The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' Global Trends report marking World Refugee Day Monday stated that a record number 65.3 million people were either refugees, asylum-seekers or internally displaced in 2015, affecting 1 in every 112 people on the planet.
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The figure jumped from 59.5 million in 2014 and by 50 percent in five years, with many people fleeing war and facing xenophobia and tougher laws as they reached borders.
“This is the first time that the threshold of 60 million has been crossed,” the report noted.
Nearly 100,000 were children unaccompanied or separated from their families, a three-fold rise on 2014 and a historic high.
Much of the exodus has been a result of fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi and South Sudan, bringing the total number of refugees in the world to 21.3 million, half of which are children.
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“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,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told a news briefing.
“We need action, political action to stop conflicts, that would be the most important prevention of refugee flows,” he added.
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Germany, where one in three applicants seeking asylum were Syrian, led with 441,900 claims, followed by the United States which had 172,700 – many fleeing violence and economic crisis in Mexico and Central America.
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Yet, countries in the Global South host 86 percent of the world’s refugees, led by Turkey with 2.5 million Syrians, followed by Pakistan and Lebanon.
Asylum-seekers, however are increasingly confronted with anti-foreigner sentiments, Grandi said, “The rise of xenophobia is unfortunately becoming a very defining feature of the environment in which we work.”
“Everybody has to share responsibility now,” he added. “The willingness of nations to work together, not just for refugees but for the collective human interest, is what’s being tested today.”