UN: Millions driven from homes in 2020 despite virus crisis
Geneva: War, violence, persecution, human rights violations and other factors caused nearly 3 million people to flee their homes last year, even though the COVID-19 crisis restricted movement worldwide, the U.N. refugee agency said in a report Friday. In its latest Global Trends report, UNHCR said the world's cumulative number of displaced people rose to 82.4 million roughly the population of Germany and a new post-World War II record.
Filippo Grandi, the United Nations' high commissioner for refugees, said conflict and the fallout from climate change in places such as Mozambique, Ethiopia's Tigray region and Africa's Sahel area were key drivers of refugees and internally displaced people in 2020.
Such factors added hundreds of thousands to the overall count, the ninth consecutive annual increase in the number of forcibly displaced people. The millions who have fled countries such as Syria and Afghanistan due to protracted wars or fighting have dominated the U.N. agency's tally for years.
This is telling, in a year in which we were all locked down, confined, blocked in our homes, in our communities, in our cities, Grandi said in an interview before the report's release. Almost 3 million people have had to actually leave all that behind because they had no other choice. COVID-19 seems to have had no impact on some of the key root causes that push people to flee, he said. War, violence, discrimination, they have continued, no matter what, throughout the pandemic.
UNHCR said 1% of all humanity is now displaced, and there are twice as many forcibly displaced people than a decade ago. Some 42% of them are under 18, and nearly 1 million babies were born as refugees between 2018 and 2020.
Many of them may remain refugees for years to come, the agency's report said.
UNHCR, which has its headquarters in Geneva, said that 99 of the more than 160 countries that closed their borders because of the coronavirus did not make exceptions for people seeking protection as refugees or asylum-seekers.
Grandi acknowledged the possibility that many internally displaced people who couldn't leave their own countries will eventually want to flee abroad if the pandemic eases and borders reopen. A good example is the United States, where already we have seen a surge in people arriving in recent months, Grandi said, referring to a a U.S. provision called Title 42 that let authorities temporarily block asylum-seekers from entry for health reasons. Title 42 will be lifted eventually and I think this is the right thing to do but this will have to be managed.
Asked about U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' recent trip to Central America, where she told people hoping to migrate to the U.S. do not come, Grandi expressed hope that the remark was not reflective of overall U.S. policy.
"I think that messaging indeed, as it was reported, is stark, and maybe shows only one part of the picture now, Grandi said, adding
that he had heard a more complex response from other officials in Washington when he was there recently.
Among recent hotspots, Grandi said hundreds of thousands of people were newly displaced in Mozambique and the Sahel last year, and up to 1 million in the Tigray conflict that started in October.
I'm worried that if the international community is not able to stop these conflicts, we will continue to see the rise in the numbers, he said.
