unchanged at

12 million, but the number of people -- both refugees and the displaced -- with whom the UNHCR was concerned had fallen by 9 per cent from 21.8 million in 2000 to 19.8 million last year.

The geographical distribution of the displaced had also shifted.  While the number of refugees originating from and hosted by African countries had fallen, Asia had generated and hosted a larger share of the world’s refugees since the mid-1990s.  The figures for 2001 showed that Asia had 5.8 million refugees, Africa had 3.3 million, Europe had 2.2 million and North America had 650,000 refugees.

Among individual countries, he said, it was Afghanistan that had the highest number of displaced last year, producing a third of the world refugee population.  The country was also the major nationality of origin of asylum-seekers in industrialized countries.

However, Mr. Hassan noted that the survey did not cover the present year, and thus did not show the significant number of Afghan refugees (1.7 million) who had returned home, nor the sharp reduction of asylum applications from Afghans.

In all, he said, the UNHCR had assisted more than 4 million refugees to return home in the last two years.  The Yearbook pointed out that while fewer refugees were now crossing international borders, the plight of internally displaced people had become worse, with an estimated 25 million conflict-generated internally displaced people around the world.  Mr Hassan added that although global refugee figures had fallen since 1992, there was no room for complacency, given the continuing protracted refugee situations in many parts of the developing world and the danger of new crisis erupting.

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